Subtitles by Julia Rakhmetova
On March 19, a gang of nationalist thugs dispersed a gay pride parade in Ukraine’s “most European” city of Lvov, which is also a center of Ukrainian nationalism. Heavily armed riot police evacuated the LGBT-activists and fled the scene themselves.
The day before, on March, 17 another group of neo-Nazi thugs staged a hit and run attack on pensioners assembled in Kiev to commemorate the 1991 referendum on the future of the USSR, in which 70% of Ukrainians had voted for the preservation of the “Big Country”.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin called attack in Lvov an outrage:
“I condemn the radicals who attacked LGBT activists in Lviv. Hatred undermines the unity of the Ukraine. Tolerance and non-discrimination make the Ukraine stronger”.
Mustafa Nayyem, a people’s deputy from the “Block of Petro Poroshenko” and the leader of the pro-Ukrainian Crimean Tatars who organized the energy blockade of the Crimea last winter, said referring to the persecution of gays:
“If there are no values and no mechanisms to restrain such phenomena in the country, it’s inevitable that we see Yanukovich reincarnated.”
As for the most important local politician, US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt:
“Bad news: the «Festival of Equality» in Lviv was unable to take place due to violent protests. Intolerance in Lviv is contrary to the European future for which Ukrainians have given so much.”
In Kiev, an elderly woman could be seen bravely fighting back, but not a single riot policeman was there to even pretend to protect the senior citizens from the kicking youth, nor were any official protests sounded afterwards.