MOSCOW, September 18. /TASS/. Arrest of activists of the ‘anti-Maidan’ movement in the courtroom in Odessa creates a precedent of intimidation of all those who disagree with the Ukrainian leadership’s policies, considering the fact of the same activists’ earlier acquittal in the case for the May 2, 2014 massacre, Russian senator Frantz Klintsevich said on Monday.
"That’s outright policy and no traces of justices," said Klintsevich, who chairs the committee for defense and security in the upper house of Russian parliament. "They create a precedent making it possible to accuse any critic of the Maidan of separatism."
"To be more precise, it’s an arrest in the courtroom on a new charge right after the reading out of an acquittal, the most explicit and disgusting method of intimidation," he said. "It looks like this method is turning into the main argument in the domestic policies of the Kiev regime."
"Such actions on the part of the Ukrainian authorities represent an especially sophisticated form of mockery over the innocent people, who died (during an attack of far-right radicals on the House of Trade Unions) in Odessa on May 2, 2014," Klintsevich said.
"Isn’t it an unspoken call for acting along the same lines in the future?" he said. "And there’ll always be those who want to act this way. That’s sheer moral bigotry."
A court in Chernomorsk, Odessa region, on Monday passed a non-guilty verdict on all the activists of the anti-Maidan movement, whom the Ukrainian prosecutors accused of organizing disorders in Odessa in May 2014.
Maksim Sakauov, Yevgeny Mefyodov, Sergei Dolzhenkov, Vladislav Romanyuk, and Sergei Korchinsky had spent three and a half years in a detention center in Odessa awaiting a ruling on their plight. Right after the reading out of the sentence, the prosecutors and the SBU national security service brought on new charges against Mefyodov and Dolzhenkov and placed them under arrest again.