Yanukovych’s lawyers hurry Kyiv court with organizing his questioning in “Berkut” inquiry

KYIV. July 21 (Interfax) – The defense lawyers of Ukraine’s ex-president Viktor Yanukovych will do everything for his questioning, via video link, to be organized as quickly as possible by Kyiv’s Svyatoshinsky Court, which is hearing the case against five former officers of the Interior Ministry’s Berkut special-forces unit, lawyer Vitaly Serdiuk said.

“We’ve come a very long way to get here. There has been a massive lie from our procedural opponents that it is the Justice Ministry who decided to question Yanukovych, that the Svyatoshinsky court ruled that Ukraine demands his questioning… In reality, we spent the whole year demanding this, gradually making our way to it. And as a result of all our efforts the court was compelled to act as required by the law, rule in our favor and order questioning. The initiative was in fact coming from Yanukovych’s and Berkut members’ defense teams,” the lawyer told Interfax on Thursday.

The court set the deadline for the questioning, December 2016, but the lawyers will try their best to make it happen sooner, Serdiuk said.

Once the Ukrainian Justice Ministry sends relevant documentation to the Russian Justice Ministry, the latter must determine which court in Russia will participate in the video conference, the two courts must set a date, and the questioning will then be carried out, the lawyer said. “Most likely, it will be a court close to his whereabouts in Rostov-on-Don,” he said.

Only about eight months ago, Yanukovych’s defense lawyers, at the request of the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office, passed it information with their client’s exact residence address in Rostov-on-Don, the lawyer said. “The whole time we demanded that investigators visit this address for conducting their inquiries, but all this time the Prosecutor General’s Office would decline, on invented formal grounds, to conduct this questioning. The same is also true of the Maidan case, the UkrTelecom case and the Mezhyhirya case,” the lawyer said.

[featured image is file photo from different occasion]