Ukraine police start clearing central streets, raid opposition headquarters

Police officers spent the early morning of December 10 successfully removing several blockades from central Kyiv, including near the Internal Affairs Ministry, the Cabinet of Ministry and the Presidential Administration, reported the Hromadske television network. About a dozen protestors were reportedly injured. In its operations, the government has employed private, plainclothes thugs to provoke police officers, giving them the pretext to push out the demonstrators, who either have shown minimum resistance or fled altogether. The provocations are sometimes done with sticks and tear gas.

Demonstrators retained control of the main occupied sites, which are the Kyiv City Administration and Independence Square (Maidan). Yet law enforcement authorities began on December 9 laying the groundwork for removing these demonstrators as well, cutting electricity to the Kyiv City Council and blocking access to the maidan for delivery of supplies, partly by closing the city’s two central metro stations. Demonstrators have begun to exchange gas masks and destroy lists of participants.

Police forces raided the evening of Dec. 9 the Kyiv headquarters of Fatherland, the leading opposition party founded by imprisoned former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. They confiscated servers, among other items. The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has begun to question opposition leaders in its investigation of attempts to seize state power. Among the arrested civic activists are Andriy Dzindza, a journalist who launched the Dorozhniy Kontrol (Road Monitoring) movement. Ukraine’s MPs are immune from arrest and criminal prosecution.

Zenon Zawada: The government cleared the least guarded barricades, where only not more than a hundred or so demonstrators were stationed. Injuries were minimal because of their small size. We understand the police is practicing its techniques on smaller groups of people to be better prepared for invasion at the better barricaded and much more crowded Maidan.

The decision to invade the offices of the lead opposition party and confiscate its servers – on the eve of the visit of EU Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Minister Catherine Ashton – confirms the Yanukovych administration’s disregard for Western values and embrace of Putinist authoritarianism, which we expect will intensify with the launch of new political repressions. Authorities have already arrested a few dozen protestors, which we expect will increase in the coming weeks.

We expect the government will make attempts to retake control of all central territories no later than the Dec. 17 meeting of the Russian-Ukrainian Interstate Commission. In all likelihood, these attempts will be successful (occurring in the early morning) but will involve far more injuries than seen this morning. Once this occurs, the political-economic situation in Ukraine will stabilize to some extent, but we expect large protests to become a common occurrence in Kyiv leading into the highly contested and tumultuous March 2015 presidential elections.