28.02.2017, Ukraine.
In his interview to the Censor.net online edition (Organization banned in Russia) on February 27th, the Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine (NSDC, Ukrainian: SNBO) Aleksandr Turchinov stated that he wanted to catch the President Viktor Yanukovych after the coup d’état in Ukraine and force him to announce his resignation.
“On the air, Yanukovych was complaining that I wanted to eliminate him by capturing his helicopter. The truth is that I indeed attempted to catch him and bring to Kiev,” Turchinov said.
Turchinov acknowledged that he has known that all procedures of impeachment are spelled out in the Ukrainian constitution. “According to the Constitution, the President can die, can get ill, can go mad; in these cases, he can be declared having no legal capacity. He can himself resign from his position. But there is no such term as “president in flight” in the Constitution,” the SNBO Secretary stated. Therefore, it was necessary to “capture Yanukovych and bring him to Kiev”, “persuade him to sign the notice of his free-will resignation and then send him to the Lukyanovskoye detention center”.
Turchinov stressed that it was important for him to “force him [Yanukovych] to announce his resignation”, otherwise he [Yanukovych] would remain President. “He could have settled in one of the eastern regions of Ukraine and claimed the decision to shift his administration there,“ Turchinov said. The SNBO Secretary acknowledged that he managed to force to land the helicopter with Yanukovych in Donetsk, but it turned out to be impossible to detain the President.
In 2015, the Chairman of the Constitutional Court of Russia Valery Zorkin stated that there were 12 gross violations of the Ukraine Constitution in the decision to dismiss Yanukovych. During the coup d’état in Ukraine, “all norms of law were violated,” Zorkin said.
Aleksandr Turchinov served as the SBU Head in 2005, during the times of Viktor Yushchenko’s presidency. In 2014 he participated in the coup d’état in Ukraine, after which he was appointed as acting President of Ukraine. In April 2014, he signed the decree to start the military operation against the people of Donbass who refused to acknowledge the new authorities.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
