By Vestnik Kavkaza
Yesterday the Russian Foreign Ministry expressed its concern about the intention of the opposition leaders to stir up the situation in Ukraine. “One of the opposition leaders urged Ukrainian citizens to establish “militia groups”, to patrol streets, and to protest near city halls in regions. It contradicts statements about the opposition’s devotedness to democracy and European values,” the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Russia believes.
Experts have a lot of complaints about the opposition. Tamara Guzenkova, Deputy Director of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, spoke about the opposition’s multi-layered structure, heterogeneity and different directions of leaders of the Euromaidan.
Speaking about differences between the events that occurred 10 years after 2004 and now, Guzenkova stated: “The authors and directors of this event believe that, to a large extent, these events will occur according to the patterns and scenarios of 2004 - that it will be a peaceful event, peaceful pressure on the authorities, it will be just smiles, flowers, teddy-bears, and so on. But the truth was much more rigid and terrible, because radical forces came to the fore, using crude, almost armed clashes. They turned out to be forming the agenda and became a very real and legitimized side for negotiations. It is sufficient to watch Vitali Klitschko, who has now, in fact, become a chief negotiator and mediator between the Maidan and the authorities. When he goes out and reports to the Maidan what happened and what they have talked about, and always keeps pausing, asking the Maidan - keeps pausing and asks how the Maidan likes it. And as far as we can judge, whether precisely those forces that represent the radical segment are satisfied.”
The other peculiarity of the Maidan, according to Gezenkova, is that participants in political events are football fans: “Ukrainian football is much more than football, it is a much more pretentious, complicated and expensive national pastime and national phenomenon. The oligarchs have invested a lot and probably will keep investing in their football clubs, and at the same time a class of football fans has formed and mobilized so that they have been able to participate as combat units in this, in fact, political opposition Maidan. They also say that while the Kiev Regionals were trying to seize more and more power within the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, the Government and so on, militants were getting prepared in camps and in places that were not open to public view. One of the main goals and objectives of these people with knives, with clubs, with Molotov cocktails, producing quite a scary experience.”
The Maidan seems to Guzenkova to have become the embodied archaism of political struggle: “These medieval catapults, burning tires and squares - it is all organized and to a large extent is being implemented in order to create, as a matter of fact, a parallel government, to legitimize various kinds of parallel headquarters. And a great help in this are the attempts to seize city hall buildings, and, in fact, the power in the regions, when gradually more and more regions refuse to recognize the central government and establish their own independent authorities. The goal is to overthrow the Kiev authorities. Of course, against this background the president's sick leave and various compromises can be perceived as a special sophisticated game for a decrease in the Maidan's activity, or it can be regarded as a weakness, because the government simply does not know what to do with these elements.”
