Mystery Surrounds Death of Ukrainian Activist

A memorial in Barmaky, Ukraine, marks where Oleksandr Muzychko of the Right Sector group died. A government report said that he shot himself.
Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

BARMAKY, Ukraine — For more than 20 years, Oleksandr Muzychko battled and somehow survived Russian power, taking up arms against Moscow-backed rebels in Georgia and Moldova, against Russia’s army in Chechnya and finally against Ukraine’s pro-Russia president, Viktor F. Yanukovych.

Late last month, however, his luck ran out in a grove of oak trees just a few hundred yards from his parents’ house in this placid, dirt-tracked village. Shot in the heart, Mr. Muzychko — a militant activist in the nationalist group Right Sector — died fleeing the reach of a Ukrainian government he had helped bring to power just a month earlier.

Who fired the bullets is unclear and a matter of bitter controversy. The mystery reflects the deep rifts in Ukraine over a February revolution that toppled Mr. Yanukovych but left rival camps sharply and sometimes violently divided over its purpose.

Right Sector, with its pugnacious anti-Russian nationalism and celebration of long-dead Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazis against the Soviets in World War II, lies at the heart of the debate. Will its members lay down their arms and accede to Kiev’s authority, as they say they will? Or are they determined to bring down the existing, corrupt order in a coup, as Russia’s fascist-baiting news media insist?

The tumultuous life and mysterious death of Mr. Muzychko, one of Right Sector’s most charismatic and mercurial leaders, speak directly to those questions, reflecting the sharp differences among those who cheered Mr. Yanukovych’s fall and now disagree on the shape and mission of Ukraine’s post-revolutionary order.

These resulted in the violent confrontation that claimed Mr. Muzychko’s life late at night on March 24. The new government, which saw Mr. Muzychko as an out-of-control extremist sent heavily armed police officers to try to arrest him at the Three Carp Cafe here. A report issued by the Interior Ministry last week said that the burly 51-year-old militant shot himself after a shootout with the police on a grassy hill behind the cafe. At the time of his death, he was under investigation by a police unit responsible for combating organized crime.

Mr. Muzychko’s family, friends and former comrades in Right Sector, a coalition of once-fringe Ukrainian nationalist groups, believe that he was killed in order to silence an uncompromising rebel who wanted to oust not only Mr. Yanukovych, but an entire class of politicians and civil servants he viewed as irredeemably corrupt.

“This is an unfinished revolution and he wanted to carry it through to its logical conclusion,” said Yuriy Shukhevych, a veteran Ukrainian nationalist leader whose father, Roman, commanded the Ukrainian Insurgent Army against the Polish and Soviet authorities in the 1930s and ’40s. Mr. Muzychko’s death, said Mr. Shukhevych, who spent more than three decades in Soviet prisons and labor camps, was a “pre-ordered hit” orchestrated by establishment forces fearful of a thorough break with the past and who were “afraid of him because he was so determined and so decisive.”

Mr. Muzychko certainly made many enemies, particularly among officials appalled by his gun-waving displays of bravado and his reputation as a man who took the law into his own hands and combined nationalist fervor with racketeering and revenge.

A week after Mr. Yanukovych fled Kiev on Feb. 21, for example, Mr. Muzychko, a holstered pistol on his belt, stormed into the state prosecutor’s office in Rivne, a city near his home village in northwestern Ukraine, and terrorized an official he accused of failing to prosecute a man accused of rape and murder.

“If you don’t sign an arrest warrant, I will beat you like a dog,” he screamed, grabbing the prosecutor’s tie and demanding to know why the judicial system let criminals with connections go free, but pursued innocent, ordinary people. A video recording of the scene was quickly posted on YouTube and was broadcast repeatedly by Russian television as proof that Ukraine had fallen into the hands of violent extremists.

He also waved an automatic rifle at leaders of Rivne’s regional council, defying a government order that Right Sector and other militant groups hand over their weapons. “No one tells us when to carry arms and when not,” Mr. Muzychko warned. “You did not give them to us and you won’t take them away.” A video of this also popped up on the Internet.

Russia Today, a state-controlled broadcaster, described Mr. Muzychko as a “shellshocked psychopath.”

The episodes embarrassed and infuriated Ukraine’s new government, which has been struggling to assert its authority and present itself as a responsible, stable power in the face of a barrage of Russian propaganda about fascists on the rampage.

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Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

But Mr. Muzychko’s antics struck a chord with some ordinary Ukrainians, who wonder when Ukraine’s revolution will bring tangible benefits and ask why law enforcement and other government agencies are still staffed mostly by people who served under Mr. Yanukovych.

