Two people charged with assaulting a journalist at a far-right National Corps party rally will stay in detention, a Kyiv court decided on Aug. 18.
Oleksandr Kuzhelny, a photojournalist with the Bukvy news site, was assaulted on Aug. 14, allegedly by the suspects Anton Holoshchapov and Mykyta Hubsky. They demanded that he delete his photos from the rally, then knocked him to the ground and kicked him.
Kyiv’s Pechersk District Court jailed Hubsky and placed Holoshchapov under house arrest. If convicted, they face up to five years in jail.
Bukvy published a video in which Hubsky and Holoshchapov apologize to Kuzhelny.
“There was information that he was leaking information on nationalist activists,” one of the alleged attackers said in the video. “That he takes photos and leaks information.”
The attackers said that later that tip turned out to be false.
“Our movement condemns any expression of violence towards representatives of the media,” the National Corps said. “We apologize to Oleksandr for this incident because this took place at our event, and we are responsible for it.”
Petro Terentiev, a co-founder of Bukvy, said that the attackers are not members of the paramilitary Azov regiment or the National Corps.
On Aug. 14, the National Corps, the civil branch of the Azov volunteer regiment, staged a demonstration in front of the President’s Office and clashed with the police.
They were protesting the controversial “Steinmeier formula,” named after German President Frank Walter-Steinmeier, which would allow more self-governance in the Kremlin-occupied parts of Donbas, in return for holding local elections there under Ukrainian law. Opponents of this plan see it as a surrender to Russia.
The National Corps also protested what they see as repressions against their members. On Aug. 7, seven members of the National Corps were arrested on racketeering charges in Kharkiv, something that the party views as a fabricated case.
This is not the first assault allegedly linked to the National Corps and the Azov regiment.
Ivan Beletsky, a Russian-born anti-Kremlin nationalist who lives in Ukraine, has accused Azov member Sergei Korotkikh of organizing two attacks against him in December 2020 and February 2021 as revenge for Beletsky’s criticism of Korotkikh. He denied the accusations.
Meanwhile, in 2020 Serhiy Filimonov, a veteran of the Azov Battalion and former head of the National Corps’ Kyiv branch, and Nazariy Kravchenko, a former deputy head of the Corps, said they had been beaten by National Corps leader Andriy Biletsky and other party members.
In June 2021 Filimonov’s Honor group accused the National Corps of assaulting its members again.
Controversial Pro-Russian politician and blogger Anatoly Shariy also accused the National Corps of organizing assaults on members of his party in 2020.
The National Corps denied all these accusations.
