After one-month absence in Ukraine, lawmaker faces up to 15 years in prison if found guilty on treason charges
Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Jan. 17 left the Kyiv Pechersk District Court a free man after nearly a 12-hour bail hearing on controversial treason charges.
A court secretary emerged after nearly five hours of deliberations by Judge Oleksiy Sokolov to announce that the ruling would be announced at 2 p.m. Kyiv time on Jan. 19.
Poroshenko, who appointed the justice in 2017, denies the allegations. Neither he nor his defense team filed a motion for Sokolov’s recusal during the bail hearing – the judge, likewise, didn’t recuse himself.
Post-Soviet Ukraine’s fifth president, 56, says the case against him is fabricated and has called on his political opponent, President Volodymyr Zelensky, to do more for defense and uniting the country as Russia threatens to further invade the country.
The treason charges involve Poroshenko allegedly facilitating the procurement of power-generating coal from mining companies in Russian-controlled parts of the country’s two easternmost regions of Luhansk and Donetsk in 2014-2015.
State Bureau of Investigations (DBR) investigators contend the money used to pay for coal sourced in the two regions that constitute the Donbas had financed Russian proxy groups that are considered terrorist organizations under Ukrainian legislation.
The first war-time president of 30 years has denied the allegations and has referred to them as “political persecution.”
Volodymyr Demchyshyn, then energy minister during the alleged crime period, is also charged and is currently on an international wanted list, DBR communications adviser Tetyana Sapayn said in a separate briefing on Jan. 17.
Pro-Russian lawmaker Viktor Medvedchuk – currently under house arrest on treason charges – is also a suspect in Poroshenko’s case. Medvedchuk, whose eldest daughter’s godfather is Russian President Vladimir Putin, has dismissed the charges as political pressure.
The bail hearing lasted about 11 hours and commenced on the same morning when the opposition lawmaker returned from what he called a one-month “diplomatic” trip abroad. He maintained stopovers in Turkey, Belgium and Poland were part of an itinerary to garner support amid Russia continuous deployment of soldiers and materiel along Ukraine’s state borders.
Speaking to journalists at Sikorsky Airport in Kyiv, Poroshenko said he came back “to defend” the country against a more superior foe that since 2014 has occupied 7 percent of territory, including the Crimean Peninsula and areas of the easternmost regions of Luhansk and Donetsk.
It is Europe’s only ongoing shooting war that has also displaced over 1.5 million people – the continent’s biggest internal displacement of people since World War II.
Signs of a full-scale war started in April when Russian started massing heavy weaponry and soldiers numbering over 100,000 with an unstated purpose close to Ukraine’s state borders. Their deployment were part of high-level diplomatic talks last week between the West and Moscow. Those discussions ended in deadlock and inconclusively.
Russia has demanded that NATO cease all cooperation with Kyiv, among other demands without offering to withdraw its forces in its neighboring regions. Moldova has against its will had Russian troops stationed in the breakaway region of Transnistria since 1992, in Georgia where two regions were forcibly seized in 2008, and Ukraine.
The Kremlin’s demands include a drastic reconfiguration of Europe’s defense architecture that would revert to how the continent looked in 1997 when most of Eastern Europe didn’t move westward and join NATO.
“We have to unite to show that Ukraine is strong and is able to stand against [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s aggression,” said Poroshenko, who left the country exactly one month ago as a DBR investigator attempted to serve him with a summons for questioning outside the Verkhovna Rada parliamentary building.
He faces a maximum prison sentence of 15 years if found guilty.
Poroshenko was seen speeding away in a vehicle during the attempted summons delivery, a DBR video showed. The agency, which investigates high-level political crime, alleges Poroshenko had evaded justice. It also accuses him of ignoring a subpoena to appear in court at the Sikorsky airport when Poroshenko arrived.
In court, the lawmaker’s defense team, Illya Novikov and Ihor Holovan, filed motions in court that mostly related to the criminal procedural code.
Since he wasn’t “technically” served, they and Poroshenko argued that he shouldn’t be named as a defendant in the case.
Another motion was to return nine volumes “of paper waste” back to prosecutors, Poroshenko said when addressing the court. Prosecutors had presented reams of paper consisting of evidence to which the lawmaker’s defense objected for not being given time to examine them.
Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko speaks in the Kyiv Pechersk District Court on Jan. 17 during his bail hearing.
Credit: Stas Yurchenko / Graty
As a result, a two-hour adjournment was announced and lasted 30 minutes more.
One more motion alleged procedures that none of the plaintiff’s main documents were signed by chief prosecutor Iryna Veneditkova. For example, she was on a one-day leave on Dec. 20 when a subordinate signed a notice of suspicion to question the former president.
“We don’t even know if Venediktova even knows about this case…since her name is nowhere to be seen on the documents,” his defense team argued in court.
Poroshenko’s lawyers also questioned why the Russian-installed proxy administrations in the occupied parts of eastern Ukraine, known by their acronyms of DNR and LNR, are mentioned in documents when they aren’t recognized by Ukraine. They allegedly are the beneficiaries of the coal-buying scheme of which Poroshenko is being accused.
“These are areas temporarily occupied by Russia, the DNR and LNR is conjured by Russia,” Poroshenko said.
A report by Skhemy (Schemes), an investigative news project run by Radio Liberty’s Ukrainian service in cooperation with UA: Pershy television, said “Russian officials” had initiated the coal purchasing plan with Medvedchuk as the middle man. Serhiy Kuzyar, a businessman with close ties to the occupied administrations of the Donbas, is also accused.
In 2019, Zelensky ascended the presidency in landslide victory over Poroshenko who was elected in May 2014 when Russian had illegally annexed Crimea and invaded the Donbas.
His assets, whose net worth is $860 million based on Bloomberg’s estimates, were frozen by the same court on Dec. 6 that heard his bail trial.
Prosecutors have announced they’re seeking a bail worth the equivalent of $37 million or 60 days in pre-trial jail.
However, after a law was passed in September to reduce the influence of tycoons that goes into effect this March, Poroshenko transferred some of his assets to his son, Oleksiy Poroshenko.
They include interests in one of Europe’s biggest confectionaries – Roshen – and share stakes in two national television channels.
As Ukraine faces the threat of Russia escalating war, the group of seven industrialized democracies known as G7, tweeted on Jan. 16 to say that they “strongly united in support of Ukraine at this tense time” while calling on “all political leaders in Ukraine to show similar unity and resolve.”
