A year after a series of violent attacks on Roma camps in Ukraine, local human rights activists met on May 27 to discuss the lack of proper investigations into the violence, only to be disrupted by an armed man and his supporters.
The man brought an ax and two knives to the discussion, which was held at the Ukraine Crisis Media Center in Kyiv, and claimed that such weapons were used by Roma in violent attacks.
The police arrived at the scene but took virtually no actions. Nobody was injured.
A spokesperson for the Shevchenkivskyi Police Department in Kyiv told the Kyiv Post she couldn’t yet comment on whether the police had opened a case into the incident.
Officially, fewer than 50,000 Roma live in Ukraine, but the unofficial number is thought to be up to five times higher. Roma still face widespread discrimination in the country.
In spring and summer 2018, local far-right groups, including the National Militia (Natsionalni Druzhyny) and C14, attacked Roma camps in Kyiv, Lviv and Zakarpattia oblasts. One woman and a man were murdered in the course of attacks, and many more were injured.
According to rights activists, a year later, those violent attacks have only resulted in one court case into the murder of a Roma man during the attack in Lviv Oblast.
For that reason, human rights activists met to discuss law enforcement’s failure to investigate violence against Roma people in Ukraine.
Yulian Kondur, a project coordinator at the Chirikli Roma Women Fund, co-organized the event at the request of student activists from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.
Kondur was also a speaker at the event. He was joined by Matthew Schaaf, the director of Freedom House in Ukraine; Vyacheslav Likhachev, the head of the Group for Monitoring the Rights of National Minorities; and Kostiantyn Tarasenko, the head of the Human Rights Department of the National Police of Ukraine.
Before the discussion started, Kondur noticed two men in the audience who he had previously seen trying to disrupt Roma-related events, including a photo exhibition called “Roma are Us.” Kondur informed Tarasenko about the potential for violence, and he called the police.
Around 17 minutes after the start of the event, the two men, Yevhen Strokan and Serhii Antonov, who represent the Unknown Patriot organization, interrupted the speakers. They called Roma people thieves and accused the speakers of not being open to discussion and talking about the “wrong” things.
Multiple posts on Unknown Patriot’s Facebook page include hate speech against feminists, the LGBT community and Roma.
Later in the event, a man named Maksym Yarosh, who was dressed in a camouflage uniform and introduced himself as a veteran of the far-right Azov Regiment, showed the audience an ax and two knives “to demonstrate what Roma use to attack people.”
Kondur says that Yarosh didn’t try to injure anybody but acted aggressively. A video published by Unknown Patriot on Facebook also shows him shoving the security guard at the event.
According to Yarosh’s Facebook page, he fights against “Roma thieves.” He frequently posts his bank account number, a common practice in Ukraine when requesting donations. He says that if Roma people give him back the money that he claims they stole, then he might stop bothering them.
Maksym Yarosh, who introduced himself as a veteran of the far-right Azov Regiment, interrupts the discussion about Roma people’s rights as he shows weapons that he claims Roma use to attack people. The discussion took place on May 27, 2019, at Ukraine Crisis Media Center in Kyiv. (Ukraine Crisis Media Center)
After law enforcement arrived at the scene, the tensions cooled. However, police officers took few actions, and the speakers were unable to continue the discussion as they faced constant interruptions.
Kondur says the speakers decided to leave the Ukraine Crisis Media Center, as they no longer felt safe. According to him, the police did not ask them to give witness statements about the incident.
In a post on Twitter, Freedom House’s Schaaf characterized violence and disruption by far-right actors as a “growing threat” to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and civil society in Ukraine.
Kondur says that the discussion’s organizers will initiate prosecution of the incident. So far, however, they haven’t yet decided how.
“It’s an attack on liberal values,” he told the Kyiv Post.
