Eighty-four Ukrainian lawmakers representing all factions in parliament have signed an appeal to Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka asking him to open a criminal case against Major Mykola Melnychenko, a former officer of the State Guard Department.
"The issue concerns treason and the transfer of secret information to foreign nationals," Our Ukraine-People’s Self-Defense faction member Yuriy Karmazin told Interfax-Ukraine.
He said that the authors of the appeal had demanded that the Prosecutor General’s Office determine whether Melnychenko’s actions constitute a crime as envisaged by Articles 364, 111, 328 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.
In their appeal, the MPs said that a criminal case against Melnychenko had been closed in 2005 without the proper consideration of all circumstances and without even questioning him.
"Meanwhile, it’s still necessary to investigate the volume, scope and content of information constituting state secrets that are illegally possessed by Melnychenko, as well as the question of whether he conveyed this information to representatives of the intelligence agencies of other countries with whom he met," Karmazin said.
The appeal notes that Ukraine has already suffered significant political and financial damage due to the spreading by Melnychenko of misleading information about the sale of Kolchuga radars to former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Karmazin said that the appeal to the Prosecutor General’s Office had been signed, in particular, by Our Ukraine-People’s Self-Defense faction members Volodymyr Aryev, Roman Zvarych, Kyrylo Kulykov, Volodymyr Maruschenko, Kateryna Lukyanova, Viacheslav Koval, Ruslan Kniazevych, Lytvyn Bloc faction members Mykhailo Rudchenko, Serhiy Hrynevetsky, Valeriy Baranov, Yuriy Lytvyn, Kateryna Vaschuk, Regions Party faction members Volodymyr Landik, Iryna Horina, Artem Scherban, Oleksiy Plotnikov, BYT faction members Ihor Hryniv, Olena Kondratyuk, and Ostap Semerak, and others.
