A court in Russia's southern city of Yessentuki has ordered that Ukrainian ultra-nationalistic Right Sector coordinator Oleksandr Muzychko, who is suspected of committing crimes against Russian federal forces in Chechnya in the 1990s, be remanded into custody in absentia, a court spokesman told Interfax.
“A custodial term has been imposed on Muzychko in absentia as a measure of restraint,” he said.
Russian Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin said earlier that the committee’s North Caucasus branch had opened a criminal case against Ukrainian citizen Muzychko, also known as Sashko Biliy, on the counts of “forming a permanent armed group (gang) in order to attack Russian citizens and leading it.”
“A resolution assigning a defendant’s status to Muzychko and putting him on the international most wanted list was issued on March 7, 2014,” he said.
“The criminal case was launched in response to information received in the course of a criminal inquiry into an armed clash between illegal armed groups led by Shamil Basayev and Khattab and soldiers of Pskov’s Airborne Troops division near the village of Ulus-Kert in the Republic of Chechnya in 2000,” he said.
A member of the Ukrainian National Assembly-Ukrainian National Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO), who fought on the militants’ side in Chechnya from 1994-2000, was questioned as part of this inquiry, Markin said.
According to this man, he joined UNA-UNSO in 1991 and got acquainted with other members of this organization, including its leader Muzychko, during a visit to an UNA-UNSO training base in the Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk.
In 1994-1995, Muzychko and other UNA-UNSO members fought on the militants’ side against federal forces during a raid on Grozny, Markin said.
“The man interviewed by us said that in January 1995 he repeatedly saw Muzychko brutally torture and kill captured servicemen of the Russian federal forces. Throughout the aforementioned period, Muzychko himself tortured and subsequently killed at least 20 federal soldiers held in captivity, demanding different information from them,” he said.
