[Ukraine: ] Comments on comments/ Re Lyashko

Subject: 2014-#165-Johnson’s Russia List – Comments on comments/Re Lyashko
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2014
From: xxx

I feel compelled to say something about the comments displayed at the top of today’s JRL.

Recommending that readers be left to “make up their own minds,” when there is such a paucity of material available in the U.S. media that departs from the “Kyiv = democratic, pro-West = good” and “Donbass ‘People’s Republics’ = Russian-supported terrorist separatists = bad,” is disingenuous, at the very least. The second person refers to “your … editorial statements” including one on Lyashko, when all you did was to highlight something from the Jamestown Foundation, which – again, given the shameful lack of attention in the U.S. press to the Lyashko phenomenon – was a useful and appropriate thing to do.

But, what kind of “senior academic Russia expert” can blow off Lyashko as merely “clownish”? His sudden rise deserves serious attention, especially now that some polls are claiming that his Radical Party would be ahead of all others, if the Supreme Rada elections were held today. (At least one of those polls omitted to associate Poroshenko’s name with a potential Solidarity Party slate, but still.) How many of us who deplored the decisive role of Right Sector in Nov. 2013 – Feb. 2014 and the elevation of Svoboda members, and Right Sector sponsors (Nalyvaychenko, Kvyt), to the government on Feb. 26, were subsequently dismissed as alarmists because Tyahnybok + Yarosh received a combined < 2% of the vote on May 25? Meanwhile, have the media and analysts paid due attention to Lyashko’s coming out of nowhere to garner 8.32%? Is the “senior academic Russian expert” aware of the following, did he see the relevant videos, does he think they depict merely “clownish” behavior?

– The events of May 23, when Lyashko gloated on Facebook about wiping out “Colorado beetles” (people) as they sat in an office in the city of Torez? Here are links to the Kyiv Post’s account of those events and to Lyashko’s own Ukrainian-language Facebook page. kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/militia-backed-by-presidential-candidate-lyashko-takes-credit-for-murder-of-russian-backed-separatists-349093.html

Lyashko crows about this in Facebook: m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=646486682086599&id=100001758206922.

Translation: “Fighters of the Lyashko Ukraina Battallion have just cleaned out and
liberated from the Colorado beetles the executive committee offices of the
City of Torez in Donetsk Region. Two terrorists killed, no casualties among
our fighters. Glory to Ukraine!”

– Many video recordings of Lyashko demanding that elected MPs and their Parliamentary caucuses be banned, dissolved, etc., and images of Lyashko joining Svoboda’s goons in physically attacking other elected MPs inside the Supreme Rada chamber.

– This is the video, or one of them, referred to by Jamestown. Does the “senior Russia expert” consider this behavior “clownish”? From Lyashko’s own YouTube site, May 8, titled there “Lyashko Interrogates Separatist Leader.” youtube.com/watch?v=tTb7efoe89I

– The video posted by Lyashko on July 9, under the title “Lyashko Restores Order in Slovyansk”. youtube.com/watch?v=AaKoVfDrKS4&list=UU7KGv_YorzF-Lgu-Wvo1BQw This was after the militias exited that city. Lyashko appears to be channeling the late Sashko Bily (cf. the latter’s intervention on the local prosecutor in Rivne last March), as he tries to force a city council official to sign a statement that he, the official, is a traitor and collaborationist with the “terrorists”; the guy keeps protesting that he stayed in his job while the militias held the city, because he was duty-bound to do that for the population.

– Unanswered questions about the Mariupol massacre on May 9 and Lyashko’s part therein.

Questions could also usefully be raised about Lyashko’s previous relationships with U.S. agencies, if any, and whether they are of continuing relevance. At the very least, back in 1990, as a journalist, the young Lyashko did a stint at Radio Liberty. At that time, Radio Liberty was run by former associates of Mykola Lebed at the CIA-funded Prolog Research Corporation (source: T. Kuzio, “U.S. support for Ukraine’s liberation during the Cold War: A study of Prolog Research and Publishing Corporation,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies (2012), doi:10.1016/j.postcomstud.2012.02.007). Lebed, of course, had been the organizer of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and an OUN-B leader during the Volhynia massacres of 1943. U.S. Army Counterintelligence wanted to keep him out of the United States after the war, as “a well-known sadist and collaborator of the Germans,” but Allen Dulles overrode that evaluation in a 1952 letter (see Breitman & Goda, “Hitler’s Shadow”) and Lebed went on to his long and influential U.S.-based career.