Ukraine Investigators Confirm Treason Probe Of Ex-President Poroshenko

Ukrainian investigators are looking into whether former President Petro Poroshenko committed treason when the so-called Minsk agreement in 2015, a 13-point road map for resolving the military conflict in eastern Ukraine, was signed.

State Bureau of Investigations (DBR) spokeswoman Anzhelika Ivanova on December 10 confirmed to RFE/RL that a criminal case is open “on the possible commitment of high treason by Poroshenko.”

The agreement is the product of an all-night negotiating session in the Belarusian capital between the leaders of Germany, France, Russia, and Ukraine in February 2015.

It was supposed to revive an earlier eponymous cease-fire agreement that was brokered in 2014 after Russian reinforcements late that summer invaded eastern Ukraine in support of Moscow-backed separatists and pushed back Kyiv forces who were on the offensive and on the verge of successfully retaking lost territories.

Suddenly, the combined Russian-separatist forces appeared poised to swallow up more territory, so a hurried truce was brokered between Ukraine, Russia, and the separatists.

The second Minsk agreement calls for the withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front lines, a process that has been monitored by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Additional points stipulate an “all for all” exchange of prisoners, local elections in eastern Ukraine, and amnesty for combatants.

The agreement contains indefinite language and the sequencing of steps, including when Kyiv would regain control over its borders with Russia, is convoluted.

After four-way talks in Paris on December 9 with the leaders of Ukraine, France, and Germany, Russian President Vladimir Putin emphasized that there was no alternative to implementing the Minsk agreement.

The DBR has at least 13 other criminal cases open in which Poroshenko features either as a suspect, witness, or person of interest.

Currently a member of parliament, post-Soviet Ukraine’s fifth president has called the cases “a vivid confirmation of the revanchism that is trying to spread in Ukraine today like a cancerous tumor.”