Law enforcement officers in one of the villages in the Kharkiv region detained a former employee of the Kharkiv “Berkut”, who was hiding from justice after the verdict was announced in December 2023.
This was reported by the press service of the Prosecutor Generalʼs Office.
The detainee is a former employee of "Berkut" and at the same time a policeman (until the decision of the Court of Appeal). At the end of 2023, he was sentenced to 6 years in prison for torturing Euromaidan activists Vladyslav Tsylytskyi and Mykhailo Nizkohuz. The crime took place on January 20, 2014 at the "Dynamo" colonnade on Hrushevskоho Street. Although the Prosecutor Generalʼs Office does not name the detainee, it follows that it is about the former "Berkut" Andrii Handrykin.
According to the indictment, in January 2014, under the colonnade of the Dynamo stadium in Kyiv, Handrykin and his colleagues detained two Euromaidan activists, Mykhailo Nyzkohuz and Vladyslav Tsylytskyi, and led them through the column of “Berkut” activists. The security forces stripped Nizkohuz in the cold, beat him and wounded him with a knife.
In 2019, the prosecution failed to prove Handrykinʼs guilt. Judge Oksana Birsa, explaining the decision, said that the court cannot come to the conclusion that it was Handrykin who tortured protesters under the colonnade of the Dynamo stadium in January 2014. Other defendants in the case, Artem Voilokov and Vladyslav Masteha, are not on trial now, because they fled to Russia.
On December 21, 2023, the Kyiv Court of Appeal overturned Handrykinʼs acquittal and found him guilty, but he did not appear at the announcement of the verdict and hid until his arrest. In the near future, he should be delivered to the place of punishment.
- On November 21, 2013, Euromaidan began in Ukraine, after Viktor Yanukovych stopped preparations for signing the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU. The protests turned into anti-government protests and gained a larger scale after the police dispersed the students on November 30. In February 2014, the shooting of demonstrators led to the overthrow of the Yanukovych regime.
- The Euromaidan events were called the Revolution of Dignity, and the dead were called the Heavenly Hundred. According to the prosecutorʼs office and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 107 people died during the revolution. Another 2.5 thousand people were injured.