As he campaigned for Ukraine’s parliamentary polls, to be held today, Nestor Shufrych was pelted with eggs and injured in a scuffle with nationalists.
It is not easy for one-time allies of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine these days.
Shufrych, a former minister and ruling party member of parliament, trod a fine line when he spoke to 300 likely voters at a recent rally in the eastern town of Kramatorsk, which was taken back by Ukrainian government forces from pro-Russia rebels in July.
On the one hand, he made sure to attack the pro-Western “morons” now running the nation in Kiev, but on the other he went out of his way to dump all over his former boss, too.
“We could have snuffed out this crisis on the Maidan,” Shufrych said, referring to the protests in Kiev that toppled Kremlin-backed Yanukovych in February.
“However, he sodded off instead — a hero of our time,” he added.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday acknowledged for the first time that Moscow had helped Yanukovych flee protesters in Kiev.
“I am telling you, frankly, Yanukovych asked to be brought to Russia and we did that,” Putin said.
At the dark heart of Ukrainian politics for over 15 years, Yanukovych’s Regions Party is conspicuously absent from the ballot this time.
Since its one-time leader was removed from power and fled to Russia, the party has not fared well. Yanukovych’s key cronies also vanished abroad and the party has lost members.
Now — with much of its stronghold in the Russian-speaking east controlled by pro-Moscow rebels — what is left of the party has officially decided to boycott today’s vote.
However, in the smoke-and-mirrors world of politics in this ex-Soviet state, a boycott does not quite mean that the party has totally left the scene. Like Shufrych, some of Yanukovych’s former ruling party allies have switched to a new party called Opposition Bloc, set up by former Ukrainian minister of fuel and energy Yuriy Boiko.
If the remnants of the former ruling elite are to make any headway, it would likely come in the Russian-speaking regions that Yanukovych once presided over as his own political fiefdom.
However, hampering that drive is that territory under rebel control will hold no vote. And when they have hit the campaign trail the results have usually been pretty poor. In the Russian-speaking port city of Odessa, Shufrych was grabbed by ultra-nationalists who tried to throw him into a dumpster. The attempt turned into a fistfight that ended up with the candidate in hospital.
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