Trump on joining Normandy talks
U.S. President Donald Trump has said he isn’t averse to joining talks with Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia aimed at ending the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Mr. Trump told Voice of America on September 9 in Washington that he’d join the talks, known as the Normandy format, if the participants needed him. “I believe the fact that the exchange of prisoners between Russia and Ukraine took place… is a very big step, and a very positive [one],” the president said. France, Germany and Ukraine have called for talks to take place by the end of this month. Russia has said it is ready to meet once “concrete steps” are taken before the meeting. The last round of Normandy talks took place in 2016. Ukraine blames Moscow for stoking the conflict in eastern Ukraine where Russia-backed militants have fought government forces since April 2014. Russia denies involvement and has portrayed the war as an internal affair. More than 13,000 have been killed in the conflict, according to the United Nations. (RFE/RL, based reporting by RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service and Voice of America)
Zelenskyy to visit U.S. later this month
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will visit the United States on September 23 to attend the 74th session of the U.N. General Assembly in New York. Speaking to journalists in Kyiv on September 9, Foreign Affairs Minister Vadym Prystaiko said a specific date on when Mr. Zelenskyy would meet U.S. President Donald Trump hasn’t been set yet. Mr. Prystaiko said the Ukrainian president “had a good conversation with U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence” in Warsaw recently, where a bilateral meeting between Presidents Trump and Zelenskyy was discussed. He said Mr. Zelenskyy has an invitation to not “simply visit the United States [to attend the U.N. General Assembly], but to also visit Washington and meet with the president and government of the United States.” The minister said there are different dates being examined for a visit to Washington. “We are working on it now,” he added. In July, Ukraine’s presidential office said Mr. Zelenskyy had a phone conversation with Mr. Trump. The 74th session of the U.N. General Assembly is scheduled for September 17-30. (RFE/RL, based on reporting by RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service)
Rada OKs presidential impeachment bill
Ukraine’s Parliament has adopted a bill spelling out procedures for a presidential impeachment. The law was backed by 245 lawmakers at a second reading on September 10, immediately after the text was passed a first time. Under the new legislation, the Verkhovna Rada initiates impeachment proceedings, which must be approved by the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court, and then passed by three-quarters of lawmakers. Ruslan Stefanchuk, the president’s representative to Parliament, said the vote showed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is committed to keeping his election pledge to clean up Ukrainian politics and tackle corruption. However, opponents said the law was rushed through without proper consultation and that the text itself was so convoluted as to be meaningless. “In fact, it is only a facade of reform that does not change anything,” said Roman Lozinskyy of the Holos (Voice) party. Mr. Zelenskyy, a 41-year-old comedian-turned-politician who has pledged to “break the system” in Ukrainian politics, was elected in April. His Servant of the People party then took a solid majority of 254 parliamentary seats in the 450-seat legislature following snap general elections in July. Last week, lawmakers voted to strip members of the chamber of immunity from prosecution. (RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, with reporting by AP and Reuters)
Dutch prosecutors question Tsemakh
Dutch prosecutors questioned Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) “person of interest” Volodymyr Tsemakh before he left for Moscow as part of a Russian-Ukrainian prisoner exchange on September 7, Dutch Foreign Minister Stef Blok told his country’s Parliament in a statement the same day. He said that, “up until” the prisoner exchange during which Kyiv and Moscow each swapped 35 prisoners, Dutch prosecutors “had done everything possible through judicial channels to keep Tsemakh available for the [MH17 Joint Investigative Team] investigation,” Mr. Blok told the Dutch parliament. In response, Kyiv had promised to postpone the exchange for some time in order to give Dutch prosecutors an opportunity to question Mr. Tsemakh, and “this has happened,” Mr. Blok said. He didn’t say for how long or what information, if any, was divulged during the interrogation of Mr. Tsemakh, who reportedly oversaw an air-defense unit among Russia-backed separatists in a town near where MH17 was shot down with what Dutch-led investigators have concluded was a Russian-made Buk missile system in July 2014. