Ukraine MP Assassinated; Vitrenko Describes Threats, Neo-Nazi Laws

In a LaRouchePAC statement issued April 14, Lyndon LaRouche demanded that top U.S. State Department neo-Con Victoria Nuland be held personally responsible if any harm comes to Ukrainian party leader Dr. Natalya Vitrenko, who is threatened by the Nazis Nuland brought to power in Ukraine.

LaRouche: If anything happens to Vitrenko, Nuland must be held responsible

On April 15 Oleh Kalashnikov, a Ukrainian MP and a member of former president Yanukovich’s Party of Regions, was assassinated near his residence in Kiev. “One of his relatives told local media,” according to Sputnik News, “that Kalashnikov was recently threatened with bodily harm due to his political views.”

An interview with Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine (PSPU) leader Dr. Vitrenko was included in a Channel One Russia TV segment April 12 on the adoption of drastic laws against freedom of expression in Ukraine. Vitrenko described how it is currently impossible for her, a former member of Parliament and Presidential candidate, to organize politically in her country:

“I cannot have contact with the population. I am never allowed on Ukrainian television channels. I cannot hold a rally, because it’s immediately taken over by goons, who come with sticks, chains, and stones, and maim people taking part in the rally.”

Vitrenko reviewed her attack on the nazi laws passed in the Rada on April 9 which she published in a press release last week, calling on President Poroshenko not to sign them.

Amid the renewal of artillery shelling around Donetsk, this past Orthodox Easter weekend saw nighttime attacks in which statues of Soviet-era figures were torn down in the city of Kharkov. Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh, now a Defense Ministry official, posted on his Facebook page images of grenades, decorated as Easter eggs and captioned with a call for divine help in achieving “Victory in the Holy War with the Russian-terrorist bands.”

During the Rada session, which adopted the laws with minimal discussion, testimony on behalf of their passage was given by Yuri Shukhevych, son of Roman Shukhevych, a commander in the German Abwehr’s Nachtigall Battalion, and in 1943 a key figure in the UPA’s Volhynia massacres of Poles living in western Ukraine. Long the head of UNA-UNSO, which became a component of Right Sector, the younger Shukhevych is now an MP from Oleg Lyashko’s Radical Party.

In the Channel One Russia broadcast, Communist Party leader Petro Symonenko, who himself was interrogated by the SBU for 11 hours last week, told an interviewer:

“There is now a dictatorship in the country — of one opinion and one ideology; a dictatorship of those who came to power through the Maidan, and that excludes any pluralism of views.”

The report also highlighted the case of Ukrainian Labor Party leader Alexander Bondarchuk, currently on trial and facing five years in prison for “infringing the territorial integrity of Ukraine” through articles published last August in the newspaper he edits.