Swiss freeze Yanukovich assets

Publisher : rt.com

Published time: February 28, 2014 13:00

Viktor Yanukovych (AFP Photo/Sergei Supinski)

The Swiss financial regulator FINMA says the assets of Ukraine’s ousted President Viktor Yanukovich, his son Oleksander, and 18 other Ukrainians have been frozen. The assets, which Yanukovich denies having, were blocked as of 12:00 CET on Friday.

Any funds that are found to be linked to Yanukovich will be frozen, and unavailable to the ex-President, who is in Rostov-on-Don in Russia in southern Russia giving a press conference.

In the statement, FINMA said they made the decision to freeze the assets on Wednesday. Included on this list is Mykola Azarov, the former Prime Minister who resigned from his post in January.

Appearing for the first time since he fled Kiev and Ukraine amid bloody riots, ex-President Yanukovich vehemently denied having any bank accounts or property abroad.

Banks now “have a due diligence requirement” to cooperate with the order to cut off access to any funds Yanukovich or the other listed 19 people may hold in Switzerland. There is so far no evidence Yanukovich has deposited money in the country known for its banking secrecy.

Ukraine’s new Prime Minister Arseney Yatsenyuk said Yanukovich and his government are responsible for leaving the country with an ‘empty treasury’ and have illegally siphoned $70 billion over the past 3 years into offshore accounts. Yatsenyuk also said that a $3 billion loan from China has gone missing. The comments were made after he was appointed prime minister by Ukraine’s parliament on Thursday.

Russian media have reported that the ex-President has asked the Russian Federation for 15 million rubles to provide security against extremists.

Austrian authorities have followed Switzerland, and will freeze any accounts belonging to the list of people as a "precautionary" measure.

Switzerland is the world's largest known offshore center of wealth, with an estimated $2 trillion in assets. Another big destination for offshore wealth is Cyprus, which part of the EU, would be required to freeze assets if the parliament votes on unilateral actions across the region. The EU can only call a bloc-wide asset freeze if all member states reach a legal decision to do so.

The European Parliament in Strasbourg will also try to pinch off access to any offshore funds belonging to the ex-President, and Friday will open an investigation into the “massive embezzlement” of Ukrainian assets.

Separately, on Thursday prosecutors in Geneva began a investigation into Yanukovich and money laundering . Prosecutors have searched the office of his son Oleksander and seized documents.

"A penal investigation for severe money laundering is currently being conducted in Geneva against Viktor Yanukovich and his son Oleksander," the prosecutor's office said in a statement, Friday.

675,000 Ukrainians pour into Russia as ‘humanitarian crisis’ looms

02.03.2014 | Source: http://rt.com/

Pro-Russian protesters wave a Russian flag and hold a sign (C) reading "Our brothers are in Russia, we are slaves in Europe" during a rally in front of the regional administration building in the industrial Ukrainian city of Donetsk on March 1, 2014. (AFP Photo)

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On Sunday, the border guard service said Russian authorities have identified definite signs that a “humanitarian catastrophe” is brewing in Ukraine.An estimated 675,000 Ukrainians left for Russia in January and February, fearing the “revolutionary chaos” brewing in Ukraine, Russia's Federal Border Guard Service said. Officials fear a growing humanitarian crisis.

“In just the past two months (January-February) of this year…675,000 Ukrainian citizens have entered Russian territory,” Itar-Tass news agency cited the service as saying.

"If 'revolutionary chaos' in Ukraine continues, hundreds of thousands of refugees will flow into bordering Russian regions," the statement read.

Ukrainians have long formed a large presence in Russia. According to the official 2010 census, 1.9 million Ukrainians were officially living in Russia, although the head of the Federal Migration Service put that figure as high as 3.5 million one year before. While those migrants were often prompted by economic concerns, political turmoil has spiked the recent rise in Ukrainian’s attempting to leave the country.

On Saturday, Russian migration authorities reported that 143,000 requests for asylum had been sent to Russia within a two-week period. Russian officials have promised to expedite the processing of those requests.

“Tragic events in Ukraine have caused a sharp spike in requests coming from this country seeking asylum in Russia,” said the chief of the FMS’s citizenship desk, Valentina Kazakova. “We monitor figures daily and they are far from comforting. Over the last two weeks of February, some 143,000 people applied.”

Kazakova said most requests come from the areas bordering Russia, and especially from Ukraine’s south.

“People are lost, scared and depressed,” she said. “There are many requests from law enforcement services, state officials as they are wary of possible lynching on behalf of radicalized armed groups.”

A week after the government of Viktor Yanukovich was toppled by violent street protests, fears of deepening political and social strife have been particularly acute in Ukraine’s country's pro-Russian east and south.

