The extreme right, the guys who took over the Maidan protests back in January and forced the abdication of the democratically elected Yanukovich, now have their martyr.
Sashko Bily, aka Oleksandr Muzychko, died in a police shootout Monday night. Bily was one of the top dogs on the far-right scene in Ukraine, a scene that far too many commentators in the West are pretending does not exist. The police who shot him down were working for the new pro-western non-elected government of Washington favorite "Yats" Yatsenyuk.
As much as the Western press might want to write these guys out of recent history, they are the ones who are making history in Ukraine, and going forward this will not be a history that the fomentors of the latest Ukraine "revolution" had in mind.
Now that the broad outlines of the IMF "rescue package" have been made public, it's only a matter of time before the extreme right gets serious traction among the Ukrainian masses. Washington's bumboy Yatsenyuk has already acknowledged that he intends to fully comply with IMF dictates, going so far as to admit he will be the most hated politician in Ukraine.
What the IMF life-line means is a 50-75% percent increase in gas bills for already impoverished Ukrainians. On top of that there will be massive job losses in the public sector and a reduction in state benefits such as pensions.
That will be fertile soil indeed for the ultra-nationalists.
If Yats isn't dead in six months, he'll have a cushy teaching post at an American university. The embittered people of the Ukraine will have realized that the IMF life-line was designed to pay their Gazprom account and cover the losses of the big banks.
They'll be flocking to the far right in droves. Democracy will be up for grabs, and the people most likely to grab it will be the hard right fanatics currently being whitewashed by dimbulbs like Stephen Harper and John Baird.
Let's hope it doesn't get ugly.
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