You're reading: Yarema: PGO combines all former authorities’ alleged crimes including Maidan shootings into one proceeding

The Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine (PGO) has combined all crimes, which former authorities, including ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, were charged with into a single case. 

The alleged crimes began with the increase of presidential power in 2010 and end with the shootings of activists during Euromaidan in February 2014. The crimes are being investigated as part of a case into “state treason” and “creation of a criminal organization,” Ukrainian Prosecutor General Vitaliy Yarema has said.

“At the initial stage, starting from July, when criminal proceedings were opened, they were investigated separately. Today, based on consultations we’re conducting with both lawyers of the ‘Heavenly Hundred’ and leading legal experts, we have decided to combine all these proceedings into one and qualify it as state treason and attempted [crime] against the state system of Ukraine, which is Article 109 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, as well as Article 255 – the creation of a criminal organization by Yanukovych,” he said in an interview with Channel 5 on Dec. 18.

According to him, the proceeding covers from 2010, when “Yanukovych pressured the Constitutional Court to commit certain illegal actions, connected to the so-called ‘titushky’ [thugs], i.e. when the parliamentary coalition was made up of separate MPs instead of factions.”

“This decision was made by the Constitutional Court, then the next decision was the change of the state system, and finally – embezzlement, a number of other crimes, persecution of politicians Yuriy Lutsenko and Yulia Tymoshenko, and what resulted in the tragic events [that] ended on Feb. 20, 2014,” Yarema noted.

He noted that the proceeding led by Director of the Special Investigations Department of the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine Serhiy Horbatiuk, who was appointed to the position on December 18. “Within [the proceeding], all the crimes committed in Cherkasy, Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk and Sumy are being investigated separately. These separate crimes [include] sending the so-called ‘titushky’ to Kyiv, interference with employees of the State Road Traffic Inspectorate, and drawing up fake protocols. These are the crimes that are being investigated separately today, but within a single proceeding,” the Prosecutor General explained.

Yarema said that according to the law, the PGO has the right to investigate a criminal proceeding for one year. “Thus, every crime committed will be investigated separately. The joint criminal proceeding in the possession of the department director will summarize the information, and in the end it will be the crown of this investigation,” he noted.

According to Yarema, after all necessary information have been gathered and registered, Yanukovych and his accomplices will be tried in absentia, if by then former president and his accomplices aren’t extradited to Ukraine from Russia.

The Prosecutor General also urged that the investigation be allowed to conclude in its own time. He used the raid on the TV tower in Vilnius in 1991, when many people were injured, as an example, as the related criminal investigation finished only in 2014. “It’s very important that the case shouldn’t fall apart. As with the financial potential that Yanukovych and his circle have, they will hire the best lawyers and do everything possible to make the case fall apart within these years,” he said.