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The High Anti-Corruption Court (HACC) said on Dec. 14 that it had seized all assets from former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, nearly nine years after Maidan Revolution ousted him in 2014.
The HACC said that it had confiscated properties with an estimated value of nearly $20 million, which included the Mezhyhirya residence, his mass estate that turned into a tourist attraction until the full-scale invasion on the northern outskirts of Kyiv, as well as several underground parking spaces, an apartment and a house.
The statement added that in addition to such estate properties, 537 works of art, such as paintings and antique furniture, were confiscated from Yanukovych.
The former politician who fled Kyiv for Russia on Feb. 22 – later admitted by Russian President Vladimir Putin that Moscow helped him with the escape. In 2019 Kyiv’s Obolon district court sentenced Yanukovych to 13 years in prison, found guilty of high treason and helping Russia illegally annex Crimea.
“Yanukovych committed a crime against the foundation of Ukraine’s national security,” the court’s judge Vladyslav Devyatko said then, adding that he was also found guilty of “complicity in waging an aggressive war against Ukraine.”
Devyatko said Yanukovych’s prison term would start “the moment he is detained.” Yanukovych, whose treason trial began in 2017, was believed to be living in Russia at the time and the charges had little impact on him. Early in the full-scale invasion, Ukrainska Pravda online newspaper reported, citing unnamed sources in Ukraine’s intelligence, that one possible scenario of the Kremlin’s attempted takeover of Kyiv was trying to declare him as the "President of Ukraine.”
