You're reading: Lawmaker’s findings: 17 law enforcement officers killed in EuroMaidan Revolution violence

 Seventeen law enforcement officers were killed from gunshot wounds on Feb. 18-21 amid the violence of the EuroMaidan Revolution, a committee led by lawmaker Hennadiy Moskal said on May 21. The committee examined events from Nov. 30 to Feb. 22, when Viktor Yanukovych fled the presidency and the country, ending up in Russia as a fugitive.

“During this period, 1,127 militia officers received injuries of various severity,” Moska, the former deputy head of the Interior Ministry and Security Service of Ukraine said, accourding to Ukrainska Pravda.

Aside from the 17 law enforcement deaths, more than 100 civilian protesters were also killed from Feb. 18-21.

The deaths weren’t properly investigated at the time, the Batkivshchyna lawmaker said, with the bullets extracted from the bodies were left in hospitals. The ad hoc committee also concluded that the three opposition parties during that time — Batkivshchyna, Svoboda and Vitali Klitscho’s Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform — didn’t have armed forces on EuroMaidan. 

One tentative conclusion the lawmakers reached is that Interior Ministry and Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) agents pretending to be EuroMaidan activists might have shot at law enforcement officers with weapons taken from confiscated illegal arm stocks. Another version put forth is that staff employees of the Interior Ministry and SBU, pretending to activists and wearing masks, shot and killed them. A third version is that “individuals with their own sense of social justice acted on their own volition” shot at the law enforcement personnel.

The committee’s findings noted that many of the deaths came from sniper fire with the purpose of escalating “the social and political tension in Kyiv in view of imposing a state of emergency.”

 Kyiv Post editor Mark Rachkevych can be reached at [email protected].