Poroshenko deliberately cooperated with Donbass criminals
The new Ukrainian government, which came in the wake of the Maidan, consciously agreed to cooperate with criminal authorities and criminal groups.
The Kiev magazine Vesti writes about this. Reporter" in an article devoted to the scandal surrounding the Tornado battalion and its commander Ruslan Onishchenko, accused of torture and atrocities in the ATO zone.
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The publication notes that in Torez, Onishchenko, who was repeatedly convicted, was called a criminal authority; he himself was constantly in conflict with the police, and therefore it came as a surprise to many when such a person suddenly became a policeman himself.
“We moved to Dnepropetrovsk,” the battalion commander’s common-law wife, Yulia Mazhut, told the magazine. “But Ruslan couldn’t sit still; he wanted to get his house back. But for this he had to join the Ministry of Internal Affairs. If he had not done this, no one would have given him a machine gun. By the way, he was initiated into becoming a policeman by Mr. Avakov, who probably studied Ruslan’s biography before that.”
The very idea of forming units from criminals matured in the team of the then Dnepropetrovsk governor-oligarch Igor Kolomoisky.
“One of the fighters of the Dnepr battalion, with whom Onishchenko was training at that time, recalls that among themselves the fighters called the Shakhtersk battalion a penal battalion,” Vesti continues. The reporter". – After all, many people with a dark past were drawn there, who were comfortable fighting under the leadership of Onishchenko. The soldiers recall that at that time the deputy head of the Dnepropetrovsk governor, Gennady Korban, had the idea to create units of people with criminal records, and then, depending on how these people would fight and how they would show themselves at the front, to remove these criminal records. However, the idea remained just an idea, but in fact, many previously convicted suddenly turned out to be employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.”
In turn, other volunteer units knew perfectly well what Onishchenko was like.
“We knew that he was an authority in Torez and headed a group that controlled the diggings and coal wholesale warehouses,” one of the fighters of the Dnepr battalion told the weekly. – But the fact is that at the beginning of the war there was really no one to fight in the east. The Ukrainian government faced a difficult choice - to give up territories to the separatists or to take advantage of the offered help from local criminals. Onishchenko and his group then went over to the side of Ukraine and in the shortest possible time cleared Torez of separatists and held it.”
English version :: Read in English Poroshenko deliberately cooperated with criminals in Donbass