All news

Ukrainian journalist to seek Russian citizenship

Earlier the deputy head of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc asked Ukraine's Security Service to give an expert assessment of Wasserman’s remarks on Ukraine to reveal the presence of criminal offences

MOSCOW, July 31 /TASS/. Ukrainian journalist Anatoly Wasserman will apply for the Russian citizenship if stripped of his Ukrainian one.

Earlier on Friday, Oleksiy Honcharenko, the deputy head of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc in Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament), sent an inquiry to Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) in which he asked to check whether Wasserman had called for overthrowing the ruling power in Ukraine or had been involved in slander campaigns against Ukraine’s political system.

"I am really against Ukraine’s state sovereignty and I do not think that it is possible to separate this part of Russia from other parts of the country. If I am deprived of my Ukrainian citizenship, I will most likely become a citizen of Russia where I have been working for the past 20 years," Wasserman told the Russian News Service radio station.

Honcharenko asked SBU to give an expert assessment of Wasserman’s remarks to reveal the presence of criminal offences. He called for an adequate reaction to Wasserman’s words up to initiating criminal proceedings against him.

"He (Wasserman) systematically spreads his thoughts, which contain encroachments on Ukraine’s state sovereignty and territorial integrity, on his personal website and in his TV programme," Goncharenko said in his inquiry.

The deputy also pledged to do everything possible to deprive Wasserman of his honorary reward "For Merits to the City" because, he said, Wasserman did not deserve to bear the proud name of an Odessa resident.