Vitaliy Serdiuk, a lawyer for former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, insists that there is no official confirmation that the Russian authorities received a letter from his client with the request to use Russian troops in Ukraine, dated March 1, 2014, with the prosecutor’s office calling their evidence legally void.
At a meeting of the Obolonsky District Court of Kyiv on the Yanukovych treason case on Dec. 14, Serdiuk provided as written evidence an answer of the Prosecutor General’s Office of Russia in response to a request from the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine stating that neither the administration of the Russian president nor the Federation Council of the Russian Federal Assembly received or considered any statement from Yanukovych with the request to use the Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine.
He also submitted to court a reply of the Russian Federation Council of April 28, stating that it received no applications from Yanukovych, starting from Feb. 24, 2014, as well as remarks by Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov that the Russian presidential administration did not receive any letter from Yanukovych on March 1, 2014.
“The defense team does not deny there was a letter itself, or rather its copy. Russian President Putin confirmed the existence of a letter that was distributed by the media on March 3. But one thing is to have a letter, and another thing is official confirmation of the receipt. The submission of an official original statement from one body to another is not identical with the existence of the statement as a whole. The statement existed, but it was not formally received by the Russian presidential administration and the Federation Council, and was not considered by these authorities at all,” Serdiuk said.
A prosecutor of the Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine, Maksym Krym, in turn, noted that these arguments by the defense team were completely refuted by the court-examined video of a meeting of the Russian Federation Council on March 1, 2014.
“The reply of the Prosecutor General’s Office of Russia is legally void, and it runs counter to the official statements of the Russian president, representatives of the Federation Council and other persons. Only after a direct notice of suspicion and the preparation of the indictment against Viktor Yanukovych, all bodies of the Russian Federation, in unison, began allegedly to refute the fact of such an appeal,” he said.
In his opinion, there is no evidence in support of the phrases given in this answer by the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office.
“There are no protocols of interrogations of Mr. Putin, nor taking any explanations from him. There are no inquiries or answers directly from the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation. There are no copies of the corresponding registration books. All this is done, in our opinion, in order to justify their accomplice [Yanukovych] in waging an aggressive war,” he said.
