Ukrainian security forces comb the village of Bobrovyshche, near the small Ukrainian town of Mukacheve, yesterday to locate and arrest fighters of Right Sector.

Reuters/Kiev

President Petro Poroshenko has ordered Ukraine’s security services and police to disarm “illegal groups”, saying that they threatened to further destabilise a country fighting separatists in its east.
Poroshenko said that a weekend stand-off between members of a far-right group and police in the western town of Mukacheve, close to the border with Hungary, Slovakia and Romania, was simply a turf war over smuggling routes.
But he appeared to take aim at Right Sector, which played a prominent role in protests that toppled Moscow-backed president Viktor Yanukovych last year, saying that no political force should operate armed cells in Ukraine and run “criminal cells”.
The far-right nationalist group demanded the resignation of the interior minister at the weekend after two of its members were killed in a firefight with police in Mukacheve, where it said it was set upon by police.
The interior ministry said the group shot first.
Poroshenko said in a statement that there needed to be a tough investigation into the events there and that the interior ministry, security services and other law enforcement officials must disarm “all illegal armed groups”.
The situation was calmer in Mukacheve yesterday but it was not clear whether Right Sector, in turn hailed or blamed for injecting violence into last year’s Maidan protests, had downed arms as demanded by the police.
Right Sector has defended its right to hold arms, saying that they must protect Ukraine from attempts to derail their demands for a new way of governing and from “outside forces”, mainly Russia, to destabilise the country.
But officials have questioned the need to hold arms in western Ukraine, thousands of kilometres from the east, where fighting has killed more than 6,500 people and forced more than 1.5mn to abandon their homes.