Viktor Medvedchuk, a Kremlin-backed Ukrainian oligarch and politician with personal ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, is suing Hanna Hopko, the head of Ukraine’s parliamentary committee on foreign affairs.
Medvedchuk, who is also the leader of the pro-Russian political organization Ukrainian Choice, is taking action in response to a highly critical Facebook post that Hopko wrote on Sept. 3.
Court documents seen by the Kyiv Post show that Medvedchuk’s legal representatives have been instructed to take action against Hopko on grounds of defamation and libel.
The first court hearing will be held in Kyiv’s Pechersk District Court on Dec. 19.
Hopko wrote a post criticizing Medvedchuk on her Facebook page on Sept. 3, a few days before the commemoration day of Vasyl Stus: a poet, human rights defender and Ukrainian patriot who died in a Soviet labor camp for political prisoners in Russia in 1985.
“We call for a stop to the revenge of pro-Russian forces in Ukraine. On the commemoration day of Vasyl Stus, we remind about his executioner, who here, in Ukraine, is doing business, buying channels, rushing to power,” she wrote on Sept. 3, referring to Medvedchuk.
Medvedchuk in response launched what appears to be a symbolic legal action to extract Hr 1 in damages from Hopko.
Back in 1980, a young Medvedchuk was assigned as a lawyer to the poet, who stood accused of “undermining and weakening Soviet power through hostile literature.”
However, Stus abandoned this lawyer very soon.
“When Stus met with his appointed lawyer, he immediately felt that Medvedchuk was a man of the Komsomol (communist youth organization), an aggressive type and would not protect him, didn’t want to understand him, and, who in fact, was not interested in his case,” said Yevhen Sverstiuk, a Ukrainian publicist, literary critic, and a former political prisoner, according to a legal analysis of the dissident’s trial by the Ukrainska Pravda online newspaper.
After Stus’s death, Medvedchuk began a career in Ukrainian politics. He headed the presidential administration of second Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma from 2002 until 2005.
Closely linked to Putin, who is believed to be the godfather of Medvedchuk’s daughter, he also opposed the 2014 EuroMaidan Revolution that drove President Viktor Yanukovych from power and has been working against Ukraine’s integration with the European Union.
Medvedchuk is among the top 100 richest Ukrainians.
Recently, Medvedchuk became chairman of the Za Zhyttia (For Life) political party, a pro-Russian party headed by Vadym Rabynovych, the previous owner of the NewsOne opposition television channel.
In a comment to Kyiv Post on Dec. 18, Hanna Hopko said that a lawyer acting on her behalf on a pro bono basis would present her defensive statement to the court on Dec. 19. She also called on Ukraine’s European allies to do more in aiding the country to tackle the corrosive influence of corrupt oligarchs.
She said that Ukrainian businessmen with shady, criminal connections still find it too easy to find refuge in European capitals, citing London as an example.
“There is a double standard,” she said. “When Ukraine is constantly being told to tackle corruption.”
