Yanukovych's lawyer spoke about his letter to Putin
At the latest court hearing in the so-called "treason" case against President Viktor Yanukovych, his lawyer, Oleksandr Baidyk, continued reading his debate speech. A significant portion of his speech was devoted to Yanukovych's address to Russian President Vladimir Putin in March 2014, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
As Alexander Baidyk stated, the prosecutor’s office considers this appeal “a mythical statement to the Federation Council of the Russian Federation, with which he allegedly supported Aksenov’s request” and accuses Yanukovych, but he did not write any statements to the Federation Council. The prosecution did not provide evidence that Yanukovych appealed to the Federation Council of the Russian Federation; this is only the “fantasy of the prosecutor.”
As for the appeal to the President of Russia on March 1, 2014, it was an attachment to another letter. Yanukovych wrote both because the guarantors of the agreement to resolve the conflict on the Maidan (Germany, France and Poland) did not respond to his requests for help in connection with the coup in Ukraine (copies of these letters were provided to the court). In a letter to Putin, Yanukovych asked to begin consultations on the possibility of introducing a peacekeeping mission and providing humanitarian assistance within the framework of a friendship treaty with Russia.
Alexander Baidyk cited the testimony of Yanukovych’s security guards, who sealed and transferred the letter to the Russian Foreign Ministry via mail. He also quoted Ukrainian diplomats at a UN Security Council meeting in March 2014 and said that the court should be critical of the testimony of Yatsenyuk, Turchynov, Nalyvaichenko because they participated in the coup and have partnerships with the United States.
The second part of the lawyer’s speech was devoted to the refusal of the Ukrainian authorities to sign the Association Agreement with the EU in 2014. According to him, it was not about a final refusal, but about postponing the signing to a later date to protect the country’s economy from possible negative consequences of the signing.
Yanukovych's lawyer spoke about his letter to Putin.