© EPA/ROMAN PILIPEY
"You know, in Ukraine we have National Security and Defense Council Secretary Turchinov. Everybody calls him the 'bloody priest.' He was a Young Communist League functionary once. Then he turned into a frenzied oppositionist and a church priest. It was he who organized all that. He, Pashinsky and the current parliamentary speaker Parubiy the Maidan's commandant," Klyuyev said.
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All the others, he went on to say, "were used later - (Arseny) Yatsenyuk, (Oleg) Tyagnibok and (Vitaly) Klitschko. Klyuyev said all those men were used as ignorant pawns. So was the Right Sector (outlawed in Russia). It was used as a pawn, too. At first Right Sector activists even detained the snipers who were shooting at both civilians and police."
Klyuyev said it was Pashinsky who had brought "two groups of snipers: one from Georgia and the other from the Baltics" to Kiev. He referred to a transcript of the interrogation of one of the suspected snipers from the "Georgian group," conducted by Right Sector members who had detained him.
"That man, Vladimir Dakhnadze, was caught and questioned by the Right Sector. He confessed he had come to Kiev to make money. At a certain point Pashinsky arrived and took him away from the Right Sector," Klyuyev testified.
He also told court President Yanukovich was under tremendous pressure from the European Union and the United States at that time.
"Visitors were coming to see the president every day. As soon as he got to work, a foreign delegation would come to busy him for two hours. Then another would follow the next minute. They kept coming in an incessant flow, giving him no chance to do his job. I would call it a 'hand-binding tactic.' First they came to us and then would go to speak in front of the Maidan crowd. It was outright intervention in the internal affairs of the state," Klyuyev said.
Yanukovich's defense initiates criminal case over Ukrainian Prosecutor General
Legal defense of the former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich has turned to the Office of the Prosecutor General with a demand to bring on a criminal case against Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko for the crime he has committed, lawyer Vitaly Serdyuk told TASS.
"I confirm the filing of petitions," he said, adding that defenders were accusing Lutsenko of forgery and encroachment on the right to defense committed by a group of persons in collusion.
"Lutsenko and the prosecutors shoved a ruling through court on arresting our customer and stuffed the petition with the misleading information that Yanukovich was allegedly hiding away from court, although a full package of documents on the customer's absence for a valid reason had been filed previously," Serdyuk said.
He cited the risks for the former President's life in Ukraine as a valid excuse, adding that there could be no consequences under law if good cause was present.
"Still they concealed these things and miscarriage of justice took place as a result of it," Serdyuk said.
Apart from Lutsenko, the defenders also plan to bring on criminal charges for Ukraine's Chief Military Prosecutor Ruslan Kravchenko. They filed a similar petition with the Specialized Anticorruption Prosecutorial Office.
On December 15, a court in Kiev issued permission to the Office of the Prosecutor General to arrest Yanukovich on charges of high treason. Vitaly Serdyuk said on the same day the defense would appeal the ruling in the courts of various instances up to the European Court for Human Rights.
Comment: Maybe more truths will come out from these cases: Ex-Ukrainian lawmaker requests Moscow court to recognize Kiev regime change as coup d'état