Right Sector () is a loosely defined coalition of right-wing to far-right Ukrainian nationalist organizations. It originated in November 2013 as a right-wing, paramilitary confederation of several ultranationalist organizations at the Euromaidan revolt in Kyiv, where its street fighters participated in clashes with riot police. The coalition became a political party on 22 March 2014, at which time it claimed to have roughly 10,000 members. Founding groups included the Trident (Tryzub), led by Dmytro Yarosh and , and the Ukrainian National Assembly–Ukrainian National Self-Defense (UNA–UNSO), a political and paramilitary organization.Behind the scenes of Right Sector , Ukrayinska Pravda (1 April 2014) Other founding groups included the Social-National Assembly, and its Patriot of Ukraine paramilitary wing, White Hammer, and Sich. White Hammer was expelled in March 2014, and Patriot of Ukraine left the organization, along with many UNA–UNSO members, in the following months.
Right Sector has been described as a right-wing or far-right nationalist political party and movement. Right Sector was the second-most mentioned political group in Russian media during the first half of 2014, and Russian state TV depicted it as neo-Nazi. In March 2014, Associated Press declared that it has found no evidence that the group had committed hate crimes.
In the 2014 Ukrainian parliamentary election, Yarosh won a parliament seat as a Right Sector candidate by winning a single-member district with 29.8% of the votes. Right Sector spokesperson Boryslav Bereza also won a seat as an independent candidate and district with 29.4% of the votes., RBK Ukraine Boryslav Bereza very short bio , RBK UkraineVideo of first brawl in Verkhovna Rada becomes a YouTube hit , Kyiv Post (5 December 2014) In the 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary election, Right Sector took part on a united radical right nationwide-party list with the Governmental Initiative of Yarosh, National Corps, and Svoboda, winning no seats.
The Right Sector fought in the Donbas war with its own paramilitary wing, the Ukrainian Volunteer Corps. In April 2015, Yarosh was appointed an advisor to the Ukrainian Armed Forces. In November, Yarosh formally stepped down as the group's leader. In December, he announced that he and his team would be withdrawing from the group entirely, declaring that Right Sector had fulfilled its purpose "as a revolutionary structure" and was no longer needed. He stated that he and his faction were against pseudo-revolutionary activity that threatens the state, fringe radicalism, and were against violent revolts against the government. In a statement issued in response to Yarosh's departure, Right Sector said the schism was due to its continuing a "revolutionary path". The departure of Yarosh resulted in at least 20% of Right Sector members leaving with him, together with three battalions of the Ukrainian Volunteer Corps to form a new paramilitary group named Ukrainian Volunteer Army. In February 2016, Yarosh started a new organisation called the Governmental Initiative of Yarosh. Since 19 March 2016, Tarasenko has been the new chairman of Right Sector.
In November 2022, the Ukrainian Volunteer Corps was reformed as the 67th Separate Mechanized Brigade and became part of the Ukrainian Ground Forces. In 2024, the 67th Brigade was disbanded and its members transferred to other brigades of the Ground Forces, due to alleged preferential treatment of Right Sector members, which led to repeated losses in a battle at Chasiv Yar.
Name The organization's name in Ukrainian is Правий сектор (transliterated Pravyy sektor), translated as Right Sector. (General-audience publications often transliterate it as Pravy Sektor or Pravyi Sektor.) One account derives the name from the group's effort to protect the right-hand side of the Euromaidan protestors at one point during the Maidan protests. Dmytro Yarosh owns the trademark "Right Sector". Russian language-speakers may refer to members of the Right Sector as pravoseki (); singular: pravosek ().Олег Бондаренко, "Чёрный террор", 2014 in Izvestia.
History
Origins
Right Sector was formed in late November 2013 as a confederation of street-fighting soccer fans and right-wing nationalist groups: Patriot of Ukraine (Andriy Biletsky), the Social-National Assembly, Trident (Dmytro Yarosh), UNA–UNSO (Yuriy Shukhevych), White Hammer, and Carpathian Sich. The BBC reports that Right Sector's Kyiv organization is primarily formed by Russian-speaking soccer ultras who share nationalist views.
The organization views itself within the tradition of Ukrainian partisans, such as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which fought in the Second World War against the Soviet Union and both for and against the Nazi Germany. Yarosh, Right Sector's leader, has trained armed nationalists in military exercises since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Co-founder Andriy Tarasenko told LIGA news agency in January 2014 that most participants were "ordinary citizens not related to any organizations".
Right Sector claims to have received donations from the Ukrainian diaspora.
Entry into Euromaidan
Right Sector became one of the main actors in the January 2014 Hrushevskoho Street riots, a part of the Euromaidan protests, in their later and more violent stages.Radicals a wild card in Ukraine's protests, The Washington Post (2 February 2014) On 19 January 2014 the organization encouraged its members to bring bottles to the protests to produce Molotov cocktails and bombs. The Yanukovich government classified it as an extremist movement and threatened its members with imprisonment.
