You're reading: Cleanup starts in City Hall after mysterious ‘Narnia’ protester group camps there at night

When Kyiv city officials entered their offices inside city hall on Feb. 17 for the first time in nearly three months, they found them looking and smelling very different indeed.

Razor wire draped in shimmery holiday tinsel hung in the building’s foyer, anti-government posters and messages, such as “out with the bandits,” lined the stairwells. Old and fresh graffiti adorned the walls, many of which had been bashed in and punctured.

SEE THE KYIV POST’S PHOTO GALLERY OF IMAGES FROM KYIV CITY HALL TAKEN ON FEB. 16.

On the third floor, the smell of body odor, rotting food and stale cigarette smoke lingered. Cleanup crews worked all morning there, stuffing blue trash bags full of everything from discarded sandwiches, beer bottles and bedding to broken furniture, gas masks and grappling hooks.

A room on the first floor reeked of urine. At the end of the third floor hallway, the scent of gasoline hung heavy in the air. Two open windows weren’t enough to sweep away the stench. A table in one of the rooms was covered in black cigarette ash and diesel fuel. Two plastic bottles filled with fuel sat nearby.

Bottles filled with fuel sit atop a table in an office on the third floor of the city hall building on Feb. 16.

A middle-aged woman with dark hair, who identified herself as the head of the electronic security department of the city administration, but refused to give her name, frantically checked her office and desk drawers to see if anything was missing.

“They took my computer and monitor, and even my coffee maker,” she told the Kyiv Post, referring to anti-government protesters who had occupied the building for nearly three months. Many of the computer hard drives as well as servers held in the building had been taken and those that remained had been destroyed or “wiped clean,” she said.

Anna Kibovska, press secretary for Kyiv City State Administration, along with a building superintendent, led a group of journalists on a tour of the building, showing vandalism in and damage to hallways and offices, as well as in the canteen and kitchen.

Walking the group down to the basement, they said protesters had stockpiled gasoline and Molotov cocktails in the freezer and storage rooms there. But no evidence could be found of the operation, only some spray-painted Nazi symbols and a single mattress in a dark and dank back corner.

City Administrator Volodymyr Makeyenko, a presidential appointee, told Interfax-Ukraine news agency that the city administration would take two to three days to get back its normal routine.

Who trashed city hall

Exactly who is responsible for the theft of property and the mess left inside city hall is unclear as most groups of protesters are saying the building looked different when they left on Feb. 16. But finding who is responsible for vandalism among multiple groups that have sprung up around Maidan is extremely tricky.

For most of December, the building was under the supervision of opposition parties UDAR and Svoboda. But UDAR vacated the building in January, leaving it in the hands of the nationalist Svoboda group. Its members were among the last to vacate city hall on Feb. 16, when it was turned over by Ruslan Andreiko, commandant of the building, to Swiss Ambassador to Ukraine Christian Schoenenberger and City Administrator Makeyenko.

But Svoboda members continued to block access to the building throughout the day. Ihor Shvaika, a Svoboda parliament member, said that after the building was handed over, the party’s members were only guarding the perimeter, and said questions about what happened inside should be directed to Makeyenko.

Makeyenko told the Kyiv Post by phone on Feb. 17 that he did not have time to comment on the situation. And attempts to contact Schoenenberger on Feb. 17 were unsuccessful.

Shvaika said that while Svoboda occupied the building, the party’s activists were only on the first and second floors – a statement corroborated by members of other groups.

Svoboda continued to block the building until prosecutors released more than 2,000 protesters, including 234 protesters detained since December, under house arrest. Maidan’s council ruled to vacate the building, and Svoboda abided on Dec. 16, despite the objection of many groups around EuroMaidan.

Mysterious group re-enters city hall

Late at night on Feb. 16, a group of masked men wearing green and black military gear, including helmets and bulletproof vests, entered the building after scuffling with Svoboda and EuroMaidan Self-Defense units, Liga.net reported. The news outlet said the group remained there well into the morning. It is unclear exactly when they left.

Vesti newspaper managed to speak with the men, who identified themselves as “warriors of Narnia,” a group that only received occasional mentions in the past. Some local media reported that another group called “Vikings” was also inside the building at night.

The Kyiv Post saw the same men inside city hall around 2 p.m., after Svoboda had officially vacated the building. They posed for a photo for Vesti on Feb. 16, in which two of them are giving the Nazi salute.

The men in the photograph appear to be the same ones photographed by the Kyiv Post on Feb. 16 chasing down and beating three police officers who were walking along Khreschatyk Street near city hall. They knocked the officers to the ground before a group of EuroMaidan Self-Defense members broke up the scene and helped the officers away. One of the men involved in the attack carried a distinctive metal bar that can be seen in photographs taken by the Kyiv Post and Vesti.

Members of Narnia give the Nazi salute while being photographed by Vesti newspaper on Feb. 16.

The same members of Narnia earlier on Feb. 16 were photographed by the Kyiv Post attacked three police officers outside Kyiv’s city hall.

Some protesters say Narnia is associated with Svoboda. Oleksandr Danyliuk, leader of the radical civic group Spilna Sprava that took over several national government buildings last month, is one of them.

“This is a crowd around Svoboda, and those are the guys (Svoboda) who knocked us out of there (Agriculture Ministry),” Danyliuk said.

In a video posted to YouTube on Feb. 16, a member of the group, who does not give his name but says he is from Belarus, explains that Narnia had close ties with Svoboda, but fell out because Svoboda “sold out.”

The man goes on to say, just after the six-minute mark in the video, that Narnia was responsible for starting the deadly clashes with police on Hrushevskoho Street on Jan. 19 that lasted till Jan. 22.

According to the Volyn Post, Narnia “was created for a physical confrontation with the police and titushki” (pro-government hired thugs) and is among most combat-ready units participating in the EuroMaidan protests.

It consists of about 50 football fanatics and right-wing radicals who are equipped with gas masks, shields, helmets and body armor, according to the Volyn Post.

Kyiv Post editor Christopher J. Miller can be reached
at [email protected], and on Twitter at @ChristopherJM. Kyiv Post deputy chief editor Katya Gorchinskaya and staff writer Nathaniel
Espino contributed to this story.