Ukraine’s presidential offices attacked, arson attempted

On the evening of March 20, protesters tried to set
fire to the building of the Ofiice of the President of Ukraine. They also broke
windows and extensively sprayed graffiti on the walls. The protesters railed against the imprisonment of former
Odesa Right Sector leader Serhiy Sternenko on kidnapping and robbery charges.

Deputy Interior Minister Anton Gerashchenko told Radio
Svoboda that the police only arrested those committing acts of hooliganism.
Most of the protesters did not break the public order, he said in a release
posted on the ministry’s website. The presidential office claims that repairs
will cost about 2 million hryvnya, online media pravda.com.ua reports.
Presidential spokesmen stated that President Zelensky saw the move as a
provocation and did not see any sense in disrupting the protests.

James Hydzik: The police
handled the protests and the acts of vandalism in an appropriate way. The light-handed
response would not have been guaranteed in 2010, or in 2003, though. Would a
reformed judiciary have handled the Sternenko case differently, or would
Sternenko’s imprisonment be accepted differently by his supporters? That is
harder to determine.

However, the heavy-handed government action against
people protesting in autumn 2013 brought out a mass response called, by many,
The Revolution of Dignity. It is noteworthy that, as far as Saturday night’s event
in Kyiv is concerned, it is the government that acted from a position of
dignity.