Analysts: Ukraine’s Right Sector strong enough to stage coup

MOSCOW, September 24. /TASS/. The organization of Ukraine’s radicals Right Sector is a menace to the current authorities in Kiev, so President Petro Poroshenko, well aware of that, has been trying hard to have the nationalists integrated with the official establishment by hook or by crook, analysts say. They also believe that the risk ultra-nationalists and their organizations may stage a march on Kiev and a government coup is rather high. Particularly so, if their idea garners overseas support.

The Right Sector and religious schismatics have seized an Orthodox church of the Moscow Patriarchate in the Ternopol Region. The Right Sector is involved in the food blockade of Crimea and agrees to let trucks carrying foods cross the border into Crimea only in exchange for a thousand dollars…This extremist Ukrainian group, outlawed in Russia, and its leader Dmitry Yarosh invariably remain in the focus of mass media. The Kiev authorities’ "honeymoon" with the movement of ultra-nationalists, whose support they used during and after the Maidan street protests, is long over. Of late, the relations between them grew strained and exchanges of direct threats were frequent.

Just recently, the Right Sector warned it might stage an armed march on Kiev, if its supporters, who continue to be detained by police, are not released within 48 hours. Yarosh addressed his men with a call for getting ready for civil disobedience actions with the aim to "liquidate the regime of internal occupation and achieve the national statehood of the Ukrainian people."

In this context the breaking news of recent days was Yarosh’s statement to the effect Right Sector militants will join the Ukrainian security service SBU’s crack unit Alfa. Experts are certain that this decision by Kiev will merely put more muscle into the radicals who are pressing for Poroshenko’s resignation.

"In fact, the SBU will incorporate a group that has officially proclaimed the ousting of Poroshenko and his entourage," the on-line media resource VZGLYAD (GLANCE) quotes the director of the Ukrainian Centre for Eurasian Research, Vladimir Kornilov, as saying. "But everybody is perfectly aware that either the authorities will arrange for a ‘night of long knives’, or the militants will come calling and do away with the current authorities. Their clash is imminent."

The Right Sector does have all the necessary resources for staging a coup, Professor Andrey Manoilo, of the Moscow State University’s department of political science, has told TASS. "Alongside the so-called Ukrainian Volunteer Corps, well-armed, having a previous record of fighting in Donbass, and obeying no one but for its own ringleaders, Yarosh has done a great deal to consolidate all other territorial volunteer battalions, many of them outspokenly nationalist. The Right Sector numbers some 10,000 men - an equivalent of a full-scale army division. For Yarosh it is more than enough to take Kiev ten times.

He really meant it when he warned if Poroshenko kept ignoring the opinion of Ukrainian nationalists, these forces would be revoked from Donbass and sent to Kiev with the aim to "restore order." "Of late, Poroshenko went to great lengths in his attempts to somehow disperse the volunteer battalions and to do something about the Right Sector. He tried to make the battalions part of the national guard or armed forces, to subordinate them to a common command and then to gradually replace their commanders and ‘dilute’ the personnel for the sole purpose of getting rid of this organized armed group."

The idea of including the militants into the Alfa unit pursues the same aim. But it remains to be seen who will gain the upper hand," Manoilo said.

"There may be one more thought on the Americans’ mind. For the United States the right-wing radicals may come in handy, should Washington decide time is ripe for ousting the regime that has hopelessly lost credibility. More economic upheavals will follow and Poroshenko will have to be removed from office. It would be ideal to have him replaced not through an election, but another spate of Maidan demonstrations. Only Yarosh and his men can do that," he believes.

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