"How many years have I waited for this picture!" - This Tuesday (April 12), Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Senzov wrote on his Facebook page, expressing many of his compatriots feeling. A netizen commented: "To wait until this moment, it is worth living." In the picture, a man in handcuffs in a camouflage uniform is sitting on a chair, his hair is disheveled and his face is shocked.
He is Viktor Medvedchuk, the pro-Russian opposition figure known as Vladimir Putin's top figure in Ukraine. He had been under house arrest for months in Kyiv, fleeing shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine. Now, according to the Kyiv authorities, he was caught at the border by the Ukrainian secret service SBU while trying to escape the country. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy first announced the news on Facebook. In just a few hours, the post with the picture has received more than 170,000 likes. The message is quite "we got him". Given his close Shadow Making ties to the Kremlin, Medvechuk is an iconic figure on the Ukrainian contemporary political scene who has been demonized by some.
The charges against him date back to Soviet times. Lawyer suspected of having affair with KGB To understand Medchuchuk's role in Ukrainian politics, one must look back more than 20 years. He was born in Russia 67 years ago to Ukrainian parents. Later, he studied law in Kyiv and became a lawyer. Some speculated that he had contacts with the KGB, the Soviet intelligence agency. In the 1970s and 1980s, he served as public defender in several high-profile trials. The most notorious of these was the trial of Ukrainian dissident, poet and human rights activist Wassyl Stus. Stuth was sentenced to 10 years in prison and died in his cell in 1985. Medvechuk successfully sued a nonfiction book a few years ago. The author finds in the book that Medvedchuk was also responsible for Stuth's heavy sentence. More about this source textSource text required for additional translation information Send feedback Side panels