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters at Kyiv’s Boryspil Airport the same news after greeting the 35 freed Ukrainian prisoners, according to the Interfax news agency. Mr. Zelenskyy said he did everything possible to ensure Mr. Tsemakh would be questioned by the Dutch and that the process “was complicated… I was scared that the [prisoner] exchange would fall apart because of that.” All 298 people on board MH17 were killed flying over territory held by Russia-backed separatists en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. Three Russians and a Ukrainian were indicted over the downing of MH17, and court proceedings in the Netherlands are scheduled for March. But the four suspects are most likely to be tried in absentia. Russia called the charges against its citizens “absolutely unfounded” and said the investigators had based their findings on “dubious sources of information,” accusing them of rejecting evidence that the Kremlin had provided. Moscow has also aired its own theories on the shoot-down but never provided solid evidence. Mr. Tsemakh, a Ukrainian citizen, is not one of the four indicted. In an exclusive interview with Interfax on September 7, the chief of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), Ivan Bakanov, said the exclusion of Mr. Tsemakh on the prisoner exchange list would have led to “the cessation of negotiations with Russia.” The degree to which Moscow was allegedly adamant on getting Mr. Tsemakh was “yet another confirmation of Russia’s involvement in the shoot-down of MH17,” Mr. Bakanov said. The Russian Embassy in the Netherlands said its diplomatic mission hadn’t received any extradition requests from Dutch authorities, according to a social media statement on September 7. The SBU apprehended Mr. Tsemakh on June 27 in the Donetsk region in the city of Snizhne, which is held by Moscow-backed separatists and is 20 kilometers from the Russian border. According to the Dutch-led investigation, the Buk missile was fired six kilometers south of Snizhne. TV footage obtained by Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA, showed Mr. Tsemakh claiming that he was in charge of an anti-aircraft unit and that he helped hide the missile system in July 2014. He also shows the interviewer where the civilian airliner fell. (RFE/RL, with reporting by Interfax, Censor.net, Dutch News, and Nos.nl)
Three charged in Crimean Tatar’s fatal kidnapping
Ukrainian authorities say they have identified the suspected kidnappers of a Crimean Tatar activist who was abducted in broad daylight more than five years ago as he protested Moscow’s seizure of Crimea – and who turned up dead weeks later. Ukrainian prosecutors alleged on September 10 that two members of a pro-Russian militia were acting on orders from a Russian military veteran when they abducted Reshat Ametov, 39, on a central square in the Crimean capital of Symferopol in March 2014 as he staged a one-man protest against Russia’s military incursion. Two weeks later, Mr. Ametov’s body was discovered in a forest 60 kilometers east of Symferopol, and he is widely seen in Ukraine and among Crimean Tatars as an early martyr to the cause of opposing Russia’s takeover. “Thanks to the cooperation of the prosecutor’s office, the police and human rights organizations, the crime was solved today,” Hunduz Mamedov, Kyiv’s top prosecutor for Crimea, said in a statement. Kyiv’s police directorate responsible for Crimea identified the two suspected kidnappers as Oleksander Bahlyuk, 44, and Oleksander Rudenko, 33. They are accused of carrying out the abduction under the direction of Yevgeny Skripnik, 53, described by Ukraine as a retired Russian serviceman who later took part in Russia-backed military operations against Kyiv’s forces in eastern Ukraine. Ukraine has issued international warrants for the arrest of the three men, Ukrainian prosecutors said. They have been charged with aggravated kidnapping, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Ukrainian authorities conducted the investigation remotely, as they do not have access to Crimean territory, which Russia seized in March 2014 after sending in troops and staging a referendum deemed illegitimate by 100 members of the United Nations. Video of Ametov’s abduction was published online weeks after the incident. It shows him being frog-marched into a car just meters in front of a man wearing a red armband typical of so-called “self-defense” units that coordinated with Russian forces in Crimea at the time. It was the last time Mr. Ametov was known to have been seen alive. In a statement in March, the U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission to Ukraine said it had “received information that indicates Crimean self-defense’s involvement in Ametov’s disappearance and killing.” The mission told RFE/RL at the time that its information was based on interviews with “a number of people,” including Mr. Ametov’s relatives and activists at pro-Ukrainian rallies at the time of his disappearance, as well as an analysis of the video of his abduction. In 2017, then-President Petro Poroshenko posthumously awarded Mr. Ametov the nation’s highest title – Hero of Ukraine. (Crimea Desk, RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service)
Ombudswoman on release of more prisoners
