Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office and SBU security service late on Dec. 3 arrested Severion Dangadze and Nazar Sitsinsky, associates of ex-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, the former president’s Movement of New Forces party said on Dec. 4.
Sitsinsky, an activist of the Movement of New Forces, was later released, while Dangadze, head of the party’s Kyiv branch, will be charged on Dec. 4, with a court to consider a detention warrant for him on Dec. 5, the party said. The party says the arrests are part of a political vendetta by President Petro Poroshenko.
The Prosecutor General’s Office and the SBU did not respond to requests for comment.
The Movement of New Forces and the party activists’ lawyers said that the SBU and the prosecutor’s office had refused to tell them what they had been accused of.
Olha Halabala, a senior official in the party, said she suspected the arrests could be linked to what she believes to be a fabricated case into an alleged coup d’etat attempt by Saakashvili.
Saakashvili said on Nov. 29 that, according to his sources, Poroshenko had given an order to arrest him and charge him with plotting a coup d’etat, and could later expel him from Ukraine. The Presidential Administration did not respond to a request for comment.
Moreover, 450 activists linked to Saakashvili and his party are currently under investigation in various criminal cases, Halabala said.
Recently about 100 Movement of New Forces activists were summoned for “a talk” with SBU officials, who told them that Saakashvili would have to leave Ukraine, and the party activists would be jailed if they do not stop their opposition activities, Halabala added.
The party also interpreted the recent arrests as the authorities’ reaction to a march held by Saakashvili and his allies on Dec. 3, when thousands called for impeaching Poroshenko.
Halabala also said that the party’s lawyers would ask the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine to open a criminal case against Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, SBU Chief Vasyl Hrytsak and other top officials, accusing them of creating an organized crime group to spearhead repressions against party activists and bribe judges for that purpose.
Vladimir Fedorin, an ally of Saakashvili and head of the Kakha Bendukidze Free Market Center think-tank, said on Dec. 4 that the Prosecutor General’s Office had opened a criminal investigation against him and his center.
According to a copy of a Nov. 17 instruction given by top prosecutor Kostyantyn Kulik to the SBU and obtained by the Kyiv Post, Kulik asked the security service to investigate Fedorin and the Kakha Bendukidze Free Market Center in connection with a corruption case against ex-President Viktor Yanukovych and his allies. Fedorin dismissed the investigation as illegal nonsense.
The Kakha Bendukidze Free Market Center was set up in 2015 – after Yanukovych’s ouster in 2014 – by Fedorin, Saakashvili and Alexander Danylyuk, who is now finance minister. Danylyuk was an advisor on economic reforms to Yanukovych, while Saakashvili and Fedorin did not hold any government jobs under Yanukovych.
In 2016 the NABU charged Kulik, a deputy head of the Prosecutor General’s Office’s department for international legal cooperation who is investigating the case, of unlawful enrichment of Hr 2 million ($80,000). Kulik has also been lambasted for ties to pro-Russian separatist leader Yevgeny Zhilin, which he admits.
“Poroshenko’s regime has exceeded (ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s) cynicism and lawlessness,” Yuriy Derevyanko, a top official of the Movement of New Forces, said on Dec. 4.
Meanwhile, five Saakashvili supporters have been charged in criminal cases linked to his crossing of the border in September. One of them, Oleksandr Burtsev, is under arrest, and three others are under house arrest.
The authorities say Saakashvili crossed the border illegally, while he denies the charge.
Moreover, seven Georgian associates of Saakashvili, a co-organizer of the protests near the Verkhovna Rada, were deported to their homeland on Nov. 17 and Oct. 21 in what they say was an illegal operation without due process or any court warrants. Several of them say they were beaten.
The authorities deny accusations of wrongdoing.
Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said that one of the deported Georgians, Vano Nadiradze – was arrested on Dec. 3 by Ukrainian and Moldovan border guards as he was trying to cross the border into Ukraine. Nadiradze, a veteran of Ukraine’s war with Russia, had been deported – despite the fact that his deportation had been banned by a court order.
The State Migration Service and Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko said on Oct. 24 that Saakashvili and 20 more Georgians could also be deported.
Three allies of Saakashvili’s Movement of New forces, members of the Liberation movement, were also arrested in two criminal cases in November.
These are Oleksandr Novikov, Anatoly Vynohrodsky and Leonid Lytvynenko – Ukrainian veterans of Russia’s war against Ukraine. They were among the co-organizers of the current protest tent camp in front of the Verkhovna Rada and are members of the Liberation movement, led by Samopomich Party lawmakers Semen Semenchenko and Yegor Sobolev.
Semenchenko and Sobolev argue that the veterans were arrested because of the protests.
A Mariupol court on Dec. 4 released Vynohrodsky from a detention facility and put him under house arrest in Mariupol. However, the court ruled to keep Lytvynenko in custody without the right of bail.
