Government power crumbles in regions and Kyiv

(Business New Europe – bne.eu – Graham Stack in Kyiv – January 24, 2014) Ukraine’s embattled president Viktor Yanukovych found himself facing a second front January 23 with anti-government protesters storming regional administrations across West and Central Ukrainian regions. Ironically the development came on a day when a ceasefire was held between protesters and police in Kyiv. While clashes in Kyiv are spectacular but largely theatrical, overthrowing state administration in the regions could start the crumbling of Yanukovych’s power.

Attention has been focused for a week on an acre of ground in central Kyiv where police and protestors have fought out a fiery battle becoming one of the most photographed sites in the world according to geotagging swarm trackers. But Ukraine is a vast expanse of territory that constitutes Europe’s largest country and is notoriously divided between the Ukrainian-speaking West and Centre and Russian-speaking East and South making the country a handful to rule at the best of times.

Day-to-day administration is in the hands of the bosses of Ukraine’s 27 regions. As a centralised state, heads of all these administrations are appointed by the president in Kyiv meaning a East Ukrainian president like Yanukovych can put his people in to govern West Ukraine, despite being broadly detested there. In local elections held in October 2010, ultranationalist party Svoboda took 25-30% of the vote to win outright in West Ukraine regions of Ternopol, Lviv and Ivano-Franstisk, with Party of Regions reduced to single figures.

Despite this disconnect, West Ukraine has been deceptively quiet since the start of the Euromaidan protests in November 2013. Instead, tens of thousands of the disaffected from West and Central Ukraine have flocked to Kyiv faithfully Sunday after Sunday to swell the anti-Yanukovych crowds on Kyiv’s Maidan square. Polls showed around half of the demonstrators at the Sunday demos had commuted from the regions and this does not include the large minority of West Ukrainians resident in the capital.

While West Ukrainians had previously taken peaceful protest to Kyiv, the switch to violent direct action in Kyiv over the last week triggered a similar switch in the regions January 23 – ironically one day after the national ‘day of unity’ that celebrates the unification of West and East Ukraine in 1918 in a short-lived independent state. As news from Kyiv of shooting of demonstrators on Ukraine’s special day was confirmed and suspicion of police involvement spread, enraged locals marched on the regional representatives of the hated Yanukovych regime.

Occupy Lviv

First to go was Lviv, stronghold of the protest movement. In the early afternoon January 23, a crowd of thousands simply marched up to the headquarters of the regional administration with cries of “here we come” and “revolution”, walked in and occupied it – forcing the Yanukovych-appointed governor Oleh Salo to resign on the spot. Protesters emerged waving Salo’s hand-written and signed resignation letter before cameras, before evicting him from the building. Yanukovych had only made Salo governor in November 2013, in a move perceived locally as preparing for falsification of presidential elections in 2015 – Salo had been linked in 2004 to attempts to rig elections in Yanukovych’s favour in Lviv region.

Salo later claimed his resignation had been extracted under duress. But the protestors had lost no time in building barricades around the state administration building to prevent his reinstallation and prepare for a general offensive: “Our task is to take control of all the state organs in the next two to three days the district administration, the tax service and the police,” Andriy Sokolov, spokesman for the National Resistance Staff, said on footage streamed to the internet. “If we don’t control the situation here in Galichina (West Ukraine), the Mongol horde will come to us from Kyiv to Lviv,” he added. With the municipality of Lviv’s elected mayor Andriy Sadoviy a staunch supporter of the Euromaidan movement, there may be little standing in their way. Self-defence brigades are currently formed in the city, according to nationalist party Svoboda.

House of cards

Other regions followed Lviv’s lead in the afternoon and evening. In Rivne, thousands of protestors occupied the regional administration after overcoming resistance from police, singing the national anthem as they did so. Representatives of Svoboda led negotiations with officials, who resigned from their positions after four hours of talks and left the building, a Svoboda spokesman later said. Police units also quit the building to cheers from the crowd outside, and according to unconfirmed reports have also resigned on mass. The victorious protesters now aim to recall local units of the Berkut riot police deployed in Kyiv against demonstrators.

