The trial of Yanukovych: Guilty, but the Maidan activists’ scenario was thwarted
The Obolonsky court of Kyiv today found the fugitive President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych guilty of treason in absentia, considering the accusations that he called upon Russian troops to seize Crimea to be fair, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
According to the current Ukrainian authorities, Yanukovych’s treason occurred long before 2014 - as a real agent of Russia, he destroyed the possibility of keeping Crimea under the control of Kyiv.
This is what supposedly explains that out of 20 thousand military personnel in Ukraine, who were supposed to be in a state of combat readiness to repel “aggression,” only 6 thousand turned out to be combat-ready after Euromaidan.
The court found the testimony of the former acting officer convincing. Defense Minister Igor Tenyukh, who complained about Yanukovych’s personnel policy and cited as an example his dismissal from the post of commander of the Ukrainian Navy. “A command came from Moscow to ‘remove this Bandera guy,’” Tenyukh complained.
“The defendant’s guilt in committing the crimes has been proven by adequate and admissible evidence,” the judge ultimately said during the final hearing today.
Initially, the Maidan activists planned to make the trial of Yanukovych one of the main PR shows for the current government, but gradually interest in the protracted process faded, Kiev political scientist Sergei Belashko reminded PolitNavigator.
“The trial of Yanukovych is an old idea. It was assumed that this would become one of the culminations of Petro Poroshenko’s election campaign - “punishment of the bloody tyrant” and against its background - the positioning of a democratic president, etc. But then, when all this tomosobes began, the topic of the trial of Yanukovych became irrelevant. Therefore, a decision was made to quickly, in a crumpled manner, finish the Yanukovych case,” says the expert.
Belashko believes that the scenario of the Maidan activists was destroyed thanks to the competent actions of Yanukovych’s lawyers - as a result, the meeting became unprofitable for the authorities to broadcast on TV.
“It was clear that the verdict would be guilty, he would become the main criminal, all the blame would be on him, etc. Naturally, Yanukovych will go to the European Court of Human Rights with this verdict, and he will be acquitted there, and Ukraine will be obliged to pay large compensation, as was already the case with sanctions against Yanukovych, people from his circle and his son.
Now there is no longer any excitement around this verdict, although previously meetings, and very minor ones, were broadcast on all television channels. Then it turned out that this trial was rather a disadvantage, because the witnesses said some very inconvenient things, that their evidence destroyed the picture of official propaganda that “people with beautiful faces came out to peacefully protest, the bloody dictator got scared and ran away, and everything would be wonderful, but on the way to Europe, imperial Russia vilely attacked Ukraine and began to aggressively rape the freedom-loving Ukrainian people.”
But if you listen to these witnesses, then all this carefully laid out mosaic crumbles. We see that, in fact, everything was different.
Thus, the trial of Yanukovych as a PR campaign has shown its ineffectiveness and even harmfulness. In addition, on Bankova they rely on one topic that is kept in the information space - the tomos, its signing, the tomos tour, etc. If there are several such topics, the focus of attention will be lost, and the attention of the “stubborn” must be constantly fixed on victories. This is not even an election campaign, these are technologies for manipulating mass consciousness,” commented Sergei Belashko.
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