Four officers of Ukraine’s KGB-successor agency, the State Security Service (SBU), have been arrested for their involvement in the killing of some 100 protesters in Kyiv’s Independence Square in the waning days of the EuroMaidan Revolution in late February, said the nation’s top spy Valentyn Nalyvchaichenko on Espresso TV on Oct. 4.
“Dozens (of
SBU men) planned the shooting on the Maidan, foremost they were heads of
departments and agencies. Criminal cases were opened against them back in
March. There are (officers) who have been dismissed, detained and arrested,” said
SBU chief Nalyvaichenko. “As of today there are four traitors, officers of the
highest rank. Two more heads of key departments have fled before our appointment
and they are wanted (men).”
Number one
on his list is his predecessor, Oleksandr Yakymenko, whose official biography
never listed when he received Ukrainian citizenship having been born in
Mongolia and served in the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Crimea in the 1990s. He
is presumed to be hiding out in Russia having given numerous interviews to Russian media there.
Nalyvaichenko
didn’t name the other suspects that are either wanted or in custody.
Calling him
a traitor, Nalyvaichenko said Yakymenko “will make it in history as the first, and
I hope the last, traitor who entirely betrayed his office and state, and who
switched allegiance to the side of the aggressor (Russia).”
He added
that in addition to Yakymenko, two of his former deputies and two key department
heads, one of whom planned the sniper shootings that killed 100 people in the
last days of EuroMaidan, also fled to Russia.
In a separate interview Nalyvaichenko gave to 112
television on Sept. 29, he said the high-level SBU officers who planned the EuroMaidan
shootings, did so with “foreign, that is, Russian Federal Security Service officers.”
There have
been no high-profile convictions in the death of some 100 EuroMaidan protesters
since February.