Right Sector has been described as the most organized and most effective of the Euromaidan forces when it came to confronting police. Right Sector claims that it was the main organizer of violent resistance against armed attacks by the state at Euromaidan. Yarosh stated that the group had amassed a sizable arsenal of weapons; these include guns taken from police stations in Western Ukraine.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported antisemitic incidents involving Svoboda and Right Sector during the demonstration, where their militants were calling political opponents "Zhyd" and flying flags with neo-Nazi symbols. According to Haaretz, these organizations were also distributing translated editions of Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the demonstrators in Independence Square.
On 4 March 2014, the organization called on readers of its Vkontakte social-media page to "correct th[e] misunderstanding" that had been created in English and Russian Wikipedia that Right Sector is fascist and neo-Nazi. According to political science professor Olexiy Haran, Right Sector's role in Ukrainian politics was "extremely exaggerated" by Ukrainians associated with Yanukovich.
Recovery of the Secret Ledger Mustafa Nayyem stated that he was with members of the Right Sector when they entered Viktor Pshonka's luxurious mansion and that the Right Sector recovered numerous GPU files from Pshonka's mansion after members of the Yanukovych government fled in exile to Russia. These files included the secret bookkeeping of Viktor Yanukovych and the Party of Regions' Black Ledger () or Barn Book (), which implicated numerous persons to improper payments from pro-Kremlin and pro-Vladimir Putin sources including Paul Manafort for which the book included the handwritten records of 22 payments over five years to Manafort, nine of which had been signed by Vitaly Anatolyevich Kalyuzhny (), who was the Verkhovna Rada's foreign relations committee chairman. On 17 August 2016, Donald Trump removed Manafort as Trump's campaign chairman following Trump's first national security briefing directly because of the records in the secret ledger.
After Trump won the 2016 United States presidential election, Manafort demanded that the White House, Trump himself, and later Rudy Giuliani actively pressure Ukrainian officials to investigate and discredit Leshchenko and others because Leshchenko had published information from the Yanukovych Secret Ledger that was highly critical of Manafort's work in Ukraine. Manafort provided information to Giuliani and his company Giuliani Partners, including its employees Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, to smear Leshchenko and others in Ukraine and entered into a joint legal defense agreement between Manafort's attorneys and Trump's attorneys. Manafort and Giuliani also discussed how to deal with Marie Yovanovitch.
Aftermath of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution
In February 2014, Yarosh and the Israeli ambassador to Ukraine agreed to establish a "hotline" to prevent provocations and coordinate actions when issues arise. The group assists in the protection of Jewish sites in Odesa. In April 2014, Yarosh allegedly demanded to be appointed Vice Prime Minister for the law enforcement matters but his demand was rejected; he was offered a post of the Deputy Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine instead but Yarosh rejected this position as being beneath him. There were discussions of appointing Yarosh deputy head of the Security Service of Ukraine, but these discussions quickly petered out for unknown reasons.
Right Sector became a dominant theme of Russian propaganda, which grossly exaggerated its strength and influence in the new Ukraine. It was portrayed as a mortal threat to Russian speakers and Jews that necessitated a Russian military intervention. By April, Right Sector was being mentioned on Russia television almost as frequently as Putin's own United Russia party. In Crimea and the East, a "Right Sector" vandalism spree targeting synagogues, Jewish cemeteries, and Holocaust memorials was widely seen as a Russian false flag attack. In Simferopol, a synagogue was defaced with the wolfsangel symbol used by the Ukrainian far-right, but in the mirror-image of its normal orientation; in Odesa, vandals defaced a Jewish cemetery with graffiti reading "Right Sector" but misspelled the group's name. The next day Yarosh met with the Chief Rabbi of Odesa to show solidarity with Ukrainian Jews and was photographed helping paint over the graffiti.
On 7 March 2014, Tarasenko told Interfax-Ukraine that the "informal movement" would be transforming itself into a political party at a congress on 15 March. On 11 March 2014, Russian Duma opposition leader Valery Rashkin called on Russian special services to "liquidate" Yarosh and Right Sector's leader for West Ukraine, UNA–UNSO member Oleksandr Muzychko. He said that Muzychko had fought for Chechen separatists against Russian troops and been charged with banditry. Muzychko (who was given the nom de guerre "Sachko Bilyi") had also become known for the farcical Right Sector video, "Sachko Communicates with a Prosecutor", in which he yells at a local prosecutor, snatches his tie and threatens to drag him to Independence Square with a rope.
Muzychko was shot to death in Rivne, Ukraine, on 24 March 2014. A witness told a local news service that a dozen men took Muzychko out of a cafe, handcuffed him, and beat him and two bodyguards. Others said that they later heard two shots fired near the cafe. Ukraine's Interior Ministry stated that he was shot after opening fire on police and Sokil special forces. He was captured alive and arrested but died from his wounds before paramedics arrived. Police said he was being detained on suspicion of organized crime links, hooliganism and threatening public officials.Interior Ministry: Right Sector coordinator Muzhychko killed in shootout with police Kyiv Post Retrieved on 25 March 2014