“In virtually all these [15+ sniper murder] cases, the perpetrators have been protected from serious legal prosecution. One of the murderers of Handziuk received a barely three-year prison sentence. A critical role in shielding the neo-Nazis is played by Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs’ Arsen Avakov, who controls the country’s police force and possesses well-known ties to Ukraine’s most notorious fascist militia, the Azov Battalion.…He [Avakov] was recently praised by former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch while testifying before the House of Representatives regarding the Trump impeachment investigation.”…In what has become Obama’s third term, Trump allowed Obama appointee Yovanovitch to stay on the job for two and a half years.
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12/6/19, “Ukraine: Three-year-old boy killed in attempted political assassination by the far right,” wsws, Jason Melanovski
“A botched assassination attempt against Ukrainian politician and businessman Vyacheslav Sobolev has resulted in the death of his three-year-old son, Alexander.
[Image] Three-year-old Oleksandr Sobolev, son of politician Vyacheslav Sobolev, shot to death in Kyiv on December 1, 2019 [Source: Facebook, Inna Soboleva] While Sobolev and his wife were leaving his high-end restaurant “Mario” in Kiev this past Sunday, right-wing thugs opened fire on Sobolev’s Range Rover, missing him but hitting his son who was seated in the back of the vehicle. The three-year-old died on the way to the hospital.
Police later apprehended two men who had fled the scene in a black Lexus sedan, Oleksiy Semenov, 19, and Andrei Lavrega, 20. Both are veterans of the ]Ukraine led] war in Donbass in eastern Ukraine where they served as members of the fascist Right Sector’s paramilitary formation until June of this year.
The Right Sector was instrumental in the US- and EU-backed, fascist-led coup in February 2014 that toppled the Yanukovitch government and replaced it with a pro-Western and anti-Russian regime. Since then, the Right Sector has been among the far-right forces that have been heavily involved in the war against Russian-backed separatists in East Ukraine.
As is usual when members of neo-Nazi groups carry out political attacks, the Right Sector and their former battalion commander fraudulently attempted to distance themselves from Lavrega and Semenov, claiming they had lost contact with them since they left Ukraine’s armed forces in June. These claims are not credible.
Lavrega, who has been identified as the principal shooter in the killing, has been a member of the Right Sector for at least half a decade. He had participated in the Maidan movement of 2014 as a member of the Right Sector and perfected his shooting skills as a sniper killing separatist soldiers in eastern Ukraine. According to his Right Sector battalion commander, Andrei Herhert, Lavrega—also known as “Quiet”—was “one of the best snipers in the war” and “very ideological.”
As a thanks for his service to the right-wing Kiev government, Lavrega received a military decoration from former President Petro Poroshenko for “courage” just last year, in October of 2018.
It is yet unclear exactly why Sobolev—who currently serves as a deputy in Kiev’s Regional Council as a member of Poroshenko’s political party—was targeted for assassination by these fascist thugs, but Sobolev’s business ties to separatist-controlled regions of eastern Ukraine may have run afoul of right-wing forces within the Ukrainian state.
In 1997, Sobolev founded a popular supermarket called “Obzhora” in Donetsk, now the capital of the separatist-controlled Donetsk People’s Republic, and subsequently became wealthy. From 2010 to 2011, Sobolev served as an executive of Ukraine’s state energy company Naftogaz, which is rife with corruption and currently embroiled in the Trump impeachment scandal in Washington.
When the war broke out between the US-installed Kiev government and regions of eastern Ukraine in 2014, several of Sobolev’s supermarket stores found themselves operating under separatist control. In 2016, Ukrainian prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into ties between Sobolev’s supermarket chain and separatist forces. Sobolev maintained that he had sold his share in 2007 and no longer owned stake in the company.
Other reports have suggested that the assassination attempt on Sobolev may have come from rival Donetsk businessman and a former judge of the Ukrainian Economic Supreme Court Arthur Emelyanov. Following the death of his son, Sobolev called for both Emelyanov and another oligarch and associate of former President Poroshenko, Alexander Granovsky, to take lie detector tests along with six other individuals.
