Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday harshly criticized Ukrainian authorities for what he described as their crackdown on the Moscow-friendly opposition amid simmering tensions between the 2 neighbors.
Putin’s assertion comes a day after Viktor Medvedchuk, who heads the Opposition Platform for Life celebration, the biggest opposition power in parliament, was positioned below home arrest on treason expenses that he denied. Medvedchuk has shut private ties with Putin, the godfather of his daughter.
Without mentioning Medvedchuk by identify, Putin lamented what he described as the continued cleaning of Ukraine’s political enviornment, saying that those that favor cooperation with Russia face political reprisals.
Those selective, politically motivated selections are aimed toward cleaning the political area from these forces which advocate a peaceable settlement of the battle in Ukraine’s southeast and good-neighborly ties with Russia, Putin mentioned at a gathering of his Security Council.
Medvedchuk, 66, is accused of transferring oil and gasoline manufacturing licenses from one of many fields in Crimea to Russian authorities.
Russia annexed Ukraine’s Black Sea peninsula of Crimea in 2014 following the ouster of Ukraine’s former Moscow-friendly president and likewise threw its weight behind a separatist insurgency in jap Ukraine. More than 14,000 individuals have been killed in seven years of combating that has devastated the nation’s jap industrial heartland, known as the Donbas.
The treason accusations is the newest a part of a broad marketing campaign in opposition to Medvedchuk launched by Ukrainian authorities in February, when his monetary property have been frozen for 3 years. In February, authorities additionally shut down three pro-Russian TV channels, 112, Zik and NewsOne, which Medvedchuk managed.
In an article revealed Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy defended the strikes in opposition to Medvedchuk’s property as a professional effort to forestall him from damaging the nation and eroding its safety.
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