Ukraine’s former President Viktor Yanukovych on Wednesday lost his decade-long court fight to lift sanctions imposed on him by the EU.
Yanukovych was the pro-Russian president of Ukraine from 2010 to 2014 before he was overthrown by the Euromaidan protests and fled to Russia. He was first sanctioned by the bloc in 2014 — when it barred him from traveling to the EU and froze his assets — and again in 2022 after Moscow’s full-scale invasion.
Yanukovych had asked the EU’s highest court to scrap the measures against him on the grounds that the bloc brought sanctions when — in his view — he faced no criminal case in Ukraine and that it had “no concrete evidence.”
But on Wednesday the General Court, part of the Court of Justice of the European Union, dismissed his action in a judgment excoriating his tenure as Ukraine’s president.
Yanukovych’s actions as Ukraine’s head of state “clearly contributed to the destabilisation” of the country and the EU was right to include him on its sanctions list according to its legal criteria, the court said in its 18-page judgment.
The court also noted the former strongman’s failure “to distance himself effectively from the Russian authorities” since his presidency and singled out his “involvement in a plan” to oust Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in March 2022.
Yanukovych’s son, Oleksandr Viktorovych Yanukovych, was also sanctioned by the EU over his far-reaching business dealings in the Russian-occupied Donbas region. On Wednesday the court dismissed his parallel appeal to have those sanctions lifted as well.
As president of Ukraine, Yanukovych pulled the country out of an association agreement with the EU, plundered state coffers and courted closer ties with the Kremlin, triggering widespread civil unrest.
After calling on Russian President Vladimir Putin to send troops into the country to restore order, and after bloody confrontations between his security forces and pro-democracy protesters that killed more than 100 of his citizens, Yanukovych fled to Russia in early 2014, where he has lived in exile ever since.
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