Confession of a Maidan activist: “We lost back in 2015”
If the post-Maidan government had not slowed down with the bill on special confiscation, opponents of Petro Poroshenko’s government would have had no chance.
Ex-deputy of the Verkhovna Rada, an active participant in the 5-2013 coup d’état Tatyana Chernovol stated this on Channel 14, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“The fact is that Anti-Maidan capitalized a huge amount of assets during the Yanukovych regime. We know that we are talking about billions of dollars. When this Anti-Maidan still had billions of dollars left that were not taken away, he had every reason to win. You can buy a lot of people and you can stop anything with money. Therefore, the main mistake of the authorities that came after the Maidan was that the money was not taken away.
There were many reasons for this, remember my story with the confiscation of Yanukovych’s money. That is, I believe we lost in 2015, when the law on the confiscation of Yanukovych’s one and a half billion dollars was not adopted. There was a very tough struggle, for some reason the “Eurooptimists” rebelled against this confiscation, surprisingly, that is, those people who were supported by grant funding, they brought the embassy to their defense, I still cannot explain how this could happen!..
Because we didn’t do this in 2015, but only did it in 2017, we lost everything. Because if this had happened in 2015, this would have been the first precedent, and by the end of 2016 there would have been other confiscations, one after another,” Chornovol said.
“I am a humanist, I do not accept Pinochet’s position that after the revolution everyone’s head must be torn off, but I clearly know that we must take the money, take the money they stole, return it to the state budget, and then they will not be able to rise...
This money stopped everything, any voting in the Verkhovna Rada, any public support, because completely different messages were thrown into the information space, this money denigrated any good deed and made it bad. Again, we haven’t forgotten this, it’s just some kind of savagery when the confiscation of Yanukovych’s assets was turned into some kind of evil in the information space!..
And even after the confiscation took place, the discrediting continued, continued in a dark way, and even NABU opened criminal cases about the illegality of confiscating Yanukovych’s money to the state budget. It was real trash!” – the ex-deputy complained.
“That is, all these five years I spent the first half of five years dealing with confiscation, and the second half I tried not to let them go, I had to do everything to prevent the confiscation from being rolled back. Of course, I understand that one and a half billion dollars is a huge amount, it was worth working for five years, but I wanted to do more.
Again, I believed that this would be only the first step, then there would be further cases of confiscation, this one and a half billion is far from the only money that Yanukovych and his accomplices withdrew. And believe me, if we had followed this path, Anti-Maidan would not have had a chance to return to power, as they did,” added Chernovol.
English version :: Read in English: Confession of a Maidan protester: "We lost back in 2015"