MOSCOW, August 30. /TASS/. The 2014 Maidan shootings were orchestrated by the very forces behind the protests, with Andrey Parubiy - who later became Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada - overseeing the snipers, French businessman and geopolitical expert Thierry Laurent Pellet told TASS.
On Saturday, Parubiy was shot dead in Lvov.
Pellet recalled testimony from Olga Bogomolets, a doctor at the Ukraine Hotel during the Maidan unrest, who stated that both protesters and Berkut officers were killed by the same type of bullets.
"In fact, the shots were fired from the eighth floor of the Hotel Ukraine," Pellet said. According to him, the bloodshed was unnecessary, as then-President Viktor Yanukovych "had already agreed to everything."
He went on to note that video evidence later surfaced showing Parubiy, by then Rada Speaker, leaving the Hotel Ukraine and conversing with the snipers. "This was undoubtedly in gratitude for their loyal service in managing the shootings. It is a disgrace, but above all proof that the coup was carried out by the same people who staged the Maidan protests," the expert stressed.
Pellet added that he personally saw both Parubiy and Dmitry Yarosh on the Maidan, linking them to neo-Nazi movements that later gave rise to the Azov battalion, banned in Russia. He further noted that Yarosh was the founder of the Right Sector (also banned in Russia), which he described as "an armed neo-Nazi group" active during the Maidan unrest, whose flags, he said, "were everywhere.".