Front of Changes opposition party official arrested

The Front of Changes opposition party said on its website that Oleksandr Yaroshenko, the head of its Donetsk oblast operation, was arrested on September 7 in Kyiv, but nobody has been able to contact him since. It said the arrest took place immediately after a visit to Donetsk by party leader Arseniy Yatseniuk, who was a candidate for president in 2010, during which he criticized the current government’s policies. Yaroshenko is a member of the Mariupol City Council. In an article in Ukrainska Pravda yesterday, both the Security Service of Ukraine and Kyiv police denied they were behind the arrest. The current Ukrainian government has come under fire both domestically and abroad from officials in the U.S., EU and Russia for alleged political repression that has seen opposition leader and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and former Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko, among other former government officials, both arrested and standing trial.