Ukraine's Ex-Top Cop Self-Isolates

Ryaboshapka calls charges against Poroshenko 'legal trash'

Alesya Batsman chatted up ex-Prosecutor General of Ukraine Ruslan Ryaboshapka on March 24 in a rambling 73-minute long interview posted to YouTube.

President Volodymyr Zelensky and parliament in early March expressed no-confidence in Ryaboshapka, who had refused to sign a notice of suspicion to Ukraine’s fifth President Petro Poroshenko on trumped-up charges invented by Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigations (SBI).

Ryaboshapka, currently locked down somewhere in France, reiterates about halfway through the interview (31:00) that he did not sign the notice because the charges leveled against Poroshenko by the SBI are “legal trash” (cf. Something Very Dangerous).

Vladimir Socor from the Jamestown Foundation’s Eurasian Daily Monitor on March 19 fleshed out motives behind Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision to harass former President Petro Poroshenko on trumped up charges, instead of investigating pro-Russia member of parliament Viktor Medvedchuk.

Melinda Harding, the Atlantic Council’s deputy director of Eurasia Center and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, sounded the alarm a day earlier in an interview with Voice of America.