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Earlier this week, Ukraine witnessed the latest murderous assault on the country’s Roma community. As the Kyiv Post reported, the attack was against a thirty year old Roma woman in the mountainous Zakarpattia region, close to the Hungarian border. The young woman was stabbed in the neck by an unknown assailant near the railway station in the town of Berehove. She then stumbled into the home of a local resident before succumbing to her wounds. The gruesome murder follows that of another such attack on June 23rd, when a 24-year-old Roma man was murdered and four others were injured by a marauding gang in Western Ukraine. As the Kyiv Post reported “since the murders are just a week apart, the commitment of the authorities to tackle violence against Roma people has once more been called into question.”
Since the Ukrainian state had an almost non-existent army at the beginning of the conflict with Russia in 2014, it came to rely on volunteer battalions to keep the state from collapsing under the onslaught of Russian-led and equipped separatist forces. Some, but certainly not all, of those volunteer battalions and groupings contained ideologically motivated and militant right wing forces. Though Ukraine had brought most of the volunteer battalions into structures administered by the interior ministry by the end of 2016, their patriotic cachet allowed for a degree of leniency toward non-state militias that would not be tolerated in other countries or under peaceful circumstances. Continue reading "As Another Roma is Murdered in Ukraine, Kyiv's Control Over Far-Right Paramilitary Groups is Called Into Question" at... |