Ex-MP Oleh Tsaryov sentenced in absentia to 8 years in prison and property confiscated

Author:
Oleksandra Opanasenko
Date:

Former MP and collaborator Oleh Tsaryov was sentenced in absentia to 8 years in prison and confiscated property worth almost half a billion hryvnias.

This was reported by the Prosecutor Generalʼs Office.

Tsaryov was found guilty of financing actions aimed at changing the borders of the territory and the state border of Ukraine. In addition to imprisonment, the court ordered the confiscation of all his property:

  • a plot of land with an area of 0.15 ha in the Kyiv region;
  • an apartment in Dnipro;
  • real estate objects in the temporarily occupied Crimea: hotel and sanatorium complexes, dormitories, industrial premises, farm buildings.

The total value of Tsaryovʼs confiscated property is 460.6 million hryvnias.

In Crimea, Tsaryov had real estate and a number of enterprises. After the illegal annexation of the peninsula, he registered them under Russian law, and also hired the Russian “Rosgvardia” military to protect them.

The investigation established that he transferred money for the protection of his manor museum and sanatorium in Yalta to the accounts of the "Federal State Unitary Enterprise ʼProtectionʼ of the Federal Service of the National Guard of the Russian Federation". That is, Tsaryov financed the Russian occupation forces in the occupied Crimea.

Now Tsaryov is hiding in Russia. He will serve his sentence from the moment of his arrest.

  • Oleh Tsaryov is a member of the Council of Four Convocations, last elected from the Party of Regions (2012 to 2014). In May 2014, he ran for president, but withdrew his candidacy. In June of the same year, the Verkhovna Rada stripped him of parliamentary immunity and agreed to his arrest on suspicion of separatism. At the end of June 2014, Tsaryov fled to the occupied Donbas, where he became the speaker of the "Parliament of the Union of Peopleʼs Republics" — a body of pro-Russian militants, which was supposed to unite the "parliaments" of the self-proclaimed "DPR" and "LPR".
  • On May 3, 2022, Ukraine sentenced Tsaryov in absentia to 12 years in prison. He was found guilty of public calls for separatism and public calls for a violent change of power and the overthrow of the constitutional order.
  • During the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Tsaryov crossed the state border of Ukraine and drove into the temporarily occupied territory of the Kyiv region to help the Russian occupiers. In particular, in the temporarily occupied village of Katyuzhanka (Vyshhorod district), he and other collaborators recorded interviews for Russian propagandists and talked about Russian soldiers as "liberators from Nazism".

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