‘Ukraine opposition’s right-wing & antisemitic agenda ignored by Western media’

‘Ukraine opposition’s right-wing and antisemitic agenda ignored by Western media’ (RT).

RT: We just heard Sashko Bilyi saying, “as long as I live I will fight against Jews, communists, Russian scum.” He is an activist from Right Sector – an organization that will be incorporated with the police, according to one of the opposition leaders. As a former police officer, do you think that is someone you’d want joining the ranks of law enforcement?

Charles Shoebridge: I think your question is rhetorical, because it’s really clear that these kind of people are advocating the street violence. Even yesterday, deep inside one BBC broadcast, was an activist being interviewed who said that they didn’t want Yanukovich to be tried or anything like this. They just wanted him killed. This seemed to come as some shock to the media. It’s notable to point out that for weeks, the media in the West – certainly in the UK and US – has backed unreservedly these protests that have been taking place.

It’s really only in the last 24 hours or so that as the situation in Ukraine has predictably started to unravel, that the media here – and even government figures – have started to question the makeup of at least some of these protesters, including the fact that – as we’ve seen on our own television screens, unavoidably, over the last 48 hours and longer – many of them are heavily armed. It’s also clear that, as we can see from the rapid scale of what might be called defections amongst police, the neutrality of the armed services in this – or their reluctance to intervene in what is, after all, a public order/security situation in Ukraine – can be seen almost as a mutiny.

It may well be that there has been activism, perhaps from the far right, because it’s notable that Svoboda, the far-right party, is quite well represented on the streets. It also was a party to disagreements on February 21 to chart a political way forward for Ukraine. So at least nominally, Svoboda had signed up to this agreement. And yet it’s also clear that there may have been some form of negotiations – some form of activism – going on behind the scenes, with links of various political groups to the armed forces, and perhaps even within the police itself. Certainly in the west of Ukraine that wouldn’t be a surprise. Read the full story here.