Double bombing follows weekend shootout between Right Sector fighters and police as president attempts to crack down on armed nationalists

Booby-trap explosions have injured two police officers in western Ukraine, further raising tensions in the region after a shootout with nationalists at the weekend left two men dead.



The continued violence in the area, which borders the European Union and is rife with smuggling, highlights Kiev’s struggles with both endemic corruption and armed nationalist groups who have helped it fight pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine. On Monday Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, ordered the security services and police to disarm “illegal groups” and root out corruption and smuggling.

Two police officers in Lviv were taken to hospital on Tuesday after mysterious bombings that the interior ministry said were connected with “events in the Zakarpattia region”, referring to the shootout in the city of Mukacheve on Saturday that killed two men.

The gunfight began after police responded to the arrival of heavily armed Right Sector members at a sports complex controlled by an MP, Mikhail Lano, who openly opposes the group. Right Sector said its men had been trying to stop a smuggling operation, but others called it a fight over contraband.

Video footage showed Right Sector men shooting at a police car with Kalashnikov assault rifles and a heavy machine gun mounted on a pickup truck. The interior ministry said the far-right group had shot first.

The first blast in Lviv, which is north of Mukacheve, occurred at about 9am when a lieutenant opened a neighbourhood police station, setting off an explosion. The 24-year-old man was in hospital in critical condition with multiple shrapnel wounds to his head and body.

A second explosion went off about an hour later at another neighbourhood police station, injuring a 31-year-old female officer. The interior ministry said the station entrances had been booby-trapped and a safety clip from a grenade had been found at one site.

Security forces detained two members of Right Sector late on Monday who it said were involved in the Mukacheve shootout. After the gunfight, government forces had surrounded Right Sector members in a wooded area near Mukacheve as well as a base in the Lviv region.



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Right Sector grew in popularity after it played a lead role in the tumultuous mass protests that overthrew president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, and the group has joined other volunteer battalions, many of them also with far-right views, to fight pro-Russia rebels in the east.

Kiev has been cautiously trying to integrate these irregular units into the military. Its troops surrounded a Right Sector base in eastern Ukraine in April after it refused to be broken up among different military units. The military eventually appointed Right Sector’s leader, MP Dmytro Yarosh as an adviser to the chief of staff, Viktor Muzhenko, in an apparent compromise.

But Saturday’s clash showed that the process of subordinating Right Sector, which has claimed to have 10,000 fighters, is far from complete. On Monday, Poroshenko took armed groups to task without mentioning Right Sector by name.

“No political force should have, and will not have, any kind of armed cells. No political organisation has the right to establish … criminal groups,” he told Ukraine’s security council.

Poroshenko added that the flow of weapons from the conflict in the east had raised the risk of crime around the country. Right Sector and other volunteer battalions have been accused of criminal activity and human rights violations, including torture and kidnapping.

Speaking to the national security council on Monday, Poroshenko called for an investigation into everyone involved in the Mukacheve incident, which he blamed on the redirection of smuggling flows, and demanded “searches, arrests and direct criminal liability”.

“We must untangle the knot of old problems requiring an immediate solution. I am talking about clans, smuggling, corruption and so on,” Poroshenko said, according to his press service. “The picture of what is happening there now is not black and white, it is simply shockingly black.”

On Tuesday, Ukraine’s parliament created a temporary investigative commission to look into the circumstances of the Mukacheve conflict. Meanwhile, customs agents in Zakarpattia confiscated a cache of 2,000 cigarettes hidden in a rail wagon full of iron ore.