INTERPOL issues wanted person alerts for former Ukrainian state leaders

The International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) announced on its web site on Jan. 12 it has issued wanted person alerts for embezzlement and misappropriation against former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, former Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, former Ukrainian Finance Minister Yuriy Kolobov and Georgii Dzekon, the former CEO and board member of Ukrtelecom. The Ukrainian government submitted the alert requests in March and INTERPOL has already issued alerts for other Ukrainian officials, said Interior Minister Arsen Avakov on his Facebook page.

The alerts seek the location and arrest of wanted persons in order to extradite them or similar action, INTERPOL said. The alerts aren’t an international arrest warrant and INTERPOL can’t compel a member-country to arrest the subject of an alert. The current alert request for Yanukovych isn’t related to an earlier request from the Ukrainian government, which sought his arrest for murder and abuse of power charges. The request was refused because it didn’t comply with INTERPOL rules and regulations.

The Russian government has yet to obtain a request from the Ukrainian government to extradite former President Viktor Yanukovych and other politicians, said Russian Prosecutor General Yuriy Chayka in an interview published on rg.ru on Jan. 11. In response, Avakov deemed that statement “a lie at the state level,” noting that extradition can only occur after the arrest of a suspect, which Russia has yet to do of any former Ukrainian official. Although the Ukrainian government requested a search for 23 Ukrainian citizens with ties to Yanukovych, the Russian government has declined to submit a search request on CIS territory, as required by international agreements, he said.

Zenon Zawada: It’s taken nearly a year since the EuroMaidan massacre for INTERPOL to declare its wanted persons alert against Yanukovych and Azarov. Though INTERPOL confirmed that the Ukrainian government submitted in March alert requests for the murder and abuse of power charges against Yanukovych, it didn’t confirmed that for the embezzlement and misappropriation charges in its Jan. 12 statement.

While this announcement is some progress in penalizing the corruption of the Yanukovyh administration, what’s critical to understand is why this alert took so long and whether it could have been issued earlier. In particular, there has been mounting evidence that the current government has been negligent in its attempt to criminally prosecute its predecessors and this latest development doesn’t dispel such suspicions.

Yanukovych and Azarov, as well as much of their entourage, are residing in the Russian Federation. We are confident the Russian government won’t comply with the latest INTERPOL request for locating the suspects. Perhaps there is some hope for compliance from the government of Israel, which the current home of former Energy Minister Eduard Stavytskyi, who had an alert placed on him by INTERPOL in August.