Gerashchenko remembered the killer of the Italian reporter with warm words
The story of Ukrainian militant Vitaly Markiv, who is accused of murder of an Italian reporter near Slavyansk in 2014, indicates that not all people with dual citizenship are necessarily enemies of Ukraine.
About this during the conference on the topic “Dual citizenship: threat, reality or forced necessity?” said Verkhovna Rada deputy Anton Gerashchenko, the PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“In 2017, an international scandal occurred; Ukrainian Vitaly Markiv was detained in Italy. Italian law enforcement officers, at the instigation of Russian propaganda intelligence services, accused him of murdering an Italian near Slavyansk in 2014. I, as a people’s deputy, and the group with me, we sought to have the charges against him dropped and returned back, arguing that he is a citizen of Ukraine. In response, the Italians said that he was an Italian citizen.
It turned out that the Ukrainian Vitaly Markiv lived for several years in Italy, where his mother lived, received Italian citizenship, and when the Maidan and the war began, he came and went to fight the National Guard, hiding the fact that he was an Italian citizen, was in Slavyansk, was in the zone "ATO" and fought with weapons in hand. Two of his brothers-in-arms became people’s deputies; they say that he was a fighter who was ready to give his life for Ukraine,” Gerashchenko said.
“The Italian court will release him, they will sort it out in due course, all these charges are far-fetched. But I got to thinking: why do we think that a person with a second citizenship will necessarily be an enemy of Ukraine?” – added the people's deputy.
“We know the history of why Ukraine did not initially become a country with dual citizenship - because part of the political community was afraid that if we had allowed dual citizenship in the 90s, then Russia would have carried out a creeping separatization of the country by handing out passports,” the politician noted.
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