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July 28, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 4
Krutko called the Donbas and Aidar members to Berezhinka after yet another raiding attempt on Trybinienko’s business that lead to 30 titushki – alleged raiders – being arrested. He also managed to attract two deputies from parliament to
the scene, including Semen Semchenko, the founder of the Donbas battalion and current deputy from the Samopomich party. “Raiding is a systemic problem,” Semchenko tells bne IntelliNews.
Raiding on the Rise
Krutko believes that veterans are the farmers’ “only hope” of solving it.
He claims attacks against farmers have been rising sharply since the 2014 overthrow of ex-president Viktor Yanukovych. Reliable data about raiding is difficult to find, but other people have expressed similar concerns. Latifundist, a media group focused on the agrarian sector in Ukraine, wrote on its website that raiders have been more active in the last years.
To try and bring the issue into the spotlight, they set up a website called “Hunting the raiders”, which lists on a map cases of raiding that readers have warned them about. The project claims that more than 7,000 raids happened last year in the country, and described it in an article as an “unprecedented wave of attacks”.
A sense of helplessness among farmers has contributed to make groups of former soldiers look like the only viable solution. “The level of trust in law enforcement and the authorities in general
is very, very low,” says Andrey, a local farmer who prefers not to give his full name.
Another issue, according to Ukraine’s Business Ombdusman Algirdas Semeta, is that even when farmers manage to win their property back, the local police often refuse to investigate who was behind the raiding attempt. “They will say ‘look, what do you want, you restored your property, you should be happy, you should not care about who did it’ and that’s a problem of course,” Semeta tells bne IntelliNews.
A new law against raiding was voted in October, setting stronger punishments (including jail terms) for raiders, but its effects still remain to be felt. Meanwhile, reform of the judiciary, especially the introduction of anti-corruption courts, is facing resistance. As bribing judges is one of the key ways raiders can seize properties, the slow progress in this area is especially problematic.
In Berezhinka, the mix of babushki, locals leasing parts of the land and teenagers hanging around Trybinienko’s farm are all overwhelmingly siding with the “ATOshniki”, the name given to the veterans of the conflict in the East. Police and local authorities are unwilling to act at best, and complicit with the raiders at worst, they say.
No Bad Buzz
But members of the “Donbas” group say that their presence is not just about protecting farmers. “Ukraine is occupied by bandits and oligarchs who are stealing the country,” says Anatoli Vinogradsky, a former commander of the Donbas battalion and the current coordinator of a blockade aimed at preventing the exchange of goods between Ukraine and separatist-controlled Donbas. His presence here, he says, is right in line with the blockade in the Donbas region: in both cases, the goal is to end the “economic occupation of Ukraine”.
Talking to bne IntelliNews, Vinogradsky exhibits a bloody nose, swollen forehead, and large scratches on his arms. He received them just the day before, when the National Guard came to disperse his men. The brawl that followed, which led to the arrest of about 20 members from the Donbas and Aidar battalions, was an overall PR win for the nationalist groups, as locals scrambled to protect them and videos of their clash spread massively through the Ukrainian internet.
In the last two years, these groups have evolved from military units to political movements dedicated to ridding the country of ‘Russian influence’: members from the “National Corpus,” an offshoot of the ultranationalist “Azov battalion” walled off the headquarters of Russian bank “Sberbank” earlier this year, while the “Donbas” group managed to pressure the authorities into