Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday harshly criticized Ukrainian authorities for what he described as their crackdown on the Moscow-friendly opposition amid simmering tensions between the 2 neighbors.
Putin’s assertion comes a day after Viktor Medvedchuk, who heads the Opposition Platform for Life social gathering, the biggest opposition drive in parliament, was positioned underneath home arrest on treason expenses that he denied. Medvedchuk has shut private ties with Putin, the godfather of his daughter.
Without mentioning Medvedchuk by title, Putin lamented what he described as the continued cleaning of Ukraine’s political area, saying that those that favor cooperation with Russia face political reprisals.
Those selective, politically motivated selections are geared toward cleaning the political discipline from these forces which advocate a peaceable settlement of the battle in Ukraine’s southeast and good-neighborly ties with Russia, Putin mentioned at a gathering of his Security Council.
Medvedchuk, 66, is accused of transferring oil and gasoline manufacturing licenses from one of many fields in Crimea to Russian authorities.
Russia annexed Ukraine’s Black Sea peninsula of Crimea in 2014 following the ouster of Ukraine’s former Moscow-friendly president and likewise threw its weight behind a separatist insurgency in jap Ukraine.
More than 14,000 folks have been killed in seven years of combating that has devastated the nation’s jap industrial heartland, referred to as the Donbas.
The treason accusations is the most recent a part of a broad marketing campaign towards Medvedchuk launched by Ukrainian authorities in February, when his monetary belongings have been frozen for 3 years.
In February, authorities additionally shut down three pro-Russian TV channels, 112, Zik and NewsOne, which Medvedchuk managed.
In an article printed Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy defended the strikes towards Medvedchuk’s belongings as a reliable effort to stop him from damaging the nation and eroding its safety.