A Ukrainian activist who took part in the EuroMaidan Revolution in Kyiv in 2014 has now been charged with attempted murder by Russian authorities in occupied Crimea – and accused of membership in an organization that does not exist.
The Crimean branch of Russia’s Investigative
Committee said in a statement published on Jan. 20 that a 22-year-old Ukrainian
had attempted to kill two Berkut officers by throwing Molotov cocktails at them
on Jan. 20, 2014. Investigators also accuse the suspect of possessing a large
amount of narcotics in in Russia’s Kabardino-Balkarian republic in May 2015.
Russian prosecutors in Crimea identified the suspect
as Andrei Kolomiets in a separate statement.
Kolomiets could face life in prison on the charges. He
is currently in custody and will stand trial in Simferopol, though a date for
the trial has not yet been announced.
The suspect, “being informed about mass riots
happening in Kyiv aimed at the illegal overthrow of the constitutional system
of Ukraine and the acting executive authorities, and being a member of an
extremist organization – the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), and sharing its
extremist ideology,” intended to kill members of Berkut by throwing Molotov
cocktails at them, the statement from investigators said.
The UPA was a nationalist paramilitary
organization active during World War II. Although it vowed to fight Nazis, the
group itself was accused of massacring Poles and Ukrainian Jews.
The organization no longer exists. Halya
Coynash of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group said the reference to UPA
was “baffling,” though it may be intended to scare people in Russia into
believing Nazis are rampant.
Jim Kovpak,
a Moscow-based journalist who has worked with the StopFake propaganda
monitoring website, agreed that the reference to UPA was strange.
“Basically
what I’d say is that unless this guy is elderly, they must be referring to a
modern group using that name. Supposedly such a group claimed credit for the
bombing of a Roshen chocolate store in Kharkiv last year, but I haven’t seen
any confirmation of this. And being the Investigative Committee, it’s hard to
say if such a group actually exists,” he told the Kyiv Post.
“I’ve never
heard of a ‘UPA’ group associated with Maidan,” he said.
Oleg
Muzhchyl, a former Right Sector member killed by Ukrainian authorities during
his arrest in earlier December, had spoken of bringing UPA back in online
manifestos and identified himself as a member of the group, though he and his
group were largely disregarded as crackpot extremists.
Muzhchyl
was accused of working on behalf of Russian intelligence and plotting terrorist
attacks in Ukraine, and Ukraine’s Security Service has repeatedly stressed that
UPA does not exist and no such group is registered in the country.
Staff
writer Allison Quinn can be reached at [email protected]
