Russia puts ex-Ukrainian officials on ‘wanted’ list
Russia’s Interior Ministry has put Ukraine’s former Finance Minister Aleksandr Shlapak and its former central-bank chief Stepan Kubiv on a list of wanted persons, according to the ministry’s database.
Both former officials are wanted under an article of Russia’s Criminal Code. However, the ministry has not specified the charges laid against them. Nonetheless, earlier they were accused of funding the 2014 shelling of Donbass, in which hundreds of people were killed.
Shlapak served as the Ukrainian finance minister between February and December 2014. Kubiv was the head of the National Bank of Ukraine between February and June of the same year.
In January, the Russian Investigative Committee charged Shlapak and Kubiv in absentia with financing the so-called anti-terrorist operation (ATO) in Ukraine in 2014, which they’d allegedly funded from the state budget.
The operation marked the beginning of the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ shelling of populated areas of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics.
In 2014, Alexander Turchinov, Ukraine’s acting president at that time (March 5 to June 10), signed a decree on conducting the ATO on the territory of the then-Ukrainian Donetsk and Lugansk People’s republics, which did not support the Western-backed coup in Kiev.
The botched attempt by Kiev’s authorities to suppress the regions by force eventually resulted in years-long conflict in Donbass, which set Ukraine on a collision course with Russia.
According to Russian authorities, Shlapak and Kubiv were among Ukrainian officials who made the decision to launch the ATO, their actions resulting in the deaths of or injuries to more than 900 Donbass residents.
The Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics broke away from Ukraine in the aftermath of the 2014 Maidan coup in Kiev. Moscow recognized the republics as sovereign states in 2022, days before the launch of its Ukraine military operation. The two republics held a referendum later that year and as a result became part of the Russian Federation.
