UKRAINIAN far-right leader Oleh Tyahnybok was questioned by police yesterday over his Svoboda party’s involvement in clashes that left three National Guard officers dead.

Sixteen members of the fascist group have been arrested on suspicion of orchestrating the riots, but Mr Tyahnybok was merely questioned as a witness.

Alongside the neonazi Right Sector group, Svoboda members have been behind attacks on socialists and trade unionists and have joined far-right paramilitary organisations fighting the anti-fascist resistance in the country’s east.

The party reveres nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera and Mr Tyahnybok, who famously posed with US senator John McCain when he visited Ukraine to show support for the Maidan movement, has praised the genocidal Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists he led for killing “Muscovites, Germans, Jews and other scum.”

He has also called in parliament for an official investigation into the “criminal activities of organised Jewry” in the country.

The party mobilised large numbers of thugs who attacked police with truncheons and planks with nails in them on Monday, while parliament was debating a constitutional proposal which would devolve more power to the regions.

Rumours that the far right are mobilising to seek to derail any negotiated solution to Ukraine’s civil war are rife in the country.

Armed fascists provided the muscle in the EU-backed overthrow of the Viktor Yanukovych government last year, and Kiev has since given them numerous political and security posts, making it difficult for the government to clamp down on their activities.