Investigators have established that former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych personally ordered the crackdown on the Euromaidan protest in Kyiv on November 30, 2013, the Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office (PGO) has announced.
“The investigation has established that the decision to break up the Maidan [student Maidan on November 30, 2013] and to do so by force was made directly by the country’s then-president,” Head of the Prosecutor General’s Office specialized investigations department Serhiy Horbatiuk said at a press briefing in Kyiv on Nov. 17.
It was also established that “an instruction to put this plan into practice was issued to Ukraine’s former Interior Minister [Vitalyi Zakharchenko] and [former] National Security and Defense Council Secretary Andriy Kliuyev,” he added.
He added that these people, in turn, gave their orders to then deputy secretary of the National Security Council Volodymyr Syvkovych, former chief of Kyiv police Valeriy Koriak, and former Head of Kyiv City State Administration (KCSA) Oleksandr Popov.
Berkut riot police were instructed to carry out the dispersal of the Maidan, Horbatiuk said.
The PGO representative said that there were no legal grounds to disperse the Maidan, and there were was no relevant court ruling. The pretext was that the authorities needed to set up a New Year’s tree in the central square of Kyiv.
“As the result of such criminal actions, over 300 people were driven out of the square, 84 people, including 17 students, were beaten up,” Horbatiuk said.
