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Ukraine to expand ‘Savchenko list’ as two Ukrainians sentenced in Chechnya

On Thursday, a court in Grozny sentenced two members of the Ukrainian ultra-nationalistic organization UNA-UNSO to long prison terms
Ukraine's Foreign Minister Pavel Klimkin Alexander Shcherbak/TASS
Ukraine's Foreign Minister Pavel Klimkin
© Alexander Shcherbak/TASS

KIEV, May 26. /TASS/. Ukraine will expand the so-called Savchenko list in the wake of a sentence issued by a court in Chechnya to the Ukrainian citizens Nikolai Karpyuk and Stanislav Klyh, the country’s Foreign Minister, Pavel Klimkin told the 1+1 television channel.

"We have a list (‘Savchenko list’) and we’ll be expanding it," he said. "We have a sentence to Karpyuk and Klyh today."

On Thursday, a court in Chechnya’s capital Grozny sentenced two members of the Ukrainian ultra-nationalistic organization UNA-UNSO, Nikolai Karpyuk and Stanisalv Klyh, to long prison terms on charges of participation in combat actions on the territory of Chechnya in 1994 and 1995.

Karpyuk was sentenced to 22.5 years in a high security jail and Klyh, to 20 years

The so-called Savchenko list presupposes sanctions against a number of persons related to the arrest of and trial over the highly controversial Ukrainian army servicewoman and nationalistic radical, Nadiya (Nadezhda) Savchenko.

On March 22, the district court in Donetsk, Russia’s southern Rostov region passed a guilty verdict on Savchenko in connection with the death of two Russian TV reporters, Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin, in eastern Ukraine in 2014, as well as with an illegal crossing of the Russian border. She was sentenced to 22 years in a general penal colony.

On Wednesday, May 25, President Vladimir Putin signed a degree on pardoning Savchenko. He did so following requests from Kornelyuk and Voloshin’s relatives.

Pyotr Poroshenko has promised to do everything possible to release two Ukrainians

Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko has promised to do everything possible to release two Ukrainians Nikolai Karpyuk and Stanislav Klykh.

"We are going to fight for them too. We are going to exert maximum efforts to see them return to Ukraine," Poroshenko said at a meeting with the lawyers of the former Ukrainian serviceman Nadezhda Savchenko. Ukraine considers Nikolai Karpyuk and Stanislav Klykh to be political prisoners and believes that they should be released under the Minsk agreements.

Earlier, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry posted an official statement with a demand to release Karpyuk and Klykh on its website.

"The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry demands that the Russian side immediately cancel this unlawful decision and release Nikolai Karpyuk and Stanislav Klykh," the statement said.

Vladimir Markin, the head of the Russian Investigation Committee, said in turn that in December 1994 radically-minded members of the UNA-UNSO political party created armed groups in Ukraine for participation in armed conflict in the territory of Chechnya jointly with the gangs headed by militant chieftains Aslan Maskhadov, Shamil Basayev, etc which operated in the territory of the Chechen Republic.

Karpyuk and another nationalist Alexander Muzychko headed the Viking criminal group, which comprised a number of UNA-UNSO members: Dmitry Yarosh, Yuri Dolzhenko, Alexander Malofeyev, Stanislav Klykh and others. In a period from December 1994 to January 1995, Karpyuk, Klykh and Malofeyev together with other gangs’ members took an active part in clashes with Russian servicemen in the territory of the presidential palace, the Minutka Square and the Grozny railway station. They killed about 30 servicemen. At least 13 military received injuries of various degrees of gravity.

"After all the gangs had been destroyed, those fighters returned to their home countries and holed up there for a long time. In 2014, they apparently lost vigilance and entered the territory of Russia. They had definitely forgotten one principle, which is applicable in Russia: no one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten," Markin said adding that the Russian security services had acted professionally. "They detained them and handed them over to investigators," Markin said.

He recalled that prosecutors had initiated separate criminal proceedings against Alexander Malofeyev who agreed to cooperate with the investigators. The court sentenced him to 24.5 years in prison. The cases of the other gang members are still being investigated, Markin said.