Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko on March 15 came up with a hybrid of an action movie and absurd theater.
If Lutsenko is to be believed, in just two years lawmaker Nadiya Savchenko turned from Ukraine’s national hero and Joan of Arc into Ukraine’s Guy Fawkes — the person who unsuccessfully plotted to blow up the English parliament in 1605. According to an alternative interpretation, Savchenko risks turning from a Russian political prisoner into a Ukrainian one.
“The investigators have irrefutable evidence that Savchenko was planning and managing a terror attack in this (Verkhovna Rada) hall,” Lutsenko said at Ukraine’s parliament. “Her plan was to blow up the (government and guest seating areas) of parliament, then destroy the Rada ceiling using mortars. After that, she was planning to finish off all the lawmakers who survived by shooting them with machine guns.”
Wow, Rambo and the Terminator pale in comparison. Until Lutsenko comes up with bullet-proof evidence, his statements look like science fiction and a bizarre parody on Joseph Stalin’s 1937 show trials.
Savchenko denied plotting any terrorist attacks in the Rada, although it was not clear whether she has actually talked about the idea of blowing up parliament as a joke.
“Who hasn’t dreamed about blowing up the Rada? But we’re not in Stalin’s times, when such talk would have been considered a crime,” she said.
Volodymyr Ruban, a mediator in war prisoner swaps, has been charged in the same case with plotting in collusion with Russia to use mortars, grenade launchers and other weapons to shoot at the Presidential Administration and the Verkhovna Rada and to murder President Petro Poroshenko, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Oleksandr Turchynov, secretary of the National Security and Defense Council.
Ruban was arrested on March 8 at the Mayorsk checkpoint near the Russian-occupied city of Horlivka in Donetsk Oblast while allegedly trying to smuggle a batch of weapons to Ukrainian-controlled territory.
Surely, Ruban is no saint. He’s a long-time associate of pro-Russian politician Viktor Medvedchuk, has expressed pro-Russian views himself and could have been involved in arms smuggling under the cover of Ukrainian law enforcers.
But Ruban is no idiot either. Why smuggle weapons from Russianoccupied territories for attacks in Kyiv if they can be bought at Ukrainian military bases, where corruption is rampant?
Also, Security Service of Ukraine Chief Vasyl Hrytsak confirmed that the minivan that Ruban allegedly used to transport the weapons had already been seized by the SBU with weapons in November. This looks extremely bizarre.
The Ruban-Savchenko saga follows the apparent collapse of Lutsenko’s case against Poroshenko’s vehement critic and ex-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. Lutsenko accused Saakashvili of accepting funding from Serhiy Kurchenko, an ally of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, to finance anti-government demonstrations and plot a coup d’etat.
But the prosecutors’ alleged evidence against Saakashvili was dismissed by independent lawyers as weak, and he was released from custody by Pechersk Court Judge Larysa Tsokol on Dec. 11. Tsokol ruled that Saakashvili’s detention by the Security Service of Ukraine without a court warrant and any other legal grounds on Dec. 5 was unlawful.
Saakashvili was deported from Ukraine to Poland without a court warrant on Feb. 12. Under Ukrainian law, forced deportation is only possible with a court warrant.
Saakashvili argues that his expulsion from Ukraine shows that the case was fabricated and political, and the authorities could not lawfully convict him.
Earlier in March the Prosecutor General’s Office suspended the Saakashvili case.
Meanwhile, a trial of Saakashvili associate David Sakvarelidze began on March 14 in what he believes to be a vendetta by Lutsenko and Poroshenko.
Instead of investigating real corruption and real crimes, Lutsenko keeps coming up with absurd and political cases in which evidence is extremely weak. Now this circus seems to have reached its culmination.
On March 15, parliament lifted lawmaker Yevhen Bakulin’s immunity from prosecution in a graft case at Lutsenko’s request after he left the country. But Lutsenko has done everything to help the main politician implicated in the same case — Opposition Bloc Leader Yuriy Boyko — escape prosecution. Bakulin and Boyko are under investigation for alleged embezzlement of $400 million during the purchase of oil and gas rigs.
In May reformist lawmaker Sergii Leshchenko published the text of what he says is a draft motion to strip Boyko of his immunity from prosecution in a separate case. Boyko is accused of embezzlement worth $700 million during the sale of natural gas. However, Leshchenko said the motion had been blocked by Lutsenko.
The Ruban-Savchenko case also looks like an excuse for the introduction of martial law, emergency situation or some authoritarian measures. It could be used to scare society with the bogeyman of terrorist attacks in Kyiv and a Russian invasion and to prevent major protests and criticism of the government.
