May 12, 2017

Yanukovych trial for treason starts as Interpol removes him from wanted list

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KYIV – A day before the trial of Viktor Yanukovych for treason started in Kyiv on May 4, his lawyers announced that the disgraced former president of Ukraine is no longer wanted by Interpol.

The world’s largest international police organization subsequently confirmed the information.

“Interpol has thus confirmed the fact that criminal cases against Yanukovych are politically motivated,” said Yuriy Kirasir, the exiled politician’s spokesman.

The Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine said it will appeal the decision.

Now living in Russia at an undisclosed location, the former head of state, whose truncated administration is widely accused of large-scale embezzlement of up to $40 billion, is being tried for aiding Russia’s hybrid war against Ukraine.

Prosecutors say he asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to militarily intervene in a letter dated March 1, 2014, after he abandoned office following the Euro-Maidan uprising in Ukraine during the winter of 2013-2014.

Two days later, then-Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vitaliy Churkin presented the letter at the U.N. Security Council in New York. After the ambassador’s death on February 20, Mr. Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, stated that no letter “or any similar document” was received to deploy troops to Ukraine.

Precisely on March 1, 2014, the Russian president asked the upper house of the Russian Parliament for permission to send soldiers to Ukraine “in connection with the extraordinary situation in Ukraine” and the purported “threat to the lives of Russian citizens.”

The Russian legislature gave the approval, and that same month Russia illegally annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea.

Audio recordings made public by the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office of Sergey Glazyev – a top Russian presidential adviser and point man on Ukraine – in August 2016 show him giving instructions to pro-Kremlin activists in southern and eastern Ukraine. In the recordings, Mr. Glazyev repeatedly tells them in late February and early March 2014 to publicly ask for Russian military intervention after they seize government buildings.

“The recordings vividly illustrate Moscow’s covert support for the still unarmed anti-government protests in Ukraine several weeks before the actual war started,” according to an article published by the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Specifically, the tapes reveal the Russian state’s involvement in the coordination and financing of separatist meetings, demonstrations, pickets and similar actions in Crimea, as well as in various regional capitals in Ukraine’s eastern and southern parts immediately after the victory of the Maidan revolution in early 2014.”

At the U.N., British Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant rejected the Kremlin’s allegations of threats against ethnic Russians in Ukraine, following the Russian ambassador’s disclosure of Mr. Yanukovych’s letter.

“It is clear that these claims have simply been fabricated to justify Russian military action,” he said, as cited by Reuters. “We are talking about a former leader [Mr. Yanukovych] who abandoned his office, his capital and his country, whose corrupt governance brought his country to the brink of economic ruin, who suppressed protests against his government, leading to over 80 deaths.”

Mr. Yanukovych, 66, has rejected all the charges against him. On May 4 during the preliminary hearing, he was granted the opportunity to take part in the trial via video link from Russia. The trial was adjourned to May 18.

The chief military prosecutor, Ruslan Kravchenko, said he will seek a maximum life sentence for the ex-president and native of Yenakieve in the Russian occupied part of Donetsk Oblast.

“Since the suspect and accused V. Yanukovych during the pre-trial investigation didn’t admit guilt, the prosecuting side will seek the maximum punishment,” he said in a statement published on the Prosecutor General’s Office website on May 4.

About $1.5 billion in assets stolen by Mr. Yanukovych and his inner circle were recovered and transferred to the state budget, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko said on his Facebook page on April 28.

The money was frozen in state-owned Oschad and Ukrgazbank banks and stemmed from “corrupt schemes” that involved the use of offshore vehicles to buy Ukrainian foreign currency bonds, local investment bank Dragon Capital said in a note to investors. “As far as we understand, the lion’s share of the confiscated money consists of foreign cash, but a small portion is still held in F/X-denominated bonds, which are supposed to be written off upon confiscation pursuant to the budget law.”

Interpol has also removed from its database all information about the former president’s son, Oleksandr Yanukovych, “who had not been placed on the wanted list, yet the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office had filed requests to Interpol,” the family spokesperson said.

Also removed from the international law enforcement agency’s wanted list were former Economy Minister Eduard Stavitsky and former National Security and Defense Council Secretary Andrii Kliuev.

Interpol has also refused to issue an order to arrest Oleksandr Onyshchenko, a fugitive ex-lawmaker who is wanted for allegedly embezzling $120 million.

Initially, Interpol placed Viktor Yanukovych on its wanted list on January 12, 2015. The ex-president was removed from the list on July 21, 2015, based on a petition by his lawyers from Joseph Hage Aaronson LLP.

“The Ukrainian National Central Bureau of Interpol said that the move was temporary, since there is not a single completed criminal investigation and, thus, not a single court ruling in Ukraine against Yanukovych,” the UNIAN news agency reported. Mr. Yanukovych was later reinstated on the wanted list.

European Union asset freezes and travel bans against the ex-president and his associates are currently effective until March 2018.

Russia helped Viktor Yanukovych flee Ukraine in late February 2014 after around 100 protesters were shot dead in downtown Kyiv.

Yet, in testimony he gave to Ukrainian authorities via video link last November, the former president couldn’t say how he eventually ended up in Russia on February 23, 2014, a route that went from his suburban estate via Kharkiv-Donetsk-Crimea.

He also couldn’t recall where he was and with whom he spoke on February 18-20, 2014, when the vast majority of the protesters in Kyiv were killed. When he did acknowledge speaking to a subordinate or foreign government official, he often couldn’t remember the substance of the conversations, The Ukrainian Weekly reported.

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