The role of Oleh Tyagnibok’s nationalist Svoboda party was even more prominent in the seizure of the state administration in West Ukrainian Ternopil region where the party holds a majority in the elected regional assembly, now likely to take over running the region. In neighbouring Khelmnitskiy region, protestors have surrounded the district administration with barricades of snow and tyres.

In the central Ukraine regions of Zhitomir and Cherkassy, things did not go so smoothly for protestors. In Cherkasy, hundreds of protestors surged into the building of the state administration, smashing through windows and doors. But riot police mounted resistance and blocked protesters from entering the third floor, where head of the state administration Serhiy Tulub has his office. The crowd then set fire to furniture on the lower floors in an effort to smoke out police and officials, while the police poured water from above. According to reports, a police officer threw a heavy flower vase out of a third floor window, hitting and badly injuring a girl, and further enraging the crowd. According to the facebook feed of local activist Roman Chornomaz, there have been numerous arrests during the night.

In the central region of Zhitomir, police repelled a nationalist attempt to capture the district administration. But as local protestor 29-year old Ihor Sirovatko told bne: “The main thing is for me that my country has finally risen from its knees this last week.”

Low-hanging fruit

While attempts to seize Zhitomir state administration have failed for now, protesters such as Sirovatko may be consoled by protestors’ seizure of the agriculture ministry in Kyiv on the night of January 23/24. Agriculture minister Mykola Prisiazhniuk, a close political and business associate of the Yanukovych family, was formerly an unloved governor of Zhitomir.

A rival nationalist organisation to Svoboda, Spil’no Spravo, spearheaded the capture of the agriculture ministry. According to Spilno Spravo’s leader, Oleksandr Danilyuk, the move was a reaction to the failure of negotiations between government and opposition, announced by opposition leaders in the evening of January 23. The agriculture ministry is directly adjacent to the Maidan, and so is ‘low-hanging fruit’ for protestors. “Yanukovych told us to get off the streets,” Danilyuk told TV cameras, “and this is exactly what we have done.” Ukraine is facing temperatures as low as -20C this weekend, another masked member of Spil’no Spravo told bne, making it impossible to sleep in tents. “We can fit a whole army in here,” he said, referring to the endless corridors and seven floors of the ministry, while assuring that the agricultural ministry was largely superfluous in winter.

Despite such assurances, the occupation of a ministry may point to a second Achilles heel for Yanukovych, besides his weakness in regions west of Kyiv: While overstretched riot police in the capital are defending government, parliament and presidential administration, many key buildings such as the ministries, the National Bank of Ukraine or gas distribution monopoly Naftogaz Ukrainy, remain almost completely unguarded and within a stone’s throw of Maidan. Asked by bne why protesters have not occupied such strategic buildings, a participant in the stand-off with police on Hrushevskiy Street answered, “because nobody has given us an order to do so.”

But after the failure of negotiations between opposition and government, and in view of the growing death toll, the disaffected youth contingent may no longer heed the cautious strategy of the political opposition. All three opposition leaders Arseny Yatsenyuk, Vitaly Klitschko and Oleh Tiahnibok have visited the militant groups fighting police on Hrushevskii Street over the last twenty-four hours to plead for restraint and each was knocked back by a chorus of jeers and whistles.

The peaceful folk of the Maidan may now be looking more to the fighters on Hruschevskii Street than to the speechmakers on the stage for inspiration on the evening of January 23, the crowd of thousands rejected opposition leaders’ request for extension of their mandate to negotiate with the government – and instead called out for immediate territorial expansion of the Maidan.

Protestors have taken control of six regional administrations and six more are under attack.

The crowd on Maidan booed when Vitali Klitschko told them Yanukovych refused to step down. He called for “a bloodless” national strike.