In this 27 December 2015 video, with Italian subtitles, Ukrainian pro-Kiev government politician Artyom Vitko sings the praise of Adolf Hitler.
By Jason Melanovski:
Ukrainian government officials celebrate Nazism, anti-Semitism
4 January 2016
Several recent incidents in Ukraine have further exposed the far-right nature of the forces unleashed by the 2014 Maidan “revolution” that ousted then-President Viktor Yanukovych and eventually brought to power the country’s current, widely despised leader, oligarch Petro Poroshenko, whose approval rating has collapsed to just 17 percent.
In a recent video posted to the internet, Artyom Vitko, parliament member and representative of the nationalist Radical Party, can be seen riding in an SUV drinking vodka and singing along to an anti-Semitic song titled “Adolf Hitler is Together with Us” by a Russian neo-Nazi rock group. Vitko, who has also served as a commander in the government-backed Luhansk Battalion that is fighting to suppress pro-Russian breakaway regions in Ukraine’s Donbass, is shown enjoying the lyrics to the song’s chorus, “Adolf Hitler is together with us, Adolf Hitler is in each of us, and an eagle with iron wings will help us at the right time.” As part of his duties as a member of the Ukrainian parliament, Vitko sits on a committee dedicated to improving ties between Israel and Ukraine.
The far-right leader first made international headlines in January 2015 when he supposedly threw blood in the face of Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Communist Party of Russia, at a meeting of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in Strasbourg, France. According to a public Facebook posting by fellow Radical Party member Dmytro Linko, “At the entrance to PACE’s building, Artyom Vitko and I hurled blood at the face of Russian Communist Zyuganov. We smacked him in his hostile mug.”
The video’s exposure was preceded by reports that the mayor in the city of Konotop, located in northern Ukraine, has been openly displaying anti-Semitic symbols.
According to the Jerusalem Post, Mayor Artyom Semenikhin, who is a member of the far-right Svoboda Party, “drives around in a car bearing the number 14/88, a numerological reference to the phrases ‘we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children’ and ‘Heil Hitler’; replaced the picture of President Petro Poroshenko in his office with a portrait of Ukrainian national leader and Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera; and refused to fly the city’s official flag at the opening meeting of the city council because he objected to the star of David emblazoned on it.”
The release of the video with Vitko singing neo-Nazi songs coincided an official visit to Israel by Ukrainian President Poroshenko. In meetings with Labor Party members, Poroshenko downplayed the rise of anti-Semitism as a political ideology in Ukraine and blamed Russia for promoting anti-Semitism in Crimea.
According to Labor Party lawmaker Ksenia Svetlova, Poroshenko stated, “In Ukraine, Jews have nothing to fear. But in the Crimea they are oppressed and not allowed in synagogue.” Jewish organizations in Crimea, which is now controlled by Russia, declared Poroshenko’s statements to be false.
In a grotesque display of political hypocrisy, during his visit to Israel, Poroshenko declared in a speech before the Knesset, “We must remember the negative events in history, when collaborators helped the Nazis seek the Final Solution.” He announced that Ukraine would hold an official 75th anniversary memorial of the massacre at Babi Yar site in Kiev, where Nazi forces killed nearly 34,000 Jews.
Last April, Poroshenko’s government officially rehabilitated the country’s Nazi collaborators, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), and moved the country’s “Defender of Ukraine Day” to coincide with the formation date of the UPA.
In an expression of the Zionist regime’s utter bankruptcy and the falsity of its claim to defend the world’s Jewish population, Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu later stated that he plans to attend the memorial ceremony in Ukraine.
Today, the direct political and familial descendants of the OUN and the UPA are found in Ukraine’s government-backed, far-right military battalions and political parties, such as Svoboda and Vitko’s Radical Party. The latter, for instance, counts Yuriy Shukhevych among its parliamentary members. Yuriy Shukhevych’s father, Roman Shukhevych, was a leader of the UPA. The younger Shukhevych helped draft the April 2015 law honoring Ukraine’s Nazi collaborators.
