The leader of the New Forces Movement party and former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili said he was questioned by prosecutors on Jan. 9 regarding the 2014 killings on Independence Square in Kyiv (Maidan Nezalezhnosti), and that two more questioning sessions were set for Jan. 10.
“I was questioned for two hours at a prosecutor’s office yesterday regarding the killings at Maidan,” in light of the allegations “made on an Italian channel […] that I ordered some Georgian snipers to shoot people,” Saakashvili wrote on Facebook on Jan. 10.
The investigators were “very friendly and professional,” but “the entire system is idling,” he wrote.
“The two main cases of that epoch – the poisoning of Viktor Yuschenko and the shootings at Maidan – have still not been investigated. That is, there are still people in the Ukrainian leadership who aren’t interested in these cases being investigated,” Saakashvili wrote.
He wrote that he had “wasted two precious hours for fiction” on Jan. 9 and was facing two more questioning sessions on Jan. 10 morning.
It has been reported that an Italian TV channel showed a documentary in which three Georgians said they had been recruited in 2013 and shot both law-enforcement officers and protesters at Maidan in 2014.
Lawyers for former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych cited these videos as evidence for the defense in proceedings in which he is being tried on charges of high treason.
Kyiv’s Sviatoshynsky District Court has granted a motion filed by the defense for two former members of the Berkut riot police charged with the mass killing of activists in central Kyiv on Feb. 20, 2014, in which they ask for the questioning of two Georgian citizens who are willing to testify that unidentified snipers shot protesters and law-enforcement officers. The Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office agreed that such questioning would be reasonable.
