The violence first broke out at a café and then continued at a sports complex in Mukacheve at around 2 p.m. on Saturday, and involved around 20 Right Sector members and people close to lawmaker Mykhailo Lanyo who is from the area.
Right Sector claimed Lanyo was directly involved in the incident and that he summoned an armed private security detail to the scene who the nationalist paramilitary group accused of shooting first. But the parliamentarian said during an interview with Ukrainian television’s Hromadske.TV on July 12 that the shootout “was a provocation.” He said the initial reason for the meeting of the two parties was a request by Right Sector for him to provide places for the group’s wounded fighters at a sanatorium he owns.
An official account of events has yet to be released after more than 30 hours by Ukraine’s SBU security service, the prosecutor general’s office, or by the interior ministry.
SBU chief Vasyl Hrytsak told Ukrainian online news site Censor.net that he is in constant contact with the Right Sector and that the situation needs to be resolved by taking into account the position of each party.
“I guarantee a proper investigation if all of the Right Sector fighters that participated in the Mukacheve incident lay down their weapons and start cooperating with the authorities,” Hrytsak said.
He said the SBU only wants to question specific individuals that were directly involved in the incident, rather than Right Sector as an organization.
“No one is planning to ‘clear out’ patriots [of Ukraine],” Hrytsak said.
Meanwhile, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe reported the arrival of security service units with 10 armored vans and two minibuses at a police checkpoint north of Mukacheve. In addition, 11 National Guard armored personnel carriers and two trucks loaded with soldiers were spotted near Stryi (120 kilometers north-east of Mukachevo) moving toward Mukacheve.
As a response, Right Sector has set up checkpoints on the route between Kyiv and Mukacheve, the paramilitary unit’s spokesman Oleksiy Byk said on July 12 during a press conference. One of the checkpoints is located on the Zhytomyr highway near Ukraine’s capital. Byk said Right Sector fighters are ready to use force to stop additional government forces travelling to Mukacheve.
But Right Sector leader and legislator Dmytro Yarosh called on all sides to avoid bloodshed.
“We’re working together with the Anti-Terrorist Center [of Ukraine] in order to stabilize the situation,” Yarosh said on his Facebook page.
Yarosh called reports that the Right Sector was removing all of its battalions from the war zone in the east as “untrue.”
Lawmaker and former journalist Mustafa Nayyem, who went to Mukacheve after the incident to assess the situation, wrote on his Facebook page on July 12 that a struggle for control of the lucrative cigarette smuggling business was most likely the reason for the Mukacheve conflict.
Cigarettes are smuggled to countries such as Germany and Italy, with each truckload bringing in a profit of €470,000, Nayyem said. Up to five trucks a week are involved in the smuggling business, he said.
Lanyo also told Hromadske.TV there was a problem with cigarette smuggling in Zakarpatya Oblast, but he denied he was involved in it, and instead pointed the finger at the customs and the security service.
The entire leadership of the Zakarpattya customs service was dismissed, the State Fiscal Service, to which the customs service is subordinate, announced on July 13.
Prosecutors, who are investigating the shooting incident in Mukacheve, are questioning Lanyo, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said on July 13. He said the next person on the list for questioning is lawmaker Viktor Baloha, an influential figure in Zakarpatya Oblast.
Earlier on July 13, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk ordered that all of Zakarpatya Oblast’s customs officers on the border, and their management, be fired and replaced with officers from other regions.
Kyiv Post staff writer Ilya Timtchenko can be reached at timtchenko@kyivpost.com.
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