Ukraine's Prosecutor General's Office appeals sentences for Berkut officers in Maidan shootings case

The prosecution in the case of the shooting of protesters on Instytutska Street in the Ukrainian capital in February 2014 will appeal the sentences for five former Berkut officers.

Source: Oleksii Donskyi, Head of the Maidan Department of the Office of the Prosecutor General, on the air during the national joint 24/7 newscast

Details: Donskyi stressed that this will be done after studying the motivation part of the sentence. He also noted the great work that the court did, as the sentence is more than 1,700 pages long.

Regarding the positive sides, the prosecutor noted that the court gave a proper legal assessment and rejected the manipulations that both the defence and some media propagated regarding a certain "third column", "Georgian snipers", allegations that the alleged unlawful actions of protesters led to the killings, etc.

At the same time, starting from the operative part of the sentence, which has now been announced, several points are incomprehensible to the prosecution, which will become the motivation for appeal.

Quote: "The first point that is extremely important for us: the court, although sentencing one person to life imprisonment, others to 15 years in prison, that is, recognising the act of premeditated murders throughout a long period of time and the indiscriminate use of weapons against an unlimited number of protesters who were without weapons, at the same time acquitted all persons by the qualification of ‘terrorist act’.

In our opinion, the very fact of committing murders in such conditions (that is, in order to intimidate protesters) is direct evidence that the attack was committed. Now, without studying the verdict, we do not understand this contradiction. The same applies to the justification in terms of Article 340, obstruction of protests, and also with respect to the destruction of weapons. After all, it was an important element that hindered the investigation: the weapon from which the murder was committed was taken out and destroyed, and in the future, it would take a long time to find it and conduct an examination.

The acquittal of two people under the circumstances of premeditated murder is also unclear."

Details: According to Donskyi, the parties currently have a month to appeal the decision of the court of first instance. The appeal of the Prosecutor General’s Office will be filed with the Kyiv Court of Appeal.

According to an approximate forecast, the appeal proceedings may begin in December. How much the appeal process itself will take is impossible to predict, but Donskyi assured that it cannot be as long as the trial of the case by the court of first instance (the trial lasted from 2016 – ed.).

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