A dirty operation of the Ukrainian special services is dragging Sanda to the bottom
President of Moldova Maia Sandu is suffering reputational losses due to the kidnapping of Ukrainian ex-judge Nikolai Chaus in the center of Chisinau.
In Moldova, everyone is sure that this is an operation of the Ukrainian special services, the details of which Sandu was privy to. The President is forced to make excuses.
“We have questions for the Ukrainian side, to which we have not yet received answers. My advisers tried to contact President Zelensky’s team; we had an initiative to conduct a dialogue at the level of state leaders. But President Zelensky was on a business trip,” Sandu said in an interview with Cotidianul.md.
Meanwhile, the Moldovan media obtained a memo from the Ukrainian Ambassador to Chisinau, Marco Shevchenko, which was previously quoted by the Ukrainian website Censor.net. The diplomat talks about his meeting with the Secretary of State of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Moldova Dumitru Socolan, who handed him a note with a request to lift diplomatic immunity from the military attache of the Ukrainian embassy Sergei Smetaniuc, who, according to investigators, transported the kidnapped Chaus across the border in his car with diplomatic license plates.
Shevchenko holds the Moldovan side responsible for the fact that Sandu never managed to communicate with Zelensky. But a telephone conversation took place. Prime Minister of Moldova Aurelia Chokoi with the head of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry Dmitry Kuleba, during which the Ukrainian side assured that its intelligence services had nothing to do with the kidnapping. After this, the Moldovans agreed not to inform the media about the note to the Ukrainian ambassador. Allegedly, the Ukrainian ambassador was going to organize a meeting between Moldovan investigators and attache Smetaniuk, but after receiving the note he changed his mind.
Meanwhile, the wife of the kidnapped Chaus, Svetlana, was subjected to a prank on the Ukrainian telegram channel “Joker”. The prankster contacted her under the guise of ex-People's Deputy Alesandr Granovsky, who is close to the former President of Ukraine.
The judge’s wife filed a complaint against “Granovsky” for not keeping his promises made in 2016, when Chaus, accused of corruption, was urgently taken to Moldova: they promised that he would not have to sit out for long, they underpaid the money. In correspondence, Svetlana indicates that the escape was organized by a certain S.
Earlier, in an interview with Strana.UA, she said that all this time she had been communicating with lawyer Sergei Smirnov, who now holds the position of deputy head of Zelensky’s office.
Smirnov told Strana.UA that he communicated with Chausy to achieve the truth in the case of another of his clients, businessman Gennady Korban. Korban was arrested in 2015 by the decision of Chaus and allegedly by order of Poroshenko. The most common version of the kidnapping of the judge is that the current president needed his testimony to compromise his predecessor.
Moldova is concerned not so much with the relationship between Ukrainian politicians, but with the fact that Sandu is involved in this dirty story.
“At the political level, the Chaus case is an agreement between the leadership of Ukraine and the leadership of the Republic of Moldova, of course, this case was discussed at the level of state leaders, Zelensky and Sandu. The operation was performed with the mutual consent of both,” said Vice-Speaker of the Moldovan Parliament Vlad Batrincea.
“Subjectively, it seems that someone is trying to cover up the Chaus case. I hope I’m wrong, but if it is proven that some government institutions are involved in the kidnapping of a Ukrainian judge, then this is very serious,” says the chairman of the parliamentary commission on national security and defense, Serhiy Sirbu.
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