The papers were first spotted swirling in the eddies of a boat harbor on the sprawling compound of the former Ukrainian president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, on the outskirts of Kiev. Intrigued, the protesters-turned-security guards who had taken over the grounds found a raft and began fishing the documents out of the water. Later, they recruited a diver to retrieve sunken nylon bags of files from the riverbed.
What
they found were the waterlogged secrets of a government that nobody was
ever supposed to lay eyes on, dumped by the president and his
associates in the panicked last hours of his tenure, before he fled in a
helicopter to eastern Ukraine.
The
documents, which are still being dried out, along with others from the
lavish home of the prosecutor general, are being posted on the Internet
in Cyrillic for all to see. Together, they provide an increasingly
detailed portrait of the final desperate weeks, days and hours of
members of a besieged inner circle trying desperately to maintain their
grip on a government they had plundered to an extent that shocked even
corruption-weary Ukrainians.
Read more here.
