Italian Foreign Minister Angelino Alfano believes a bilateral investigation team will be set up to probe the case of Ukrainian serviceman Vitaliy Markiv.
“I think it is in the interest of everybody to seek the truth, and I am fully confident that Italy’s judicial bodies will admit Ukraine to the investigation and this will be a bilateral consideration of the case. And there will be a group of investigators from both countries,” Alfano said at a joint press conference with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin in Kyiv on January 30.
He also noted that the Italian people are closely following the murder of Italian journalist Andrea Rocchelli in the Donbas war zone. “We understand that the results of the investigation can affect the opinions of the two peoples,” Alfano said.
In turn, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin called for the formation of a bilateral investigative team. “We believe and we are ready for this, that this investigation should be carried out jointly… We understand the whole situation and how everything happened, and we are ready and we provide all the necessary data and evidence,” he said.
Klimkin also expressed his belief that the innocence of the Ukrainian will be proved.
Ukraine’s Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, for his part, wrote on Twitter that together with Klimkin he had a meeting with Alfano on Markiv’s case: “The conversation was a success. We won’t abandon our soldier!”
As reported, Ukrainian serviceman Markiv was detained in Italy on June 30, 2017 on suspicion of killing Italian photojournalist Andrea Rocchelli near Sloviansk, Donetsk region, in May 2014. The Ukrainian is in the Italian city of Pavia.
The first hearing of the case was held on July 4, however, the consular service of Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said the court did not review the facts of the case and did not rule on pretrial confinement. Ukrainian diplomats visited Markiv in a pretrial holding facility in Milan. Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, meanwhile, reported Ukrainian representatives were not present at court proceedings on July 4.
Media reported that Pavia prosecutors have opened a criminal case into the circumstances of the death of an Italian and Russian journalist during 2014 in Donbas war zone based on testimony from a French journalist. The French journalist said shelling by National Guard unit, in which Markiv served, caused the deaths of the journalists. The French journalist provided what he claimed was video evidence of his claim.
Deputy Head of the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine Yevhen Yenin, in turn, said the Italian photojournalist was killed in an area not under control of Ukrainian forces.