Ukrainian and Russian officials are discussing the possible “liberation” of 113 Ukrainian nationals jailed in Russia, according to Ukrainian ombudswoman Lyudmyla Denisova. In a televised interview aired on September 10, Ms. Denisova said that she was not sure when exactly the 113 Ukrainian citizens – including 89 Crimean Tatars – would be released and returned to Ukraine, but she expressed hope it would happen by the end of the year. Russia and Ukraine exchanged a total of 70 prisoners on September 7 in a move praised by the West as an opportunity to improve tense relations between Kyiv and Moscow. The 35 Ukrainian citizens returned to Ukraine included only one Crimean Tatar activist, Edem Bekirov. His lawyer, Nikolai Polozov, told RFE/RL that his client was released due to his extremely poor health. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told an RFE/RL correspondent on September 7 that the Ukrainians remaining in Russian custody would be liberated during what he called “the second stage of the prisoners’ swap.” He added, “We are not talking about a year, two, or three years. We want to do it as soon as possible.” Refat Chubarov, the chairman of the Crimean Tatars’ self-governing body, the Mejlis, alleged that Russia is trying to exclude Crimean Tatars from any prisoner swap in order to “cut off everything linked to the annexation of Crimea.” Russia took control of Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014 after sending in troops and staging a referendum dismissed as illegal by at least 100 countries. The Russian-imposed authorities in the Black Sea peninsula have since prosecuted dozens of Crimean Tatars on various charges. Rights groups and Western governments have denounced what they describe as a campaign of repression targeting members of the Turkic-speaking Crimean Tatar community and others who have come out against Moscow’s takeover of the region. (Crimea Desk, RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, with reporting by 1+1 TV)
NBU chief mulls seeking political asylum
Ukraine’s former central bank chief, Valeria Gontareva, says she is not ruling out the possibility of applying for political asylum in Britain where she currently resides after experiencing an alleged hit-and-run attack and her daughter-in-law’s car being set on fire. “If our country is going to treat its own reformer like dirt, to politically and physically persecute, then I’ll have no choice but to ask for political asylum,” Ms. Gontareva told the Ukrainian news site Liga on September 9. On September 5, her daughter-in-law’s car was set on fire in Kyiv. On August 26, a car ran over Ms. Gontareva’s foot in London, sending her to the hospital with broken bones. She called the two incidents “part of the same link in a chain” of events and attributed them to her tenure as chairwoman of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) in 2014-2018. In less than four years, Ms. Gontareva shuttered 80 banks whose owners were essentially using them as their personal piggy banks by engaging in pervasive third-party lending, including Privatbank, then the country’s biggest private lender. International auditors had found a $5.5 billion hole in Privatbank’s balance sheet so the NBU nationalized it with taxpayers’ money. It was co-owned by billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky whom Ms. Gontareva accuses of threatening her and of being behind the incidents in London and Kyiv. In previous interviews, Mr. Kolomoisky – a former business associate of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy – has said he did nothing wrong at Privatbank and that there is no evidence tying him to the events involving Ms. Gontareva and her family. Ms. Gontareva said she started receiving veiled threats from Mr. Kolomoisky three years ago and public threats in her direction a year ago. Specifically, she accused the oligarch of threatening her in an interview she gave to BBC in June. “I want this to be clear to everyone. If something happens to me, I want it so that everyone knows why,” Ms. Gontareva said. Authorities are investigating Ms. Gontareva in two criminal probes. In one of the cases she is a witness; in the other she is a suspect under investigation for abuse of office as a central bank official. She hasn’t appeared for questioning in Ukraine, calling the cases “fabricated” and aimed at applying pressure on her for her role in nationalizing Privatbank. On August 27, a Kyiv court granted authorities permission to “forcibly” bring her in for questioning, although she has lived in Britain for a year as a research fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. “We were carrying out reforms and are now suffering because of that,” Ms. Gontareva said last week. “There’s no other country in the world where reformists are being persecuted in such a way. I understand when it’s political persecution – that happens everywhere. But this is about exploding cars,” she said last week. (RFE/RL, with reporting by Liga.net)
U.S. to help Ukraine prep for energy shortage
