For instance, the over 100-year-old Czech-built family home of Ivan Katchanovski [professor of Political Science at the University of Ottawa] in Lutsk, the center of historic Volhynia in northwestern Ukraine, has been unlawfully appropriated by the Kiev government. The beleaguered professor believes that his research on Ukraine’s far-right and on the Odessa and Maidan Snipers’ massacres was most likely the reason for this action. The aim, he believes, is to prevent and intimidate him from conducting further research on these subjects in Ukraine. His thorough investigation into the Maidan Snipers’ massacre is especially significant. It found that the snipers who shot and killed both protestors and police on the Maidan were most likely far-right activists. This inconvenient truth contradicts the official Kiev line which blames the massacre on former President Yanukovych. On 11 February, a report by the BBC World Service seemed to corroborate Katchanovski’s investigation.
Katchanovski suspects direct involvement from officials in Kiev in the seizure of his property due to the fact that the original decision came from higher-ups. Further, according to Katchanovski, Mykola Sorokopud, the head of the lawyers’ association of the Volyn Oblast, was directly involved in falsifying evidence against him in order to confiscate his property. Sorokopud is affiliated with the far-right group Right Sector (Praviy Sektor) as well as Ihor Palytsia, the current governor of the Odessa Oblast. Another Lutsk native, Playtsia is also connected with Right Sector. He runs the foundation “New Lutsk”, headed by Sorokopud’s wife, that finances members of Right Sector fighting in the Donbas in the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.Reconsidering Russia and the Former Soviet Union
L’affaire Stephen F. Cohen and Academic Dissent and Division on Ukraine Reconsidering Russia and the Former Soviet Union
Pietro Shakarian | MA graduate student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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