In Everything, Blame The “Regionals”

Original: Colonel Cassad
Translated by Alexander Fedotov / Edited by @GBabeuf

The Gauleiter of the occupied part of the LPR—Moskal (the one “investigating” the case of the snipers on Institutskaya Street, but who was photographed with these very snipers) put forth his explanation of what happened. It turns out that for everything in the Donbass the “Regionals” [the Party of the Regions of President Yanukovych ‒ed.] are to blame.

Exactly one year ago, on April 29 in the afternoon, the building of the regional state administration in Lugansk was, for the third and final time, captured by the separatists.

“The capture of the regional state administration building, the subsequent fighting, the occupation of part of Ukraine and everything that is going on in the Donbass were caused by the panic of the Party of Regions, its desire to regain power at all costs and to secure for itself special privileges, including exemption from criminal responsibility and the opportunity to continue its plunder of the Donbass unchecked. It was the Regionals who urged the people on to illegal actions, including the seizure of state institutions. And when they lost control over the process, the people, intoxicated by propaganda, were led by those with unfulfilled ambitions and by various antisocial and lumpen elements who were being instructed by the security services of the Russian Federation.

“What we now have in the Donbass—hundreds of thousands of displaced, people killed and wounded as a result of the military action, housing and infrastructure destroyed—all this is ‘thanks’ to the ‘dearly beloved’ formerly ruling Party of Regions,” commented the head of the Lugansk military and civil administration, Gennady Moskal.

PS. Quite an absurd attempt to put the cart before the horse, as the main beef with the Regionals at that time was not that they led and then abandoned their constituency somewhere, but that they did nothing to combat the coup. Yanukovych is disliked in Crimea and the Donbass not for the fact that he did not lead them somewhere, but because he did not fire on “Euromaidan”, and his party colleagues, after the coup, shamefully merged into the shadows. As a consequence, a power vacuum was created in the South-East which was largely resolved through people’s self-organisation on the ground. The culmination of the Regionals’ actions in this matter came in the Kharkov congress. Dobkin and Kernes, who, until that point, had been making loud pronouncements (it is amusing to recall now that they were then considered to be among the leaders of the resistance), vented the pressure through a steam whistle—out of the entire convention, chock-full of Party of Regions members, only two individuals spoke out openly against the coup—Zhilin from “Oplot” and one war veteran. In Kharkov, the Regionals effectively did everything to ensure that the local resistance would be crushed by the junta. And in general, throughout the South-East, the Party of Regions rather sabotaged acts of defiance against the Junta (here [Cassad means in Crimea –ed.], this manifested itself as “Rubanovshchina”^*), emphasising the argument that one cannot break the law, notwithstanding the fact that it had already been repeatedly broken.

Regarding the DPR and the LPR, Akhmetov’s attempts there to manipulate the protest began to fall apart in the first days of March, when Gubarev was declared the People’s Governor of the Donbass and events quickly began to escape from the junta’s and the Ukrainian oligarchs’ control. Did they try to manipulate the rebellion? Yes, they certainly tried. Did they succeed? As we can see from the results, they did not. The Party of Regions for the Donbass already by the spring of 2014 was a cut-off chunk and its political agenda was lagging far behind the demands of the masses—the ideas of federalisation and the second state language were too late; the people were already demanding either independence or reunification with Russia. It is clearly the case that the Party of Regions could not follow on this path, therefore during the spring and summer of 2014 it evaporated as a political force in the Donbass. Rather than resist the coup, the Party of Regions tried to accommodate itself to the new reality, including through elections. Its end came when a large part of the party split into so-called Opposition Bloc, and the number of its representatives collapsed during the “Poroshenko elections”. But now they are paying a high price for their erstwhile behaviour—they are maltreated, their businesses are taken away, some of them are simply killed or “commit suicide”.

On the whole, the sin of the Regionals is not that they had arranged and ignited anything, but the fact that they shamefully surrendered in the face of the coup and failed to organise the people to fight the fascist junta; indeed they acted as accomplices in maintaining the junta in power in most of the South-East. Of all the speakers of the Regionals of that period, only Konstantinov answered for his words in Crimea.

PPS. And once more about Yanukovych. In Sevastopol, in the Brotherhood Cemetery at the grave of the deceased Yanukovych Jr a sign proving the identity of the deceased has been hung.