ATTACKS DISRUPT LOCAL PRO-UKRAINIAN RALLY

As reported in 'The St.Petersburg Times' : ATTACKS DISRUPT LOCAL PRO-UKRAINIAN RALLY By Sergey Chernov The St. Petersburg Times Published: August 27, 2014 (Issue # 1826) Pro-Ukraine protesters celebrated the country’s 23rd anniversary of its independence from the U.S.S.R. Sunday afternoon.

A reporter received a concussion as dozens of pro-Kremlin protesters wearing the black and orange St. George ribbon were seen assaulting demonstrators at a rally in support of Ukraine on Ukraine’s independence day in central St. Petersburg on Sunday. Arseny Vesnin, a reporter with the St. Petersburg branch of the liberal radio station Ekho Moskvy, was briefly hospitalized after he was kicked by a man at the protest — organized by the Democratic St. Petersburg movement — on the corner Malaya Sadovaya Ulitsa and Nevsky Prospekt, St. Petersburg’s main throughway. Speaking to The St. Petersburg Times this week, Vesnin said that a man — who earlier verbally assaulted him and other people — kicked his tablet computer, which bounced and hit him in the face. According to Vesnin, he was hit as he was preparing to write a post on Twitter. Later, Vesnin was taken to a hospital, where he was diagnosed with a “closed head injury.” The incident was also caught on a video, showing the man kicking Vesnin, knocking his computer, microphone and spectacles on the ground, and then immediately denying the attack as the protesters appealed to the police. “Stop lying,” the attacker said to Vesnin in the video. “It’s their working tactic,” he then said to the police. The attacker, who was detained, turned out to be Sergei Smirnov, a 49-year-old activist with the National Liberation Movement (NOD), a pro-Putin movement led by the State Duma’s United Russia deputy Yevgeny Fyodorov. In his explanatory notes to the police published on the Ekho Moskvy website, Smirnov wrote that Vesnin provoked him and that he “brushed against” the tablet by accident while trying to protect himself from the reporter, who was allegedly sticking the microphone with the Ekho Moskvy logo in his face. Smirnov was charged with “disorderly conduct,” a minor offense punishable with a fine of up to 1,000 rubles ($28) or a prison sentence for up to 15 days. According to Vesnin, the police appeared reluctant to detain anti-Ukrainian counter-protesters and reacted only to actual beatings. “I think they were not very eager even to detain Smirnov, and did it only after I and everybody else started shouting that a journalist got kicked in the face,” he said. During the protest, aggressive counter-demonstrators hurled insults at pro-Ukrainian protesters, calling them “fascists,” “traitors,” and the “fifth column,” pushing them as well as seizing and tearing up placards. At least one placard was burnt on the site. “The people with St. George’s ribbons insulted people, shouted ‘Maidan won’t pass’ and ‘Russia! Russia!’ effectively staging a public rally, but nobody wanted to detain them,” Vesnin said. “That’s why I went to the police: not because I am mad that someone hit me in the face, it’s something that I could survive without making a fuss. But the point is that I was attacked as a journalist, and a journalist with Ekho Moskvy. If you don’t like the media outlet where a journalist works, does it really mean that you should hit him in the face? It’s inadmissible. “And the main thing is that I hope to draw attention to the fact that these people with St. George ribbons, these activists, have become totally brazen; they fight in full daylight on the city’s main street and attack their ideological opponents, who stand peacefully, and they’re totally confident of their impunity as the [anti-Ukrainian] hysteria gets stronger in the media. What happened [on Sunday] is the next stage of the brutalization, the next stage of the split in the society.” The St. George ribbon was introduced in 2005 as an alleged public initiative to commemorate the feats of the Russians in World War II, but it has also been used as a sign of support for pro-Russian insurgents fighting in eastern Ukraine. The ribbon, consisting of a black and orange pattern, is also used in the logo and as the flag of the NOD movement that most of the counter-demonstrators were reported to belong to. “The NOD is the Kremlin’s organization, it’s headed by deputy Fyodorov,” Vesnin said. “I think they receive certain instructions. It’s perfectly clear why they came to Malaya Sadovaya. It’s not because they wanted to stage their own rally, but they obviously came to break up the rally in support of Ukrainian unity.” Organizer Natalya Tsymbalova, an activist with the Democratic St. Petersburg movement, said that the attacks were deliberately misrepresented in the pro-Kremlin media as the reaction of “ordinary St. Petersburg residents” to a pro-Ukrainian event. “I want to stress that it was not just passing pedestrians who saw us and decided to oppose us, they were organized provocateurs,” Tsymbalova told The St. Petersburg Times this week. “The activists who stood with placards at a distance from Malaya Sadovaya said it was much quieter there. I was even told that more people supported them than opposed them. I find it hard to believe this though because where I stood it was a complete hell. However, we did have several people break through this shouting crowd to support and thank us.”