The U.S. Department of Energy is sending a delegation to Ukraine to help the country address a possible energy shortage this winter as Russia seeks to end gas transit. The U.S. energy specialists will work with Ukrainian counterparts to study the country’s energy generation, transmission, and distribution and develop a “winter action plan,” the Department of Energy said in a statement on September 6. The announcement follows a meeting between U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry and members of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s administration on August 31 in Warsaw to discuss energy security. The delegation was requested by the Ukrainians, the statement said. Russia is seeking to launch two new pipelines next year to carry gas to Europe via Germany and Turkey. The pipelines would eliminate Russia’s need to ship gas through Ukraine to meet European needs, potentially leaving the country short of energy in the winter. “This team will help ensure that the Zelenskyy administration and government of Ukraine is best equipped to ensure Ukraine is never again vulnerable to threats of supply disruption from Russia,” the statement said. Natural gas accounts for about a quarter of Ukraine’s annual energy consumption, according to a 2018 report by PwC. Coal and nuclear account for more than half. Mr. Perry was accompanied on his trip to Warsaw with executives from U.S. companies involved in the nuclear, coal, and gas industries. Russia cut off gas to Ukraine in the winters of 2006 and 2009 amid price disputes. Russia for years had sold gas to Ukraine at discounted prices to ensure loyalty to the Kremlin, but that changed as Kyiv pursued a policy of closer relations with the West. Ukraine imports about one-third of its gas needs. The country has struggled to increase its own domestic gas production though it sits atop large reserves. Ukraine is not expected to produce enough gas to meet its own needs until the end of the next decade. (RFE/RL)
U.N. secretary-general to report on Crimea
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will deliver his first report on the human rights situation in Russian-annexed Crimea at the international body’s next general assembly, which opens on September 17. The report, published on August 2, says it is “limited to information collected through remote monitoring” because Russia would not give workers from the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) access to the occupied Ukrainian peninsula. Russia rejects the U.N.’s resolutions that call Russia an occupying force. Conditions on the peninsula allow for “abductions and unacknowledged detention” as well as “enforced disappearance,” a violation of rights to life, liberty and security, the report stated. OHCHR identified 42 victims – 38 men and four women – of enforced disappearance in Crimea since March 2014. “Torture and ill-treatment of individuals” in law enforcement detention centers was reported. Most victims were men charged with extremism, affiliation with groups banned in Russia, sabotage, or “anti-Russian” activities. Torture was used to obtain confessions in nearly all accounts OHCHR received. In terms of rights to maintain one’s identity, the OHCHR “documented a narrowing space for manifestations of Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar identities and enjoyment of the respective cultures in Crimea.” On freedom of religion, the U.N. agency noted that the former Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate lost its legal status because it didn’t register with the Russian authorities. Other Churches like the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church faced obstacles to register. Congregations of Jehovah’s Witnesses lost their right to operate in 2017. Charges have been pressed selectively on people in “ways that undermine freedom of expression in Crimea,” the report said. Individuals who’ve expressed dissenting views toward the authorities in any form of media, including online social media, have been deemed “extremist.” Members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities have been denied permits to publicly assemble. (RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service)
Tool to help prevent company ‘raiding’
Ukraine’s newly installed government has tweaked the state-run registry of legal entities to publish information on a daily basis, a change that the chief coordinator of the Cabinet of Ministers says will help prevent the theft of businesses known as “raiding.” In a September 2 Facebook post, Minister of the Cabinet of Ministers Dmytro Dubilet emphasized the measure because “raiding occurs when company ownership or directors quickly change when the true owners aren’t aware of it.” Due to weak property rights and crooked judges, corporate raiding in Ukraine is seen as a huge impediment to foreign investment. Earlier, the company registry was updated weekly, allowing for ownership or management changes to be made with the use of the country’s corrupt judicial system and other means like barring shareholders from attending meetings. Mr. Dubilet noted that a week’s time was enough for the corporate raider to shift a company’s assets beyond the reach of the true owner or quickly sell them to a third party. He said the database is freely accessible on five websites, including the state-owned Privatbank that was nationalized when auditors found a $6 billion hole on its balance sheet. Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky was a former co-shareholder of the bank and is where Mr. Dubilet was previously the chief technical officer in charge of information technology. Notices of company takeovers can be made electronically to the government’s anti-raiding commission through the iGov portal of government services, Mr. Dubilet noted. “Earlier, to file a complaint, you had to first hire a lawyer who would gather a pile of documents… Moreover, while the commission was processing these documents through the chain of offices, two weeks could elapse,” he said. (RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service)