Jewish citizens in Konotop, in northeastern Ukraine, are increasingly worried following the election of Artem Semenikhin, an admirer of Adolf Hitler and a member of the extreme-right Svoboda party, as the town's new mayor last October.
According to reports, Semenikhin has made no effort to hide his anti-Semitic views. The mayor drives in a car with a license plate numbered 14/88, which in neo-Nazi circles stands for “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” and “Heil Hitler”, the Nazi salute.
Semenikhin has placed a picture of World War II-era Ukrainian Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera in his office, replacing a picture of current Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko.
“The reaction of [the] community is shock,” community activist Igor Nechayev told the 'Jerusalem Post'. “People are shocked it could happen in the city and nobody believed it could happen here but it happened somehow.”
“The community is discussing the situation and they understand that the mayor is balancing between anti-Semitism,” Nechayev said, adding that the mayor was "saying borderline things that can be understood as anti-Semitic."
Euro-Asian Jewish Congress Affiliate researcher Vyacheslav Likhachev told the Israeli newspaper that “Ukrainians are afraid of the Russian threat, not the threat of national radicalism. Semenikhin has successfully created himself an image of defender of Ukrainian independence, and voters were able to support him, not paying attention to the radicalism of his views.”
"Unfortunately, the current Ukrainian legislation does not allow it to be forbidden to take part in the election candidates with right-wing views, or to remove them from the elected positions," Likhachev said, adding: "The special anti-communist and anti-Nazi law talks about banning the symbols of the National Socialist (Nazi) of the totalitarian regime, which includes symbols of the Nazi Party and the state symbols of the Third Reich only. It is impossible to interpret, in legal terms, symbols like ’14/88.’”
