Ukraine’s former chief of General Staff indicted, arrested for high treason

Retired Colonel General Volodymyr Zamana, the former chief of General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces from February 2012 to February 2014, was arrested on Feb. 25 on a charge of high treason, according to the country’s top law enforcement officials.

Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko said the retired high-ranking army officer was charged of ruining the combat potential of Ukraine’s armed forces amid the imminent threat of Russian invasion. Zamana was an appointee of the pro-Russian former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted in the EuroMaidan revolution in 2014.

More specifically, according to Lutsenko, the general in 2012-2014 disbanded as many as 70 operating military units, notably air defense brigades and divisions, in addition to 19 Air Forces formations.

Ukraine’s chief military prosecutor, Anatoliy Matios, during a briefing in Kyiv said that as part of the drastic cuts, the Ukrainian Air Forces 114th Tactical Aviation Brigade based in the city of Ivano-Frankivsk had been reduced to a single squadron.

“The deactivation of these military units and formations effectively stripped the whole nation of its air defenses,” Matios said.

Moreover, while then-acting legislation on military manpower envisaged a limit of 125,482 persons on active duty service in the Armed Forces, General Zamana reduced the number of available troops by nearly 17,000, which was 5,000 more than demanded by the law.

The prosecution also charges the general with swinging cuts in military recruitment stations, which later undermined the mobilization of Ukrainian troops at the early stage of the war. And according to Matios, Zamana in early 2014 failed to bring the Armed Forces under his command to full combat readiness, despite being aware of an imminent Russian attack in Crimea.

On Zamana’s orders, shortly before the war all Ukrainian troops deployed in Crimea were put under the command of Ukraine’s then-Navy top commander Admiral Yuriy Ilyin, who defected from the Ukrainian military and failed to order any resistance to the Russian invasion.

Zamana coordinated his actions with Russia’s top military leadership with the aim of destroying the Ukrainian army from within, Matios said.

Moreover, according to the military prosecution, “there valid proofs and clues demonstrating that General Zamana has never actually sworn an oath to Ukraine as a military serviceman.” The general’s personal files show that gave his oath on June 20, 1993, but, according to Matios, at that time the future army general was in Russia and gaining his diploma at Russia’s General Staff Academy.

As Matios said this fact was established thanks to an unidentified “patriot” who had intentionally recorded the obviously fake data in Zamana’s papers and therefore gave the inquiry a clue to the general’s void military oath to Ukraine.

Zamana himself was dismissed by Yanukovych from his post as a chief of General Staff on Feb. 18, 2014, reportedly for his refusal to order army troops to disperse protesters amid violent fighting in downtown Kyiv, the culmination point of the Euromaidan Revolution.

After Yanukovych fled to Russia on Feb. 22, 2014, Zamana openly supported the revolution and was appointed by the Verhovna Rada as the parliament’s envoy to the Ministry of Defense.  In March, he retired from active military service.

In late 2018, he was included in the list of Ukrainian citizens sanctioned by Russia.

If found guilty, the retired general could be sentenced to between 10 and 15 years in prison.

On his Facebook page, Prosecutor General Lutsenko added that Zamana’s arrest was the fourth indictment of a top defense official in Ukraine on charges of high treason.

On Feb. 5, Lutsenko also presented a comprehensive report on deep decline of Ukraine’s Armed Forces between 1991 and 2014 due to decades-long massive plundering, drastic personnel cuts, and sell-out of the country’s military power abroad.

In particular, he noted that between 2005 and 2014 only, as many as 832 tanks, 232 helicopters, 202 warplanes, 714 armored vehicles, 4,930 cars, 28,555 artillery and rocket projectiles, and 1.82 million firearms were sold off, in addition to various munitions valued at Hr 560 million ($20.6 million).