Whoever is ultimately responsible for ordering this political assassination and the murder of the three-year-old boy, it is clear that the same far-right forces that were instrumental in the coup in February 2014 and the civil war are now being employed to carry out political assassinations by the Ukrainian oligarchy.
Since the 2014 coup, the number of targeted political assassinations by right-wing neo-Nazi groups like C14 and the Right Sector has skyrocketed. At least 15 people have been murdered in such hit jobs by the far right since 2014. Among them was the well-known Belarusian journalist Pavel Sheremet and the politician Kateryna Handziuk, who was killed in a horrific acid attack by right-wing thugs last year.
In virtually all these cases, the perpetrators have been protected from serious legal prosecution. One of the murderers of Handziuk received a barely three-year prison sentence. A critical role in shielding the neo-Nazis is played by Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs’ Arsen Avakov, who controls the country’s police force and possesses well-known ties to Ukraine’s most notorious fascist militia, the Azov Battalion.
Avakov is one of the few members of the previous Poroshenko government that have remained in the current Cabinet of Ministers under President Volodmyr Zelensky. He was recently praised by former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch while testifying before the House of Representatives regarding the Trump impeachment investigation (see also: “The impeachment crisis and American imperialism”).
President Zelensky, who was elected in April this year on the basis of promises that he would bring an end to the widely despised civil war in eastern Ukraine that has claimed the lives of over 13,000 people, has maintained a conspicuous silence on this latest political assassination attempt by the far right. Instead, the day after the murder, he posted a message on Facebook to honor two Ukrainian soldiers who were killed while fighting in eastern Ukraine this past weekend.”
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Additional source:
12/1/19, “Two Suspects Detained In Killing Of Ukrainian Lawmaker’s 3-Year-Old Son,” rferl.org
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Two among comments
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“Charlotte Ruse
The CIA always manages to dig up the most despicable characters to overthrow governments–-Christian fascists in Latin American, Nazis in Eastern Europe, and ISIS in the Middle East and Africa.”
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“Felix Kreisel
Nationalists train kids as young as ten and twelve to use rifles and to think of targets, not people. Various businessmen subsidize these gangs of nationalists to go to the front for weeks or months to train up. Then the thugs come back to the city and need to earn a living. Their profession is “killer”….The question is really not: Who is the dastardly paymaster? Sure, it would be good to find out, which oligarch ordered this hit. The real question is: What kind of a system is it that bases itself on stirring up nationalism and training young men to be killers?“
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Added: 1/1/2017, War lobbyist and fake US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch is near front lines in eastern Ukraine to cheer on Ukraine military against Russia.…Our fake Ambassador joined US Senators Amy Klobuchar, John McCain, and Lindsey Graham.
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1/1/2017, Image: US officials including US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch tell Ukraine military they’ll go back to Washington and get US taxpayers to give Ukraine soldiers what they need to to fight Putin…."US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, US Senators Amy Klobuchar and John McCain, Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko, and US Senator Lindsey Graham (left to right at center) pose for a photograph with Ukrainian servicemen. Photograph: Mikhail Palinchak/TassUS,” via UK Guardian, “Speaking during tour of Baltic states, Ukraine, and Georgia, McCain and fellow senators say US will support the countries despite Trump’s comments [for which he was elected by voters]”
“In the presence of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, Graham told the soldiers: “Your fight is our fight…2017 will be the year of offense. All of us will go back to Washington and we will push the case against Russia.” McCain promised the assembled troops, “we will do everything we can to provide you with what you need to win.” [Meaning US taxpayers will give you money and weapons to kill Russians.]
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Comment: It’s not Marie’s fault that she’s in the wrong job and that she should be a lobbyist. The entire US political class is happy to load up the “interagency” with people who function as war industry lobbyists while on the payroll of US taxpayers. The US is just as corrupt as Ukraine. Solution? There’s only one. The US must be broken into parts.
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