A municipal court of Russian southern town of Yessentuki has issued an arrest warrant for former Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, accusing him of participating in armed groups in the Russian North Caucasus republic of Chechnya in the mid-1990s and fighting against Russian troops.
According to the court’s March 27 statement, an international warrant for Yatsenyuk’s arrest has been in effect since Feb. 21. The court noted that the detention period should start from the moment of Yatsenyuk’s detention on the territory of the Russian Federation or his extradition to Russia. The motion was submitted by an investigator of the North Caucasus Federal Branch of the Investigative Committee of Russian Federation.
Yatsenyuk brushed off the accusations, saying that “hatred and total absurdity are the foundations of (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s regime.” Commenting on the warrant, he said that the Kremlin “has hit rock bottom.”
“The Kremlin is looking for legal mechanisms to prosecute Ukrainian politicians,” the former prime minister said on March 27.
Russia’s accusations against Yatsenyuk are not new. In September 2015, Shatoi District Court in the restive Chechnya republic heard a criminal case that involved the former Ukrainian prime minister. According to the investigation, Yatesnyuk was involved in at least two of armed confrontations that took place on Dec. 31, 1994, on Minutka square in Grozny, and in February 1995, outside city hospital 9 in Grozny. He was also accused of the torture and executions of prisoners.
Aleksander Malofeev, a member of the Ukrainian nationalist group UNA-UNSO (banned in the Russian Federation since 2014), who was named in the case, said he, together with other Ukrainian nationalists, had arrived in Chechnya in the mid-1990’s through Georgia. It was followed by the creation of Viking, an armed group. According to Malofeev, Yatsenyuk was a member.
Aleksander Bastrykin of Russia’s Investigative Committee said that in 1995 Yatsenyuk was awarded the “Honor of the Nation” Chechen state award.
“In early 1995, Arseniy Yatsenyuk returned to Ukraine via Georgia with a group of journalists. Later, he was repeatedly seen at conventions and other events of UNA-UNSO in Kyiv,” Bastrykin was quoted as saying by the Russian newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta.
Yatsenyuk’s spokeswoman Olga Lappo, commenting on the initial allegations on Facebook in September 2015, said that Bastrykin “should have his head examined.”
Yatsenyuk’s official biography states that in 1995, at the age of 20-21, he was studying law at Chernivtsi National University in western Ukraine.