Since the Kiev regime came to power in a US-backed coup in February 2014, the fascist forces that carried out the overthrow of elected President Viktor Yanukovych have committed violent atrocities against opponents in an effort to terrorize the population into submission.
TODAY communists and socialists will be picketing the Ukrainian embassy in London in protest at the banning of the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) on December 16. The ban is a result of the decree on “decommunisation” signed by President Petro Poroshenko (pictured) on May 15 2015. The case was heard in secret. The defendants — the leadership of the CPU — were barred. So were their legal representatives. It followed a previous hearing in July when the presiding judges themselves resigned in protest at its politically motivated character. The decommunisation decree had already made it a criminal offence to promote communism or Marxism or to display an associated symbol. Selling anything written by Marx now attracts a prison sentence of up to five years. The same decree requires all citizens of Ukraine to show “respect” to those who fought alongside the nazis in WWII in the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN): here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
Strike by Ukrainian coal miners
Ukrainian coal miners in the Lviv region have been on strike since January 2. They are members of the Ukrainian Miners’ Independent Trade Union and are protesting unpaid wages. Another union has announced it may join the action.
The striking miners have threatened to block custom checkpoints at Ukraine’s border with Poland on January 12.
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/01/08/wrks-j08.html
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Ukrainian miners block border crossing
Ukrainian miners went ahead with their plan to block a border crossing post Tuesday. More than 300 miners blocked the crossing point between Poland and the Ukraine on the main road linking Lviv and Rava Ruska.
The miners, members of the Independent Trade Union of Coal Miners of Ukraine (NPGU), have been on strike since January 2. They are protesting at arrears in their wages. They have been paid less than half their wages owed for the period November to December 2015.
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/01/15/lab2-j15.html
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Medical doctor assisting anti-Maidan arrested and tortured
Campaign for the release of Grubnik Vladimir Yurievich
http://www.antiimperialista.org/free_grubnik
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Saturday 23rd January 2016
posted by Morning Star in Editorial
LABOUR MP Paul Flynn and his parliamentary colleagues are to be congratulated on the early day motion condemning the ban on the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU).
Last December’s ruling by the Kiev District Court rests upon the spurious legal basis of a series of anti-communist laws and decrees promulgated last year.
They branded the former Soviet Union as a “criminal” entity that pursued a policy of “state terror.”
Left-wing propaganda and symbols were declared illegal, including use of the five-pointed red star used on the mast-head of our own paper.
As a direct result of this legislation, scores of Ukrainian cities, towns, villages, streets and squares are being renamed, hundreds of statues pulled down and several million signs replaced.
At the same time as the Soviet Union and its Red Army, which fought and defeated four-fifths of the nazi war machine to liberate Europe from fascism, are being traduced and reviled, all veterans of the “struggle for Ukrainian independence” have been awarded special legal status.
It is now specifically a crime to denounce the fascist Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army which terrorised and murdered Jews, Poles, Czechs and Russians in the 1930s and ’40s and whose leaders collaborated with their country’s nazi occupiers.
No wonder, then, that these anti-democratic laws were immediately criticised and condemned by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe and former president of Poland Bronislaw Komorowski.
In July 2015, the process began to criminalise the CPU and two smaller left-wing parties, despite the CPU having won 2.7 million votes and 32 seats in the last genuinely free all-Ukraine parliamentary elections in 2012.
As a democratic and constitutional party, the CPU had opposed the coup backed by the US, EU and neo-nazi paramilitaries to depose elected president Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014. While upholding national unity, the CPU also refused to support the state and fascist military assault on popular militias in eastern Ukraine who rose up against the post-coup regime and its anti-Russian and “de-communisation” policies.
These principled stances led to violent attacks on the party, its members and premises, including the disgraceful yet unpunished thuggery aimed at CPU leader Petro Symonenko in the parliamentary chamber last May and July 2014. It also confirmed the determination of Prime Minister Yatsenyuk to outlaw the party, arresting the first judge who stood in his way.
The ban on the CPU has since been condemned in the strongest terms by Amnesty International and the Venice Commission, which advises the Council of Europe on constitutional matters.
