Ruslan Kotsaba talks to journalists in June 2015. Image still via YouTube.Last Thursday, Ruslan Kotsaba addressed journalists in a west Ukrainian courthouse, tears running down his face. “This is a sign that that madhouse, that chaos that’s happening the east, will soon come to an end.”
Little over a month after the first wave of conscription began in Ukraine in early 2015, the activist blogger was arrested in his hometown of Ivano-Frankivsk. Kotsaba had addressed Ukraine’s president in an “anti-mobilisation” YouTube video a few weeks earlier. Here, he railed against the prospect of traveling into “the hell in the east” to kill his fellow countrymen while the fat cats in parliament and central command grew ever fatter.
