Among charges: sponsoring terrorist organization and stoking separatism
KYIV – Ukraine’s authorities on July 30 detained Oleksandr Yefremov, an associate of Viktor Yanukovych. He is the highest ranking associate of the disgraced ex-president to have been arrested to date.
Two days later, Kyiv’s Pechersk District Court ruled that the former leader of the Party of Regions parliamentary faction be held for 60 days He faces charges of sponsoring a terrorist organization in the Luhansk Oblast and stoking separatism. The 61-year-old former Luhansk Oblast governor also is accused of abuse of office in seizing the large state-owned Luhansk-vuhillia coal mine.
Mr. Yefremov’s defense will appeal the court ruling about his pre-trial detention, one of his lawyers, Oleksandr Lysak, told the online news outlet Ukrayinska Pravda. If found guilty, Mr. Yefremov, considered the most influential person in the Luhansk Oblast until early 2014, when Mr. Yanukovych fled the country, faces up to 15 years in prison.
Mr. Yefremov has denied the charges.
The Opposition Bloc, a parliamentary faction to which many former Party of Regions lawmakers belong and which Donald Trump’s presidential campaign adviser Paul Manafort helped create, according to a July 31 report in The New York Times, called his arrest “political pressure and repression,” in a statement published on the party’s website.
Contrary to his denials, Mr. Yefremov has admitted to “sponsoring” and “financing” the Kremlin-backed separatist movement Luhansk People’s Republic in numerous interviews he has given to television channels that the group controls. Ukraine’s government has branded the separatist group a terrorist organization along with the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, a group also supported by Russia, according to Kyiv and Western governments, including the U.S.
One such interview was briefly published on the GTRK LNR channel operated by combined Russian-separatist elements on July 30 – the same day that Mr. Yefremov was detained at Boryspil International Airport while attempting to board a Vienna-bound plane.
“I finance separatism… I talk about this, and openly do this,” Mr. Yefremov told the interviewer at the 1:38 minute mark of the interview. In the same interview Mr. Yefremov didn’t deny having had Valery Bolotov, the first self-proclaimed leader of the Luhansk separatists (until August 2014), in his employ as a driver.
The video disappeared from the separatist channel’s website 30 minutes after it was published, but not before other Internet users saved and shared it on YouTube and other social media platforms.
Mr. Yefremov’s former legislative colleague, two-term Party of Regions lawmaker Volodymyr Landik, told Radio Liberty that the suspect in March 2014 had organized the seizure of government buildings in Luhansk.
In an interview with Radio Liberty, Mr. Landik said Mr. Yefremov ordered then-Luhansk Oblast Governor Valeriy Holenko to bus young Russians in to seize the regional administration and state security service buildings.
“We filmed everything. From where they came, who distributed truncheons, how they dispersed people, beat [them], entered the administrative [building], and at night returned to Russia on the same buses,” Mr. Landik said.
Armed groups also seized government buildings in the neighboring Donetsk Oblast at the same time. The Moscow-engineered armed uprising, including Russia’s annexation of Crimea in February 2014, culminated in Ukraine losing 7 percent of its territory. The Russian-provoked war has killed nearly 10,000 people and displaced 2.2 million people so far, according to data provided by the U.N.
Mr. Landik, also a Luhansk Oblast native, said he handed over what evidence he has to the Security Service of Ukraine, and prosecutors are partially basing their case on materials that he has presented.
Prosecutors have also noted that they will attempt a plea bargain with Mr. Yefremov and offer a reduced sentence if he cooperates, especially if he names the alleged Russians with whom he coordinated separatist activity.
Political consultant Taras Berezovets, director of Berta Communications and founder of the policy center Ukrainian Institute for the Future, said Mr. Yefremov’s arrest was belated.
“The detention of the LPR spiritual torch-bearer Oleksandr Yefremov by the Prosecutor’s Office is wonderful,” Mr. Berezovets, a native of Crimea and author of a book on Russia’s annexation of the peninsula, said. “The ‘father of Russian democracy’ and one of the pillars of the Yanukovych regime should’ve been sitting [in a prison cell] for a long time now. Yefremov and his henchmen have the blood of thousands of Ukrainian citizens on their hands.”
Mr. Yefremov defended the policies of Mr. Yanukovych as long as he remained in office. He had promoted the controversial passing of the so-called dictatorship laws on January 16, 2014 that severely curbed civil liberties and which were perceived as a clamp-down on the Euro-Maidan Revolution. The legislative package was passed by a show of hands without the use of Parliament’s computerized voting system.
However, when Mr. Yanukovych abandoned office, Mr. Yefremov denounced his former boss and fellow party member. He laid the blame for bloodshed that saw more than 100 unarmed protesters and over a dozen police officers killed on the former president, who evaded authorities by fleeing to neighboring Russia.
Authorities first detained Mr. Yefremov on February 14, 2015, for abuse of office in getting the repressive laws passed the previous year. He was also accused of “inciting ethnic hatred.” Former Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin failed to secure a conviction. Mr. Yefremov was released on bail in February 2015, and by the spring of 2016 authorities had given his passport back to him and refunded the bail money.
He was a devoted Communist for much of his life before Ukraine re-surfaced as an independent state in 1991. When Ukraine broke from the Soviet Union, Mr. Yefremov was the head of a local branch of the Communist Youth League, or Komsomol.
According to BBC Ukraine, he became deputy governor of the Luhansk Oblast in 1997 before heading the industrial coal-mining region for seven years until 2005. After the Orange Revolution, he joined the Party of Regions and allied himself with Mr. Yanukovych, who had lost the presidential election to Viktor Yushchenko.
While heading the Luhansk branch of the future ruling party, Mr. Yefremov got elected to the Verkhovna Rada in 2006. Thereafter, his political weight grew as he got re-elected in snap elections in 2007 and again in 2012. When Mr. Yanukovych ascended to the presidency in 2010, Mr. Yefremov led the ruling party’s faction in the legislature.
He didn’t run for a legislative seat in the October 2014 election.