The commander and seven of his soldiers from the Interior Ministry’s Tornado volunteer battalion were arrested on June 17 in different cities amid what they allege is a conflict with their superior, Luhansk Oblast police chief Anatoly Naumenko, over smuggling.
Authorities accuse them of committing rape
and torture, Deputy Prosecutor General Anatoly Matios said, adding that prosecutors had video footage of the alleged crimes.
The Luhansk-based Tornado servicemen, including
their deputy commander Mykola Tsukur who wasn’t remanded in custody, accuse
Naumenko of running a protection racket for smuggling cast iron from occupied
territory and said that the arrest is linked to those accusations. The Tornado
battalion is partially made up of former convicts from Donetsk and Luhansk
oblasts.
Luhansk Oblast’s police department
declined to comment when reached by phone. Andriy Demartino, a spokesman for
the Prosecutor General’s Office, was not immediately available for comment by
phone.
Battalion commander Ruslan Onyshchenko was
detained in Dnipropetrovsk by Sokil, a rapid response unit of the police, while
six Tornado soldiers were arrested in Luhansk Oblast by military prosecutors.
An additional soldier was detained in Lviv by the State Security Service,
Mykola Tsukur, a deputy commander of the battalion, and Serhiy Batyashov, a
soldier of the battalion, told the Kyiv Post by phone.
“Some of them are charged with some severe
crimes but they (authorities) don’t have any facts,” Batyashov said. “…This
whole mess is because of trains with smuggled goods.”
Currently Onyshchenko is being held at a
detention facility in Kharkiv, Tsukur said. He added that law enforcement
agencies were planning to search the battalion’s base near Lysychansk.
Tsukur wrote on Facebook that authorities
were preparing to storm the Tornado base and urged fighters of the Right Sector
nationalist group to help them.
Batyashov attributed the arrests to
Tornado fighters stopping what they say is a train transporting 20 railroad
cars with smuggled cast iron worth Hr 17 million from the city of Alchevsk in
territory occupied by Russian-backed separatists to Dnipropetrovsk Oblast on
June 16.
The conflict between Tornado and Naumenko
over smuggling flared up on May 29, when Tsukur alleged on the Shuster Live
television show that Naumenko was running a joint smuggling business with
Kremlin-backed separatists.
On the next day, Tsukur’s abandoned house
in Perevalsk in separatist-controlled territory was burned.
He said later that Naumenko had ordered
the battalion to withdraw to their base when they tried to block a train with
what they said was smuggled coal in April.
Smugglers earn Hr 10 million in net profit
from one coal train between the separatist-held city of Luhansk and the
Ukrainian-controlled town of Shchastia, he claimed.
Alexander Rychkov is a freelance
journalist based in Ukraine. He can be reached at [email protected]. Kyiv
Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected].
