At 11 a.m., I went to the Soros Foundation, for a meeting of the supervisory board of the Humanitarian Justice initiative. We examined documents and requests relating to victims from the Maidan period. We also discussed the unpleasant situations created by certain individuals who are attempting to obtain money, supposedly for their care, from several organisations at the same time. It’s a shame that all these victims’ aid funds refuse to create a single database relating to the injured in such a way that everyone would know who had already received money for their treatment and who still needed it. More than 170 victims are currently being treated abroad. Some of the bills are huge: tens of thousands of euros. Particularly those from Israeli hospitals. Lithuania and Poland are treating the injured for free. The administration of military hospitals, as well as the administration of the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) hospital, refuse our aid, even though the wife of one of the injured policemen appealed to us and received money to buy essential medicine. Two berkutovtsy are still in intensive care at the MVD hospital, in a coma, one of them with two bullets in his head. But the administration says they have all they need to care for these men.
There have also been victims from the pro-Russian demonstrations in Donetsk, Kharkiv and Luhansk, and they are asking us for support. Of the 3,129,000 hryvnas collected by the foundation, we have already spent nearly half. Financial aid and medical care have already been given to 158 people. Fifty-six patients have left hospital, for the moment, their medical bills paid in full. However, there are problems that the foundation cannot resolve on its own. A 51-year-old Afghan, Valeriy Fisun, received payment for the treatment of a damaged eye and spinal injuries, but his identity papers remained at his home in Crimea. He can’t return for them, because the police have already been looking for him several times at his address. For now, he is living in a tent in the Maidan. What will happen to him when the Maidan is taken down? Who will take care of a case like his? The problem now is to find him a new place to live and to establish an ID for him.
As I was walking home from the foundation meeting, on the corner of Reitarskaya Street and Vladimirskaya Street, near the fish restaurant, a man dressed in camouflage suddenly appeared in front of me. His jacket was half open, offering a glimpse of the flashing blade of a machete, which I could see was attached to his belt. He was walking steadily and confidently, as if he knew exactly where he was going. The look on his young face was tough and expressionless, giving him the appearance of a cross between a young Che Guevara and a patient from a psychiatric hospital. I briefly thought about stopping him and saying: ‘Excuse me, brother, but which sotnya are you from?’ I didn’t, though. Firstly because he was walking too fast and clearly had no intention of stopping to talk with an unknown civilian. Secondly, the icy gleam of that steel blade was threatening. And thirdly, my question might have seemed provocative to him, because there was nothing on his clothing that suggested he belonged to any of the Maidan’s self-defence sotnyas.
There are some strange people mixed up in the revolution these days. Some of them are simple criminals or ex-cons who, under the cover of Pravy Sektor, pillage shops and farm cooperatives in the south of Ukraine. In the Dnipropetrovsk region, special detachments of police capture half a dozen false Pravy Sektor groups every day, all of them devoted to theft in local villages and hamlets. Special detachments resident in the big cooperatives have been set up so they are as close as possible to the places where crimes are likely to be committed. And, for the moment, among the two hundred or so criminals arrested while wearing camouflage and carrying a gun, not one actual member of Pravy Sektor has been found.