You're reading: Right Sector roughs up Shufrych in Odesa, promises new attacks

It's getting dangerous out there for lawmakers with deep ties to the corrupt regime of overthrown President Viktor Yanukovcyh.

Opposition lawmaker Nestor Shufrych, seeking re-election in the Oct. 26 parliament, ended his campaign tour to Odesa on Sept. 30 in a hospital bed, after several dozen local activists of militant Right Sector attacked him and roughed him up. They blame him for crimes committed by the regime of ousted President Viktor Yanukovych.

Shufrych, who was elected to the current parliament as part of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions party list, is now going to parliament as No. 7 from the Opposition Bloc, a group formed predominantly from former Yanukovych’s allies.

Shufrych said he was planning to conduct a short press conference in the building of the Odesa regional government administration. Learning of his plans, members of the militantly nationalist Right Sector found him and threw him into a trash bin and marked him with green paint.

Mykola Skoryk, deputy of Odesa Oblast council and a former oblast governor was also been beaten up along with Shufrych.

“I’m surprised to put it mildly by what happened today in the building of regional administration,” Shufrych said, lying in a hospital bed with a red nose and bandaged right eye. “It is a demonstration of what the authority in Ukraine and Odesa, in particular, look like,” he added.

A YouTube video shows how bodyguards and police officers took the bloodied Shufrych out of the regional administration building, while the crowd kept trying to attack him.

Activists of the militant Pravy Sektor rough up member of parliament Nestor Shufrych for his close ties to ex-President Viktor Yanukovych.

The Opposition Bloc has called on President Petro Poroshenko to sack minister of Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and Odesa Governor Ogor Palytsia because of the violent incident. “Either the president guarantees election rights for citizens of Ukraine and stops this chaos or these elections will be the last in history of our country,” the political group said in the statement.

Over the last weeks activists of Right Sector — which led the militant wing of the EuroMaidan Revolution that forced Yanukovych to flee on Feb. 22 — organized a set of attacks on politicians whose reputations were damaged by their ties to Yanukovych and a series of so-called “dictator laws” passed by the former ruling party, with the unsuccessful aim of keeping the ex-president in power

On Sept. 25, activists covered lawmaker Viktor Pylypyshyn with red paint and threw him in a trash bin when he was trying to register as candidate in Kyiv. He was also punished for suppring the Jan. 16 “dictator laws” to curb free speech and protests a month before Yanukovych fled power.

Kyiv Post+ offers special coverage of Russia’s war against Ukraine and the aftermath of the EuroMaidan Revolution.

Artem Skoropadsky, a spokesman of Right Sector, told the Kyiv Post that attacks on Shufrych and Pylypyshyn were a kind of “people’s lustration,” which the activists were conducting to prevent people with disgraced reputations, including the members of the former ruling Party of Regions and Communist Party, to run for parliament.

“Right Sector said in the very beginning that we are going to fight these bastards,” he said. “These are just the warning actions. We are just warning them – Pylypyshyn, Shufrych and other bastards that they should not be candidates. If they don’t listen to us we will do it another way,” he added.

Shufrych, in turn, threatened the Right Sector. “We will do everything to clear the city out of this evil,” he said in a hospital bed interview. Shufrych’s allies claimed the lawmaker received a serious concussion over the attack.

“We will do everything to clear the city out of this evil,” Party of Regions lawmaker Nestor Shufrych said from his hospital bed, referring to the Pravy Sektor activists who roughed him up as he was about to give a press conference in his re-election bid in the Oct. 26 parliamentary election.

In the Ukrainian version of Wikipedia, the Sept. 30 Shufrych incident is described as a light beating of the politician “by patriots of Ukraine” to punish him for treason and stealing state funds.

Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected]