It's not about what anyone "thinks" about the protesters, it's about the facts on the ground, which were described in some detail in the article. The protests were started by:
a lonely, courageous Ukrainian rebel, a leading investigative journalist. A dark-skinned journalist who gets racially profiled by the regime. And a Muslim. And an Afghan. This is Mustafa Nayem, the man who started the revolution. Using social media, he called students and other young people to rally on the main square of Kiev in support of a European choice for Ukraine.
This group got beaten up, so more were added
When riot police were sent to beat the students, who came to defend them? More “Afghans,” but “Afghans” of a very different sort: Ukrainian veterans of the Soviet Red Army, men who had been sent to invade Afghanistan during after the Soviet invasion of that country in 1979. These men came to defend “their children,” as they called the students. But they were also defending a protest initiated by a man born in Kabul at the very time they were fighting their way toward it.
Then the real decadent Western influences got in the game, along with millions of others:
As the New Year began the protests broadened. Muslims from southern Ukraine marched in large numbers. Representatives of the large Kiev Jewish community were prominently represented. Some of the most important organizers were Jews. The telephone hotline that people called to seek missing relatives was established by gay activists (people who have experience with hotlines). Some of the hospital guards who tried to stop the police from abducting the wounded were young feminists.
And yes, he specifically says the right played a part as well in the demonstrations, but a specific part that is not well understood:
The Ukrainian far right did play an important part in the revolution. What it did, in going to the barricades, was to liberate itself from the regime of which it had been one of the bulwarks. One of the moral atrocities of the Yanukovych regime was to crush opposition from the center-right, and support opposition from the far right. By imprisoning his major opponents from the legal political parties, most famously Yulia Tymoshenko, Yanukovych was able to make of democracy a game in which he and the far right were the only players.
In the meantime:
The transitional authorities were not from the right, or even from the western part of Ukraine, where nationalism is more widespread. The speaker of the parliament and the acting president is a Baptist preacher from southeastern Ukraine. All of the power ministries, where of course any coup-plotter would plant his own people, were led by professionals and Russian speakers. The acting minister of internal affairs was half Armenian and half Russian. The acting minister of defense was of Roma origin.
But no, this author did not in any way accuse "Yanukovych of having a rich father." He said Yanukovich stole money from the state and apparently enriched his dentist son with it, and built for himself a bunch of houses and what we now know to be a ridiculous estate complete with zoo and galleon and other ridiculous elements:
The country, Ukraine, was in effect an oligarchy, where much of the wealth was in the hands of people who could fit in one elevator. But even this sort of pluralism, the presence of more than one very rich person, was too much for the leader, Viktor Yanukovych. He wanted to be not only the president but the oligarch-in-chief. His son, a dentist, was suddenly one of the wealthiest men in Europe. Tens of billions of dollars simply disappeared from the state budget. Yanukovych built for himself a series of extravagant homes, perhaps the ugliest in architectural history.
What Mark, whom I don't know, didn't get from this is that this is not about good guys and bad guys, or black and white. Every government in this region is prone to corruption (left, right, or center), and every insurgency of this magnitude consists of a wide cast of characters, some of whom we might not like much, others who with whom we would find solidarity. This is not a simple situation: they never are. But certainly Yanukovych was not the sort of guy we want to throw our weight behind when his people rise up: it frankly, was more of interest to Europe than to us.
We're not here to "pick sides." Nor are we here to "think" (read: believe) things about the situation. We need to learn all of the facts, and realize that there are--as in Syria and so many other places these past few years--no really good players. But there are the people, who have apparently had enough. And those people were diverse and they were viciously attacked by the government:
Who was killed? Dozens of people, in all about a hundred, most of them young men. Bohdan Solchanyk was a young lecturer at the Ukrainian Catholic University, a Ukrainian speaker from western Ukraine. He was shot and killed. Yevhen Kotlyov was an environmentalist from Kharkiv, a Russian speaker from eastern Ukraine. He was shot and killed. One of the people killed was a Russian citizen; a number of Russians had come to fight—most of them anarchists who had come to aid their Ukrainian anarchist comrades. At least two of those killed by the regime, and perhaps more, were Jews. One of those “Afghans,” Ukrainian veterans of the Red Army’s war in Afghanistan, was Jewish: Alexander Scherbatyuk. He was shot and killed by a sniper. Another of those killed was a Pole, a member of Ukraine’s Polish minority.
Has it ever before happened that people associated with Ukrainian, Russian, Belarusian, Armenian, Polish, and Jewish culture have died in a revolution that was started by a Muslim? Can we who pride ourselves in our diversity and tolerance think of anything remotely similar in our own histories?
This is not just about right-wing groups, as the Russians would like us to believe. It's a messy geopolitical situation in a country long divided by conflicting allegiances.
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