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Lawyer confirms Ukraine’s ex-president hospitalized, will skip Kiev court hearing

A spokesperson for the Sklifosovsky hospital said Yanukovych had been hospitalized there on Friday and discharged on the same day

KIEV, November 18. /TASS/. Former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was hospitalized in Moscow on Friday and won’t be able to attend a hearing in a Kiev court, his lawyer Alexander Goroshinsky has told TASS.

"On Friday I was in Moscow, I tried to contact him, but his assistants told me about his hospitalization," the lawyer said.

"I arrived in the hospital and we talked," Goroshinsky said.

Yanukovych was hospitalized with a suspected spine and knee injury, he said. "I cannot reveal the exact diagnosis, but I saw with my own eyes that the man cannot move."

The former president won’t be able to make his last plea in Kiev’s Obolonsky court on Monday, which is due to hear the case on high treason charges against him, the lawyer said.

Earlier in the day, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper reported on its website citing a source that Yanukovych had been sent to the Sklifosovsky emergency hospital in downtown Moscow with a suspected spine and knee injury, which he had presumably received during a tennis game. The politician was sent to intensive care and later transferred to a private clinic, the source told the paper.

A spokesperson for the Sklifosovsky hospital said Yanukovych had been hospitalized there on Friday and discharged on the same day.

Yanukovych served as Ukraine’s president in 2010-2014. After the coup d’etat in February 2014, he fled to Russia.

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