Kiev police detained 17 youths in connection with an attack on three foreign students, according to a February 21, 2008 article in the local newspaper Kievskie Vedomosti. The mob of youths was hanging out near the MAUP university, which perhaps coincidentally is the country's leading publisher of antisemitic literature, when they spotted two Iranian and one Chinese student getting off a bus. Police reacted quickly, detaining the attackers, but letting 12 go after establishing that they are under-aged. The other five are in detention pending charges.

Kiev's police chief, Vladimir Polishchuk, told the paper that he had no idea why local media was treating the incident as a racist attack (for example, an article the same day in the local paper "15 Minut" reported that one of the suspects claims to be a skinhead). "These are just hooliganistic excesses," he argued. Whatever the truth behind this latest in a series of attacks on ethnic minorities in Ukraine, Mr. Polishchuk then made the completely spurious claim that no racist crimes took place in Kiev over the last year.

"By the way, last year there were 113 crimes against citizens of other countries, during which six people died," he asserted. "But not one of them was connected with racist or any other kind of inter-ethnic attitudes. Although there are some kind of minor groups that claim to be skinheads in the capital, there are no real militant organizations. So citizens of other countries, especially African and Asian countries, have nothing to fear."

However, the SBU (the KGB's successor agency) the same day released a report that paints the situation in more alarming terms, according to a February 22, 2008 report in the same newspaper. The SBU's press office reportedly told the local media that they are monitoring several racist skinhead organizations in Kiev, Sevastopol, Yalta, and the regions of Kiev, Kharkov, Kherson, Summi, Donetsk, Dnepropetrovsk, Vinnitsa, Odessa, and Zhitomir.

"There are ten such groups in Kiev operating independently of one another who follow the theory of racism," the SBU reported. "They receive ideological literature from abroad" much of it most likely from Russia (though the SBU was not specific), where the neo-Nazi movement is much more developed than in Ukraine.

The SBU qualified its assertions by saying that the neo-Nazi movement does not yet present a public threat because it is not well organized, but added that its numbers are growing, and that its leaders are gaining organizational experience.

Earlier this month, the Council of Europe's racism monitoring body released a report arguing that Ukrainian police are not doing enough to combat growing racist violence, and UCSJ's Kiev monitor reported a record number of racist attacks in January 2008. In addition, from October 2006 to September 2007, UCSJ recorded 55 likely hate crimes, including seven murders, several of them in Kiev. The victims were primarily Arabs (13 victims), Jews (10 victims), and blacks (10 victims).

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