What role did the Ukrainian radical right play in the protests, and what symbols did they use?
Russian state-controlled media represented the EuroMaidan Revolution as a coup by Ukrainian neo-Nazis bent on eradicating Russian culture in Ukraine. In reality, the broad mass protest movement that brought down Yanukovych was not ideological, and its vague identification with “Europe” does not square with the alleged neo-Nazi orientation.
At the same time, the Ukrainian radical right did play a notable role in the revolution, which is worth examining.Prior to the Yanukovych presidency, radical Ukrainian nationalists languished on the margins of politics. Unlike in most of Europe, in Ukraine radical right parties were not represented in the parliament and often functioned as mere front groups intended to take away votes or credibility from the more mainstream opposition parties. As disillusionment with the Orange governments set in, however, the radical right Freedom party made an electoral breakthrough in Galicia. During the 2009 and 2010 municipal elections there, it received roughly a third of the seats. Freedom was founded in the early 1990s as the Social-National Party of Ukraine and used the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel symbol. In the early 2000s it began moderating its extremist image, changing the name to Freedom and discarding the Wolfsangel, but some of its anti-Semitic and anti-Russian rhetoric remained.
The parliamentary elections of 2012 provided Freedom with an opening into national politics. Amid growing dissatisfaction with the kleptocratic Yanukovych regime, some voters began considering alternatives other than Tymoshenko. That year Freedom harnessed a significant share of the protest vote in the western regions by promising to root out corruption, while styling themselves as the successors to such revered there nationalist figures as Stepan Bandera and his Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Freedom's total added up to 10.4 percent of the national vote, but it performed very poorly in east-central Ukraine, except for Kyiv.
Another populist party managed to burst onto the national political stage with 14 percent of the total vote, but it was not a rightwing one. The aptly named UDAR (Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform)—an acronym meaning “punch” that riffed on party leader Vitalii Klitschko's background as a heavyweight boxing champion—established itself as a credible opposition force in eastcentral Ukraine. This party grew into a major national force during the revolution, whereas Freedom lost much of its appeal with the fall of the Yanukovych regime. In 2014 it failed to clear the 5-percent threshold to receive the party allotment of parliamentary seats, although six of its members were elected in single-mandate districts in western Ukraine.However, Freedom did play an important role during the revolution itself. Unlike the centrist opposition parties, it could supply militarized groups of radical youth for clashes with riot police. So, too, could the new entrant on the political scene, Right Sector. The latter was created in the spring of 2013 from a merger of several small right-wing nationalist groups, and it soon outdid Freedom in radicalism. Unlike the latter, Right Sector openly used as its official flag the OUN's red and black standard. During the phase of nonviolent resistance on the Maidan, the radical right was less visible. In fact, field research by Ukrainian sociologists showed that only a small minority of protesters belonged to any political party at all: 3.9 percent in December 2013.8 All that changed during the violent stage of the protests in January and February 2014. When the Yanukovych regime attempted a forceful crackdown on the Maidan, the radical right led the way in organizing an equally violent resistance. Right Sector and Freedom activists still constituted a small minority in the revolutionary crowd, but they were the best organized and the most visible.
It was at this critical juncture that some symbols and slogans of the radical right were introduced into the protest culture.
The nationalist greeting from the 1940s, “Slava Ukraini!" (Glory to Ukraine!), and its response, “Heroiam slava!" (Glory to the heroes!), acquired new meaning on the Maidan. When used by protesters, such slogans referred to a hoped-for democratic and pro-Western Ukraine and regarded as heroes those who had fallen in service to their cause. Tellingly, another nationalist slogan from the 1940s, “Slava natsii, smert voroham!" (Glory to the Nation, Death to Enemies), did not catch on. Thanks to Right Sector, but also Freedom, which used it unofficially, the red and black flag of the OUN became more acceptable to patriotic citizens outside western Ukraine. Images of Stepan Bandera, too, became widespread, although not everyone on the Maidan was comfortable with them, leading to the quiet replacement of a large, prominently displayed Bandera portrait with one of Taras Shevchenko, a nineteenth-century national bard and a much less divisive symbol of Ukrainian identity. Still, it can be argued that in the course of the EuroMaidan Revolution, the image of Bandera acquired new meaning as a symbol of resistance to the corrupt, Russian- sponsored regime, quite apart from the historical Bandera's role as a purveyor of exclusivist, ethno-nationalism.Just as Freedom lost much of its popular support with the disappearance of its arch-nemesis Yanukovych, so did Right Sector. In the parliamentary elections of 2014, only 1.8 percent of voters nationwide supported Right Sector. During the presidential elections that took place the same year, its leader, Dmytro Yarosh, obtained just 0.7 percent of the vote, although Russian state television reported at one point on election night that he was allegedly ahead of all the other candidates.9
While the departure of Yanukovych reduced the radical right to a relatively small political niche, it gained disproportionate media exposure again, with the start of the Donbas war in the spring of 2014, largely because it served Russian interests to do so. However, radical right activists did help to form several volunteer battalions that took part in fighting alongside the Ukrainian army, and one of them, Azov Battalion, continues to use the Wolfsangel as its official emblem. Another battalion, which branched out from Azov, took the name “OUN," although the Ukrainian authorities refused to register it.