Two members of parliament from the opposition Batkivshchyna Party say that authorities are engaged in provocations against EuroMaidan participants and activists, including AutoMaidan participants – demonstrators who have been using their cars in motorcades to picket homes of top officials, including President Viktor Yanukovych.
Batkivshchyna Party member of parliament Arsen Avakov
said the aim is to discredit pro-European Union demonstrators.
“We’ve just received a report about provocations being
prepared against Automaidan participants and activists. The main direction of
the attack is to discredit and open criminal cases against them by secretly
putting drugs and illegal weapons in their cars,” he wrote in his blog on
the Ukrainska Pravda online newspaper on Jan. 8. Avakov said that “a
special group of swindlers” had been hired to carry out the provocations.
“The national resistance headquarters warns law
enforcement agencies of their imminent liability for such actions. We won’t
leave a single activist one on one with the bandits in uniform,” Avakov
said.
Another Batkivshchyna Party lawmaker, Andriy
Kozhemiakin, said that police or their agents are spying on activists.
“We received calls from participants that they were chased, their phone
calls are listened to, that things at their homes are in the wrong places. We already counted
around 25 cases like that,” Kozhemiakin said during a briefing on Jan. 8
in the Trade Union building.
Kozhemiakin said the actions are
probably illegal because such surveillance would have to be authorized by a
judge.
Allegations from authorities that
EuroMaidan activists are using and selling drugs are simply provocations, he
said.
“This is the way to create
grounds for” searches, Kozhemiakin said. “We also received the
information that provocations against AutoMaidan participants will take place
soon.”
