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July 6, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 7
Some of the timeline fits this interpretation: On the day before the police attack, reporters noted Yulia Lovochkina openly fraternising with the students on the Maidan. Lovochkin’s TV crews covered the 4am events closely, and Lovochkin immediately tendered his resignation in protest at the police violence.
The next day, Lovochkin’s TV channel played foot- age of the worst of the police violence on heavy rotation on prime time news. News anchors intoned that Yanukovych had “shed the blood of Ukrainian children.” Whereas the student pro- tests had attracted hundreds, protests on Sunday December 1 against the police violence attracted hundreds of thousands. This was the start of Eu- romaidan.
Authoritative chronicler of the Euromaidan revolu- tion Sonya Koshkina, as well as Ukrainian prose- cutors, have argued it was anti-EU hardliners who were responsible for attacking the students.
But on the third anniversary of events, November 29, 2016, Ukraine’s interior minister Arsen Ava- kov told the BBC that “Lovochkin was the author of the dispersal of the [students’] Maidan, and should be in prison, not in parliament.”
Lovochkin denies any role in the attack on the students. “I submitted my resignation because of President Yanukovych’s decision to decline sign- ing the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA) [...] and the use of force against peaceful protesters in Kyiv following it,” he said.
What was Lovochkin’s motivation to break with Yanukovych so abruptly over Europe, whether or not he was involved in the violence? According to Koshkina, Lovochkin was “a placeman of Firtash and one of the architects of the regime,” hardly a nationalist or freedom-loving liberal. But in June 2013 the US had indicted Firtash for alleged bribery in India. On October 30 2013 — as Yanukovych was wavering over the Association Agreement with the EU — the US issued an arrest warrant for Firtash.
The US withdrew the arrest warrant four days later — after US deputy secretary of state Victo- ria Nuland met Yanukovych in Kyiv, and received assurances that Yanukovych would sign the Asso- ciation Agreement, Firtash said during extradition hearings in Vienna in 2015 that first revealed the details of the case. But come the Vilnius Summit, Yanukovych failed to sign. The arrest warrant was reissued in March 2014, and Firtash was arrested in Vienna on March 12, 2014.
Legal proceedings in Ukraine have yet to estab- lish ultimate responsibility for the police attack
on students on November 29 and indeed for much of the violence against protestors in the winter of 2013-2014. On June 23, plans to abolish the pros- ecutor’s special office investigating crimes against Euromaidan demonstrators became known.
Thus Manafort’s trial, if it occurs, will be as eagerly awaited in Ukraine as in the US.
With additional reporting by Olha Yevstihnieieva in Kyiv