Vitrenko and Marchenko to Petro Poroshenko: Ensure the Right to Life, or Step Down!

The following statement was issued April 16, 2015 by Dr. Natalia Vitrenko and Vladimir Marchenko, former members of Parliament and leaders of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine.

The European democracy and European values, promised by the Euromaidan, have in reality been forgotten and trampled upon.

The true essence of those currently in power in Ukraine is Nazism, the physical elimination of dissidents, political repressions, terror in the information sphere, the destruction of the national economy, and social genocide.

We are politicians with enough experience, including as Parliamentarians of Ukraine, to make an evaluation of the current regime. We do this with regret, but the facts compel us to defend justice.

Therefore we appeal to you: Stop supporting neo-Nazism in both policies and ideology, stop making heroes of Hitler’s accomplishes from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Ukrainian Insurgent Army (OUN-UPA), both as a political movement and for how they practiced the struggle for “Ukraine’s independence.”

In the mass media, including on your Channel 5, for more than a year any dissident views whatsoever have been classified as abetting separatists, infringing the territorial integrity of Ukraine, and undermining the national security. Political and public figures, scientists and teachers, journalists and writers, and even ordinary citizens of Ukraine, who have advocated, and continue to advocate, preserving the integrity of the country, but envision its protection based on different domestic and foreign policy principles than you, the Parliamentary majority, and the government formed thereby do, are immediately branded as enemies of the people, Ukrainophobes, and agents of Putin. Lists of “accomplices of separatists and terrorists” are drawn up and disseminated through the Internet.

The Ukraine Security Service (SBU) and the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) disseminate falsehoods about people who don’t suit them, initiate criminal cases against them, put them in prison, and drive them to suicide. Among these, without question, are V. Semenyuk-Samsonenko, M. Chechetov, S. Melnik, A. Peklushenko, A. Bondarchuk, S. Dolgov, A. Mayevsky, D. Denisov, and others. Those in power have directed their repressive discreditation and persecution machine also against N. Vitrenko and P. Symonenko.

For two days in a row, Ukraine has been shaken by the murders of political opponents of the authorities: People’s Deputy of Ukraine Oleg Kalashnikov, and the writer and journalist Oles Buzyna. These murders were brutal, provocatory, and, unquestionably, politically motivated.

We believe that the horrors being experienced by the people of Ukraine are linked with the activity of neo-Nazi parties and movements, and the support of their actions by those in power (both in the media, and in law enforcement agencies).

The Laws of Ukraine “On the perpetual commemoration of victory over Nazism during the Second World War, 1939-1945,” “On the condemnation of communist and national-socialist (Nazi) totalitarian regimes in Ukraine and the prohibition of propaganda of their symbols,” and “On the legal status and honoring of the memory of fighters for Ukraine’s independence during the 20th century,” adopted April 9, 2015, recognized the regime of the USSR and Ukrainian SSR as criminal, while simultaneously glorifying Hitler’s accomplices from the OUN-UPA as participants in the Ukrainian liberation movement, thereby glorifying their forms and methods of fighting their political opponents. Those forms and methods of struggle, and the cases of the millions of innocent civilians — women, children, and old men — who were their victims, were examined at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunals. The whole world shuddered at the truth revealed there. Atrocities committed by members of the OUN-UPA were also exposed during thousands of trials in Ukraine after the end of the Great Patriotic War. These crimes were judged to be so monstrous, that even upon review of the cases after 1991, they were deemed inappropriate for exoneration (rehabilitation) proceedings.

We have already sent you our open letters, demanding that you not sign the aforementioned laws, since by doing so you would split Ukraine and trigger a mechanism for the physical annihilation of millions of Ukrainians at the hands of neo-Nazi gangs, which are armed to the teeth. Like their predecessors, they will cover for all such horror, in the name of the struggle for an independent Ukraine. And they will consider the murder of the writer and journalist Oles Buzyna to have been a “great deed,” just like the October 24, 1949 murder of the outstanding antifascist writer Yaroslav Halan in Lviv.

Petro Alexeyevich, open up the Constitution of Ukraine and the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, and read about your obligations to the citizens of Ukraine, the most important of which is the obligation to guarantee the right to life, safety, and inviolability of every person in Ukraine. The SBU and MVD agencies, which are subordinate to you, are obligated to ensure these guarantees, rather than conducting political repressions.

We demand that you, personally, fulfill your constitutional obligations, or leave the political scene!