“They are trying to change a campaign of talking with voters to a campaign of street brawls. This is not even a dirty political strategy. This is an attempt to threaten the elections themselves, to sabotage them. And this is definitely not a Ukrainian scenario […] We know what’s at stake at these elections. And our eternal enemy knows it too.”
These angry comments made by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko at a recent rally in Kyiv refer to the far-right National Corps party. In past weeks, National Corps activists have been following the president across the country, disrupting his public events with corruption accusations.
Yesterday’s darlings of Ukraine’s mainstream patriotic public, National Corps have been suddenly reclassified by Poroshenko’s media machine from “heroic defenders of Mariupol” who reclaimed the southeastern city from separatist forces in May 2014, to “dangerous paramilitaries with ties to Russia”. This shift tells us a lot about the unusual conjuncture in which the country has found itself on the eve of major elections.
