The Ukrainian Nationalism at the Heart of ‘Euromaidan’
I guess The Nation has been infiltrated by cointelpro too?
http://www.thenation.com/article/178013/ukrainian-nationalism-heart-euromaidan
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Spearheading the clashes with police was Right Sector, a group with ties to far-right parties including the Patriots of Ukraine and Trident, which BBC Ukraine reported is largely comprised of nationalist football fans. In a statement the next day, the group claimed credit for Sunday’s unrest and promised to continue fighting until President Viktor Yanukovich stepped down.
“Two months of unsuccessful tiptoeing about under the leadership of the opposition parties showed many demonstrators they need to follow not those who speak sweetly from the stage, but rather those who offer a real scenario for revolutionary changes in the country. For this reason, the protest masses followed the nationalists,” the statement read.
The surge in violence sparked by Right Sector has revealed how uncritical and undiscerning most of the media has been of the far-right parties and movements that have played a leading role in the “Euromaidan,” the huge protests for closer ties to Europe that flared up in November and have taken over Kiev’s Independence Square (“Maidan Nezalezhnosti”). Protest coverage focused on the call for European integration and the struggle against the Yanukovich regime has largely glossed over the rise in nationalist rhetoric, often chauvinist, that has led to violence not just against police, but also against left-wing activists.
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On New Year’s Day, Svoboda led about 15,000 people in a torchlight march in honor of Stepan Bandera, the controversial leader of the wartime Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which fought the Soviets for an independent Ukrainian state but also ethnically cleansed tens of thousands of Polish civilians. (Right Sector also announced its own march that day in honor of Bandera.) Some historians have accused the Ukrainian Insurgent Army of cooperating in the massacres of thousands of Ukrainian Jews during the Nazi occupation, and Tyahnybok even commended the rebels in 2004 for fighting “Russians, Germans, Jewry and other crap.” The Simon Wiesenthal Center put Svoboda at number five on its 2012 list of top anti-semitic slurs, citing Tyahnybok’s “Moscow-Jewish mafia” comment and Miroshnychenko calling Ukrainian-born actress Mila Kunis a “dirty Jewess.”
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The Ukrainian Insurgent Army colors are red and black, so if this emblem is spotted in the crowds, it's not Reds or Anarchists:
Again, you don't have to be a fan of contemporary Russia, or approve of the Ukrainian crackdown on civil liberties, to fear a tide of right-wing activity in the Ukraine. The article posits that Svoboda could see electoral gains coming out of this clash. Just food for thought...
= new reply since forum marked as read
n the early days of the protests in Kiev, the most radical activists on Independence Square created the Right Sector movement, which took an active part in the clashes with police on 19 January.
This group consists mostly of young men with right-wing views.
They come from different regions of Ukraine, and there are both Ukrainian and Russian-speaking people among them.
>
The backbone of the organisation in Kiev is formed by Russian-speaking football fans sharing nationalist views.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25826238
For those unaware the BBC is not Russian State owned media. 
Just as nationalism is at the heart of a lot of other protests.
Ever observe Venezuelan politics in the last decade? Go Venezuela, and down with ______!
We hear nifty things about Catalonian nationalism.
And all kinds of other nationalisms. We just don't like some. When they're not going to support governments that we like. (It's not about them. It's really about us. We just like to think it's us caring about them.)
In the case of Ukrainian nationalism, it's usually "right."Almost by definitino. That's a loaded term, of course, since Ukrainian "right" and "left" aren't exactly the same as American "right" and "left." The problem is that a lot of Ukrainian nationalists aren't skinheads--they just don't want the Ukraine to be a fully-owned satrapy of Moscow, as it has been for hundreds of years. And Ukrainian nationalism is strongest in areas that were both non-Soviet and non-Russian-Empire for decades, even if for a few years they sided with Hitler because, well, they didn't like how the Ukraine was treated by Stalin and didn't want Ukraine to be essentially Russian.
The nationalists certainly include skinheads and ardent racists (not like that requires being all that "right" by American standards--I've known some fairly racist Russian "communists"
. And, when confrontation's brewing, they're likely to be front and center. But they're not alone in the Maidan, they're just the ones getting the attention. They're the ones that Klitschko--not exactly a darling of the left himself--has to contend with in order to keep things from getting even more violent and making the entire Ukrainian nationalist cause seem fascist, even to other Ukrainians would would support a Ukraine free of foreign domination and intervention. They're the ones that the Russian media, official and merely paid for, love to point to because if the Russians are convinced only skinheads and fascists are opposed to Russia, well then there's no supporting any sort of Ukraine that's not properly under Russia's heel.