When Mr. Muzychko was buried two days after his death, throngs from his village and Rivne flocked to mourn a man they knew as Sashko Bely, a nom de guerre meaning Sashko White. In Kiev, the capital, Right Sector militants besieged the national Parliament, retreating only after legislators promised to conduct an independent investigation into Mr. Muzychko’s death. Right Sector’s leader, Dmytro Yarosh, demanded that Ukraine’s interior minister resign and vowed revenge for Mr. Muzychko’s death.

The European Union, on the defensive against criticism from Moscow that it was coddling Ukrainian extremists, condemned Right Sector’s unruly pressure tactics. The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, called on the group “to refrain from the use or threat of violence” and denounced its “intimidation of the Parliament” as a violation of “democratic principles and the rule of law.”

Roman Koval, the head of the Rivne branch of Right Sector, acknowledged that Mr. Muzychko’s methods perhaps played into Russian propaganda, but added that he understood and supported his comrade’s belief that peaceful protest alone could not always bring real change. Ukraine’s February revolution, said Mr. Koval, would never have happened without Right Sector and other militant groups.

This process, he added, needs to continue because the ouster of Mr. Yanukovych has so far “changed a few faces but not the structure of the system.” Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt traffic police force, for example, stopped extorting money for a few weeks, but has now started to demand bribes once again.

Mr. Muzychko’s rage against authority, particularly the judiciary, was not just political but also deeply personal. Born in the Russian region of Perm in 1962 to a mother from Belarus and a Ukrainian coal-miner father who had been forced to leave Ukraine by Soviet authorities, he grew up bitterly resentful of a Soviet system that he saw as a tool for Russian domination of its neighbors.

“He was always interested in politics,” said his 78-year-old mother, Olena. Wailing with grief as chickens clucked at her feet outside the family home, she cursed “criminals” for killing the older of her two sons.

“He could have liked Russians if they had lived with us in peace,” she said. “Maybe the Russians did not like him.”

Moscow’s dislike of Mr. Muzychko stretched back to 1994, when he joined Chechen separatists fighting for independence from Russia. A Russian human rights activist who knew Mr. Muzychko in Chechnya remembered the Ukrainian as a jocular, friendly character who showed little sign of the showy aggression that would later make him a hero for some and villain for many others. The Russian authorities, however, say that while in Chechnya, Mr. Muzychko was involved in a string of atrocities against Russian soldiers and issued a warrant for his arrest.

Shortly before his death, Mr. Muzychko released a video in which he predicted that Ukrainian authorities would either kill him or hand him over to Russian security services. Mr. Shukhevych, the son of the wartime nationalist hero, said Mr. Muzychko visited him about 10 days before his death and told him that an emissary from the government in Kiev had offered to pay him $20,000 if he disappeared for a few months and stopped causing trouble. “If he had taken the money and gone on a long holiday to the Bahamas he might still be alive,” Mr. Shukhevych said.

But Mr. Muzychko never retreated from a fight. As a young man he had repeated brushes with the law and was convicted on charges of brawling and extortion. An early marriage quickly fell apart.

Sergei Pandrak, a longtime friend and political ally, insisted that Mr. Muzychko was never a gangster. But in the 1990s Mr. Muzychko had combined activities in a nationalist youth movement with work providing “physical support,” or protection, in return for money from local businessmen who backed the nationalist cause and worried about their safety. “It was a very gray period,” Mr. Pandrak acknowledged.

As far as anyone can tell, Mr. Muzychko never held a regular job and, between his time on the battlefields of Chechnya and elsewhere, devoted himself to a string of Ukrainian nationalist organizations, notably the Ukrainian National Assembly, a political party that was led for a time by Mr. Shukhevych. He ran for Parliament on the party’s ticket in 2012 and came in sixth, with just 1.1 percent of the vote.

After Mr. Muzychko’s flop at the ballot box, he focused on street politics, pushing the Ukrainian National Assembly into cooperation with, and then in March absorption by, Right Sector.

Despite having no obvious source of income, Mr. Muzychko built himself a large two-story house in Barmaky. Unlike the ramshackle single-story home of his parents, located at the entrance to the village near the main road, Mr. Muzychko’s home, which builders finished shortly before he died, sits atop a secluded hill in a far more prosperous district. Local residents estimated that his house was worth more than $200,000, a hefty sum in this part of the world.

Mr. Shukhevych dismissed suspicions that the property was the fruit of criminal activity, recalling that the house took 15 years to build because Mr. Muzychko kept running out of cash to pay the builders. He acknowledged that Mr. Muzychko had a hot temper that pushed him into trouble with the law and even his friends. “He was very emotional, but always apologized afterwards when he did something stupid,” Mr. Shukhevych said.