Flynn’s Commons motion therefore deserves the signature of every MP who believes in democratic freedoms of speech, assembly, organisation and publication.
Morning Star readers should contact their elected representative and urge them to lend their support.
That would send the clearest message to the British government, the European Union and — above all — the regime in Kiev that Ukraine’s steps down the road to fascism will not go unopposed.
As a burning desire for EU membership provided the pretext for Yatsenyuk and his fascist allies to carry out their coup in the first place, a special responsibility falls upon pro-EU governments, parties and politicians to demand sanctions against the Kiev regime unless and until it restores fundamental democratic freedoms.
Not only should Ukrainian membership of the EU be taken off the table; the country’s partnership status within the “European Neighbourhood Policy” should be terminated forthwith.
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-21a9-Kiev-anti-left-laws-threaten-vital-freedoms#.VqT41FLa44A
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Monday 22nd February 2016
posted by James Tweedie in World
FAR-RIGHT demonstrators rallied in Kiev’s Maidan Square yesterday to call for the government’s overthrow, the day after fascist thugs rampaged through the streets.
About 1,000 people gathered to demand that Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk quits.
They set up six tents in an echo of the 2014 coup d’etat against the elected government of Viktor Yanukovytch after he turned from Europe to Russia.
Rightwingers accuse the government of treachery for seeking to pass regional autonomy laws as part of the Minsk II peace agreement with anti-fascist forces in the eastern Donbass region.
Mr Yatsenyuk — whose appointment was famously demanded by US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland — narrowly survived a parliamentary no confidence vote last week.
But former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s Fatherland party then quit his ruling coalition, which includes his rival President Petro Poroshenko’s “Solidarity” blocSaturday’s event to commemorate those who died in 2014 turned nasty as camouflage-clad mobs attacked the offices of two Russian banks as police looked on and clashed with National Guard troops.
They also targeted the holding company of Ukraine’s richest oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, who has been accused of backing the Donbass militias.Russian news agency Tass reported that members of the neonazi Right Sector militia, which has previously threatened to bring down the coup regime it helped instal, were among the attackers.
Many of the so-called Heavenly Hundred victims of the 2014 violence were killed by snipers — allegedly in the service of the opposition.
Police officers deployed against rioters, including Right Sector and fascist Svoboda party thugs, were burnt by petrol bombs, some fatally.
http://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-ee9e-Ukraine-Far-right-thugs-go-on-the-rampage-in-Kiev#.Vss6H-ZrgdU
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Saturday 26th March 2016
posted by Morning Star in World
by Our Foreign Desk
THE MISSING Ukrainian defence lawyer for a captured Russian anti-fascist volunteer was found buried on an abandoned farm yesterday.
Kiev’s Chief Military Prosecutor Anatoly Matios said that Yuri Grabovsky had been drugged and kidnapped in the capital earlier this month.
He was then taken to the Black Sea port of Odessa, before being moved to the countryside some 90 miles south of the capital where he was shot and killed, Major General Matios said.
Gen Matios told reporters that Mr Grabovsky’s body had been found in early yesterday after a suspect had infomed prosecutors of the location. Another suspect in the killing was detained later, he said.
The prosecutor would not immediately identify the motive for the killing or give the names of the suspects, but he said they held forged law enforcement agency identity cards.
Mr Grabovsky was representing Alexander Alexandrov, who was taken prisoner along with fellow Russian volunteer Yevgeny Yerofeyev in the eastern Donbass region.
Both had been officers in the Russian army, but Moscow said they had resigned from active duty before volunteering to fight with anti-fascist militias in Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has offered to trade the two men for Nadezhda Savchenko, a member of the neonazi Aidar volunteer battalion who was jailed for 22 years in Russia earlier this week for her role in the killing of two Russian journalists.
On Thursday US Secretary of State John Kerry said Russian President Vladimir Putin had assured him that Ms Savchenko’s fate would be addressed “at some point.”
http://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-b8d7-Ukraine-Lawyer-defending-anti-fascist-fighter-found-murdered#.VvZiCnptc4A
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