Soon after Yanukovich opted to flee the country in what he branded as an extremist coup, a newly reconfigured parliament did away with a 2012 law on minority languages which permitted the use of two official languages in regions where the size of an ethnic minority exceeds 10 percent.

Apart from the Russian-majority regions affected by this law, Hungarian, Moldovan and Romanian also lost their status as official languages in several towns in Western Ukraine.

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said Ukrainian deputies were wrong to cancel the law, while European parliamentarians urged the new government to respect the rights of minorities in Ukraine, including the right to use Russian and other minority languages.

Konstantin Dolgov, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s commissioner for human rights, was far more damning in his criticism.

“The attack on the Russian language in Ukraine is a brutal violation of ethnic minority rights,” he tweeted.

Out of some 45 million people living in Ukraine, according to the 2013 census, some 7.6 million are ethnic Russians. Leaders of several predominately Russian-speaking regions have said they will take contr

Federation Council Approves Putin's Request for Troop Deployment in Ukraine

02.03.2014 | Source: .themoscowtimes.com

• RIA Novosti
• Mar. 01 2014 19:42
• Last edited 19:42

Putin at the EU-Russia summit in January, 2013. | M. Stulov / Vedomosti

(Updated March 1, 2014, 7:42 p.m.)

The Federation Council on Saturday approved a request from President Vladimir Putin to use armed force in Ukraine. 

Putin made the request because of what he said was a threat to the lives of Russians and military forces located in naval bases in Crimea. 

The Federation Council voted unanimously in support of military action. 

The move comes after reports of large Russian troop movements in the southern Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, and a week after the opposition swept to power in Kiev when ousted President Viktor Yanukovych suddenly left the city. 

Russian troops will remain deployed until the “political-social situation in the country is normalized,” the Kremlin said in a statement. 

Senators in the Federation Council, which is Russia's upper house of parliament, lined up during an extraordinary session Saturday afternoon to express their support for armed intervention. 

Lawmakers accused the United States and European countries of open support for violent protesters in Ukraine. 

The decision follows a wave of pro-Russian protests in southern and eastern Ukraine, and calls from the newly elected prime minister of Crimea for Putin to intervene. 

The ratcheting up of Russian rhetoric over Ukraine and widespread reports of the presence of Russian troops already maneuvering on Ukrainian soil has provoked outrage in Kiev and condemnation from world leaders. 

U.S. President Barack Obama said Friday that he was deeply concerned about Russian troop movements inside Ukraine, and warned that violations of Ukraine’s sovereignty would be deeply destabilizing. 

Officials from the interim Ukrainian government have said Russia is trying to provoke conflict, and have called on the Kremlin to withdraw all soldiers back to Russian naval bases on the Black Sea coast.

Kiev seeks NATO's help

02.03.2014 | Source: Pravda.Ru

Kiev seeks NATO's help in light of Russia's move to deploy troops in the Crimea to defend the Russian-speaking population of the republic.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen announced the convening of emergency meetings of the North Atlantic Council and the NATO-Ukraine Commission. They will take place in Brussels on Sunday, March 2.

On March 1, Russian senators unanimously approved the address of Russian President Vladimir Putin about the deployment of Russian troops on the territory of Ukraine to normalize the situation in the country.

Meanwhile, the Russian President discussed the situation in Ukraine in a telephone conversation with his US counterpart Barack Obama. The conversation took place at the initiative of the American side. "In response to Barack Obama's concerns about Russia's plans on the possible use of Russian armed forces on the territory of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin drew Mr. Obama's attention to provocative criminal acts of ultranationalist groups, whom, in fact, the present authorities in Kiev support," statement released by the press service of the Kremlin said.

USA wants to send international forces to Ukraine

02.03.2014 | Source: Pravda.Ru

 

U.S. Ambassador to the UN Security Council, Samantha Power, in her speech at a meeting convened at the request of Kiev, offered to immediately send international observers into the country. Representatives of 15 countries took part in the closed meeting. Vitaly Churkin represented the Russian Federation.

Power stated that Russia must come into direct contact with the Ukrainian authorities. She also said that one should put an end to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. For this purpose, the U.S. ambassador offers to send international observers from the UN and the OSCE to the troubled country. According to the U.S. official, it will reduce tension.

UK Ambassador Lyall Grant, in turn expressed concerns about the most recent move of the Russian parliament to authorized military action on the territory of Ukraine, and stressed that the United Kingdom supported the current government of Ukraine. The British side also acceded to the request for immediate consultations under the Budapest Treaty between the United States, Britain, Russia and Ukraine.