* Far-right movement played key role in protests
* Ultra-nationalist Yarosh wanted by Russia
By Pavel Polityuk
KIEV, March 8 (Reuters) – Ukrainian far-right leader Dmytro
Yarosh said on Saturday he would run for president and launched
a scathing attack on the new government, two weeks after he
helped bring it to power through street protests.
Yarosh’s ultra-nationalist views make him a rank outsider in
the May 25 election, but his remarks signalled a growing split
with other leaders of the protest movement that toppled
Moscow-backed Viktor Yanukovich as president on Feb 22.
The outspoken leader of the Right Sector paramilitary
movement, which wears black combat gear and ski masks, announced
his presidential campaign despite being wanted by Russia on
charges of incitement to terrorism.
“I am running for president,” Yarosh told a news conference,
confirming a decision by Right Sector’s leadership body.
He then went on to criticise the leaders in the new
government who were united with him in support of the protests
against Yanukovich, in which Right Sector had increasingly set
the agenda this year.
“For now we see a lack of professionalism, government
appointments are increasingly surprising and there is a gradual
loss of public confidence,” Yarosh said.
Yarosh was given the role of deputy secretary of the
Security and Defence Council, the country’s top security body,
under the government of Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk that
took shape after Yanukovich’s overthrow.
But he complained the government had not released details
about how at least 95 people were killed in clashes with police
or by snipers during the protests, saying it was surprising that
none of “the criminals who killed our heroes” had not convicted.
“The government must wipe out corruption, above all in the
law enforcement agencies and judicial bodies. The government has
to start systemic reforms,” he said. “Only deeds, not words,
will turn Ukraine into a state where people want to live and
where separatists are thrown out of every town.”
DIVIDED OPPOSITION?
Yarosh, 42 and fiercely anti-Russian, plans to turn Right
Sector into a political party. He says the Communist Party and
Yanukovich’s Party of Regions, which was dominant during the
former president’s four-year rule, should be banned.
Moscow has charged him with incitement to terrorism for
allegedly suggesting a Chechen warlord should attack Russia
after Russian forces took control of Ukraine’s Crimea region.
Retired boxing champion boxer Vitaly Kitschko has said he
will also run for president, as could former Foreign Minister
Petro Poroshenko and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
“Yarosh has no chance of winning. The most he could get is
about 3 percent of votes,” said political analyst Volodymyr
Fesenko of the Penta think tank, describing his bid as a
practice run for the next parliamentary election.
Drawing comparisons with the Orange Revolution that kept
Yanukovich out of power after what was widely seen as a fixed
election a decade ago, he said: “The main problem is that there
is again a split among the leaders of the opposition camp, as in
2004-2005.”
(Editing by Timothy Heritage and Tom Heneghan)
