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Interview: Ukraine Salvation Committee to help ex-deputy

The Committee has nominated Vladimir Oleinik to the position of president of Ukraine

MOSCOW, August 13 /TASS/. The Ukraine Salvation Committee will render all-round assistance to the former Verkhovna Rada (parliament) deputy, Igor Markov, who was detained in Italy on Wednesday at the request of Ukraine’s Interpol office, Vladimir Oleinik, the former Ukrainian parliament deputy, said in an interview with the Rossiya 24 TV news channel.

The Committee for the Salvation of Ukraine was set up early in August with an aim to win power in Ukraine through snap elections and restore peace in the country through direct talks with the militias in the east of Ukraine. The Committee has nominated Vladimir Oleinik to the position of president of Ukraine.

"When the Committee for the Salvation of Ukraine was established, (president) Poroshenko personally issued an instruction to tear apart and eliminate its members. Markov’s case is a case, which does not exist. He feels confident. We are giving him legal, moral and political support," Oleinik said.

He expressed the hope that Markov would be free soon. "If the court is going to be objective, and hopefully it will be, because a Ukrainian court has already passed a decision on this case. Markov was released and the case against him was dropped. I do not know how the case has emerged again," the Ukrainian politician said.

Artyom Shevchenko, the press secretary of Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, said on Wednesday that Markov had been detained. He added that Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office was preparing documents for Markov’s extradition from Italy.

Some Ukrainian media outlets have reported that Interpol had arrested the ex-deputy, whom the Ukrainian authorities put on a police wanted list, at an Italian sea resort. Back in Ukraine, Markov is suspected of complicity to beating demonstrators in 2007 who protested against the recreation of the monument to Empress Catherine II in Odessa.

Ukraine’s Interior Ministry put Markov on police wanted list late in 2014 in a bid to prosecute him for hooliganism and infliction of bodily harm.