By Marta Havryshko (Ukraine)
This is a police officer photographed during recent events outside a secret Azov facility in Petropavlivska Borshchahivka, near Kyiv, where beaten men were reportedly discovered and protests erupted.
He has become a symbol of how ordinary Ukrainians increasingly see the police: as an institution serving the interests of Zelensky’s corrupt regime and enforcing its machinery of forced mobilization.
Police officers appear in almost every video of the notorious busification raids — Ukraine’s brutal practice of snatching men off the streets and dragging them into military vans.
They twist men’s arms behind their backs. They carry them by their hands and feet and throw them into vans like sacks of human cargo.
They hunt down soldiers who have gone AWOL and hold them in places like this shadowy facility in Petropavlivska Borshchahivka.
They lie to protesters and journalists about the whereabouts of detained men. They obstruct medical personnel trying to provide the care they are legally entitled to.
They fail to protect journalists and protesters from [Nazi] Azov’s baton-wielding "vigilantes" — thugs who attack civilians in the name of defending Azov’s supposedly spotless reputation.
This is the hideous face of Zelensky’s regime: a regime that, in its insatiable hunger for ever more power, is steadily devouring what remains of its own people's trust.
The more power it grabs, the more legitimacy it loses.
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