Posted on 12/14/2013 7:51:38 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
KYIV -- In a grimy canvas tent in the nerve center of the protest encampment against Ukraine's president, Oleg Mikhyuk barks orders like the commander of an army.
In the last 24 hours, hundreds of former soldiers have filed into the tent to enlist their services with Mikhyuk, 48, who sits in jeans and a green shirt festooned with medals from his time as a paratrooper in the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan.
Mikhyuk's brigade -- which he says numbers thousands of Afghan war veterans -- is one of four security divisions designated to defend the opposition encampment tooth-and-nail if the authorities attempt to break up what protesters say is a peaceful demonstration.
"We are peacekeepers here, foremost, but just because we are keeping the peace does not mean that if they beat us, we're going to stand around silently," Mikhyuk says.
"We know how to defend ourselves and how to strike back. They sensed this the other night on the barricades. They took away the barricades, but they couldn't force the people out."
Mikhyuk was among the mass of protesters who repelled hundreds of riot police in the early hours of December 11, when they tried to bring an end to the "Euromaidan" demonstrations against President Viktor Yanukovych for scuttling a landmark deal with the EU.
After laying siege to Independence Square, where the opposition has established a protest camp, police moved in -- clearly on orders not to swing truncheons -- and tried to physically push the opposition off the square.
But without using more aggressive tactics, they appeared unable to dislodge the swarm of men in hard hats and body armor fashioned out of sticks and tape. And as the sun rose over Kyiv, the police withdrew.
Mikhyuk has been on high alert since, but says the attempt to clear the square has actually galvanized the protesting forces.
'Defend The People, Not The Authorities'
Tens of thousands of Ukrainians have been flooding into the snowbound capital, mainly from the west of the country, in anticipation of a weekend of huge antigovernment demonstrations.
Barricades, bulldozed by police days ago, have been reerected twice as big as before, while green and brown canvas tents have sprung up again.
Police are again a rare sight near Kyiv's Independence Square, which sometimes has the incongruent feel of the sprawling million-dollar film set of some medieval epic.
Smartly dressed lawyers talking on phones rub shoulders with mustachioed Cossacks in full garb, while bearded priests in black gowns lead prayers over speakers to murmuring old women crossing themselves. Men in orange hard hats carry planks of wood to beef up barricades made from scrap, barbed wire, and bags packed with snow.
The fear is that this scene is the calm before the storm. But Mikhyuk is defiant. "We don't fear anyone -- not the Berkut [riot police] nor anyone else," he says. "We went through Afghanistan. We saw bloodshed, we understand the worth of life. We want the people in epaulettes to understand that they took an oath to defend the people of Ukraine and not the authorities."
A travesty show.
Patriotic Ukrainians are standing up against KGB Putin’s Neo-Soviet dreams. The EVIL EMPIRE Putin loyally served is dead and gone forever. Ukraine wants nothing to do with the mass-murdering genocidal tyrant Putin.
LOL. I guess it is finally time for them to grow a pair and start to stand for themselves not for or against someone else.
Putin will fail in his attempts to destroy freedom in Ukraine like he has destroyed the freedom of the people of Russia.
Ok, Mishiko. I see it in a different way. If these paid clown are about to bring their nation into a Fourth Reich, why not? Germans might finally have both their Leibenstraum of cheap fertile land and slave labor without a single panzer dispatched. Just like Hitler dreamed about.
Putin’s Russia is more like the Third Reich than Germany under Frau Merkel. Putin invaded Georgia on a pretext just like Hitler’s invasion of the Sudetenland. Putin exterminated and ethnically cleansed thousands of innocent Georgians. Who has Merkel killed? Nobody.
Bankers from Frankfurt, technocrats from Brussels, administering the hard dreams of British, Spanish, Dutch, and other socialist politicans.
Lots of freedom to be had there. (of course, nevermind that Ukrainians would not be free to travel freely into the EU. The EU doesn’t care THAT much about them.
Yep, sure. Putin is a new Satan and the whole world revolves around him. He is never right. Frau Merkel and George Soros are new Christs, EUSSR is a new Heaven. Am I got it right?
Have the Germans regained Pomerania or Silesia?
Please. Comparing the EU to Nazi Germany only betrays an abysmal lack of knowledge about either.
I almost want to see for the Ukraine to be part of it to look at these clowns after. The problem is these protests are as false as all the previous “color revolutions” including Arab spring.
Putin will never get away with what he's done. He'll pay.
You are attracted to visual symbols too much. EU and Nazy Germany indeed are very different in that but the entire idea of German economical dominance, adjusted to modern realities, are pursued via both institutions in a very similar manner. Racial slur is missing for sure, there aren’t underdeveloped cultures, but underdeveloped economies these days. There aren’t death squads and concentration camps but financial consultants and regulators to kill industries and jobs in the East. There are no de-juro slave labor by Eastern “untermenschen” in Germany, but all the dirty jobs are done the the Poles and Lithuanians who earn pennies living in awful conditions.
Respectfully, shelling Ossetian apartment buildings while their civilian occupants sleep inside is not a ‘pretext’ - at least not the way I take you mean it. Mikheil Saakashvili is not the kind of friend America needs, whatever you think about Putin.
I don’t envy the position of the Ukrainians either. I know enough emigres from there to know about the Holomodor, where commissars starved millions, and about Russians moving into the already-furnished houses of the deceased, where they are now to organize for greater ties to Russia. It seems like a complicated issue to this American, with good arguments against both Putin and against the EU. I think we should tread lightly here.
Saakashvili is a hero who won his people’s freedom from the tyrant Putin. No amount of slanderous Kremlin propaganda can change that. Putin tried to reverse what Saakashvili accomplished but he failed. Putin will fail in Ukraine too.
And because America treats Central and South America much like Germany treats Eastern Europe, you're a Nazi.
Wow! Facile arguments are fun, aren't they?
>>>I don’t envy the position of the Ukrainians either. I know enough emigres from there to know about the Holomodor, where commissars starved millions, and about Russians moving into the already-furnished houses of the deceased, where they are now to organize for greater ties to Russia. It seems like a complicated issue to this American, with good arguments against both Putin and against the EU. I think we should tread lightly here.<<<
About half of Holodomor myth is a propaganda. Ukrainians weren’t any specific target of “Holodomor” which was a result of Stalin’s attempt to herd the people of Soviet Union into cities. Any other rural group in Russia, Georgia and elsewhere has suffered as much. It also worth mentioning that rural Ukrainians were starved by Ukrainian communists to feed growing Ukrainian population at the time. I don’t know what Russians were moving into Ukrainian homes to advocate for Russian ties. You really need to expand your history knowledge on the subject into 1950s as USSR leadership was takes by Khruschev who was a Ukrainian and annexed a huge part of Russia making it into Eastern and Southern Ukraine. These territories are inhabited by Russians for obvious natural reasons and it is actually people of these lands who are advocating for stronger ties with Russia.
>>>No, no. You’re right.
And because America treats Central and South America much like Germany treats Eastern Europe, you’re a Nazi.<<<
US is a positive factor and a powerplant of Americas. US enterprise makes jobs and growth there.
If you are to check about any social and economic parameters of newer EU states, most of them moved from sustained growth to stagnation and decline after their EU agreements.
That’s just what Hitler would say!
Thanks Tailgunner Joe.
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