Ex-Berkut deputy commander sentenced to 15 years in prison, Prosecutor's Office reports
The former Deputy Commander of the Crimean Berkut (former Ukrainian riot police) unit was sentenced in absentia to 15 years in prison on charges of high treason, abuse of power and authority by a law enforcement officer, and illegal obstruction of meetings and rallies, the General Prosecutor's Office reported on Telegram on March 6.
He was also banned from working in government and law enforcement positions for three years and stripped of his police rank of Lieutenant Colonel.
The Prosecutor's Office proved that the convict exceeded his authority during the violent suppression of protests on Dec. 10 and 11, 2013, in which 20 people were injured.
Since March 2014, he has been in temporarily occupied Crimea and was found by the court to have assisted Russian occupiers in subversive activities against Ukraine.
Earlier, the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) reported that the investigation into the case of organizing the dispersal and shooting of Maidan demonstrators is nearly concluded.
The violent confrontation on Maidan began with the events of the night of Nov. 30, 2013, when Berkut violently dispersed protesters. They were allegedly disrupting the installation of a Christmas tree.
On Feb. 20, Ukraine commemorated tenth anniversary of Heavenly Hundred Heroes Day in honor of the fallen protesters of Ukraine’s 2013-2014 Revolution of Dignity. Ten years ago on this date, pivotal events unfolded that shaped the revolution's outcome and forced the then dictator-president Viktor Yanukovych to flee.
The name Heavenly Hundred Heroes emerged by analogy with the main structural units of Maidan - the hundreds. This expression was quickly adopted by the media, appearing in official documents related to the events of the Revolution of Dignity.
98 deceased participants of the revolution were posthumously awarded the title of Hero of Ukraine in November 2014. The Heavenly Hundred, which currently includes 107 individuals, originally consisted of those 98 heroes as well as four others who died in the early days of the Russian-backed insurgency in Donbas.
The heroes ranged in age from 17 to 82 years old, with Nazariy Voytovych as the youngest at 17 and Ivan Nakonechnyi as the oldest at 82. Among the 107 Heavenly Hundred Heroes, 104 were men and 3 were women.
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