Yanukovych Blocked
from Leaving Ukraine,
Speaker Says
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/yanukovych-blocked-from-leaving-ukraine-speaker-says/495062.html
Ukraine's former
president was blocked from taking a plane to Russia, hours after the Ukrainian
legislature voted to remove him from office, the country's new parliamentary
speaker said.
President Viktor
Yanukovych abandoned his lavish estate Saturday and tried to board a charter
plane in Ukraine's eastern
region of Donetsk, but was prevented from doing
so by Ukraine's
customs officers, Oleksandr Turchynov said.
"He [Yanukovych]
is now hiding in the Donetsk
region," Russian media reports quoted Turchynov as saying. He gave no
details on Yanukovych's destination, as the flight did not undergo the
registration procedure.
Yanukovych insisted
Saturday that he would neither resign nor sign any agreement with what he
called "bandits terrorizing the country." He described the events in Kiev as a
"coup".
A report by Donetskie
Vesti claimed Yanukovych could be now outside the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv at a dacha,
belonging to an unnamed official. The presidential plane reportedly landed at
the airport of the United
Arab Emirates Saturday to distract
attention.
Presidential
spokeswoman Anna German said Saturday Yanukovych had left Kiev for Kharkiv to meet with his supporters.
Yanukovych fled his
luxury mansion in Mezhyhirya, outside Kiev, Saturday, which was previously
closed to visitors. Thousands of Ukrainians were given unprecedented access to
the 343 acre estate that features a huge man-made lake, a private zoo, car park
and spa.
On Saturday the
Ukrainian parliament voted to impeach Yanukovych and scheduled presidential elections for May.
Few Options for Ukraine's
Ousted Leader
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/few-options-for-ukraines-ousted-leader/495090.html
KIEV — Big and burly
with two convictions for assault, Viktor Yanukovych is hard to miss. But after
a day of high drama and intrigue, the whereabouts of the ousted Ukrainian
president were a mystery.
One report had him
ejected from a charter flight at Donetsk
airport in his native east. An aide said he had been in the northeastern city
of Kharkiv all day, though he failed to appear at a meeting of regional
governors. A taxi driver in Kiev swore he was in
the United Arab Emirates.
The mystery did
little to help loyalists who stuck to the line that their leader was still the
president, even after parliament voted to remove him in the climax to three
months of turmoil and several days of carnage over Ukraine's
allegiance to Europe or Russia.
"We have a legitimate,
living president, we just do not know where he is," Oleh Tsaryov, a member
of Yanukovych's Party of Regions, said grimly on Russian television.
The smart money was
on Donetsk, an
industrial region and political power base of the Russian-speaking leader. But
even there, 63-year-old Yanukovych is unlikely to roam free for long.
Protesters in Kiev's Independence Square, mourning dozens of
their number who were shot dead in two days of gun battles this week, were
baying for his head. Hundreds invaded the grounds of his sprawling residence
outside the capital, gawping at its opulence and the Australian and African
ostriches stretching their legs in his private zoo.
In Donetsk,
Yanukovych might expect to count on the protection of local oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine's richest man and chief
financier of Yanukovych's party.
But despite a shared
passion with Yanukovych for local soccer club Shakhtar Donetsk, Akhmetov may
find his interests best served in fealty to the new order.
"The best way
for Akhmetov to get close to the new authorities is to give Yanukovych
up," said Volodymyr Fesenko, a political analyst at the Kiev-based Penta
think tank. "For Yanukovych, even Donetsk
is not secure."
Belarus, Maybe?
Yanukovych might
decide blood is thicker than water, and seek refuge with his eldest son,
Oleksander. A dentist by trade, Oleksander is part of what is known in Ukraine as
"The Family", a coterie of relatives and friends who grew rich under
Yanukovych's rule since 2010.
In an interview in
what looked like a hotel room, a shell-shocked Yanukovych told Ukrainian
television station UBR he had no intention of fleeing the country.
Instead, he planned
to tour the southeast, a region that includes the autonomous and majority
ethnic Russian region of Crimea, home to Russia's
Black Sea fleet.
If Yanukovych hunkers
down there, and vows to fight, it will fuel suspicions of a plot to split the
country along its historic linguistic and cultural fault line.
Interfax news agency
reported, however, that two armed men had tried to bribe border guards to let
Yanukovych fly out of Donetsk
on a private jet, but were refused. Where was he heading?
Russia would seem an obvious choice. Yanukovych
had done Moscow's
bidding in turning his back on a deal to deepen ties with the European Union in
November, the spark for a revolt that eventually brought him down.
But Russia,
uncomfortable with the example being set in its backyard, had hardly disguised
its impatience with Yanukovych's inability to extinguish the protests against
him.
With $15 billion in
funding on the table, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Thursday that Moscow did not want to
deal with a Ukrainian leadership that people were "wiping their feet on
like a doormat".
Yanukovych might find
he gets a warmer welcome in neighboring Belarus, where veteran strongman
Alexander Lukashenko took in Kyrgyz leader Kurmanbek Bakiyev after his ouster
in 2010.
Viktor Yanukovych
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Yanukovych
Viktor Fedorovych
Yanukovych (Ukrainian: Ві́ктор Фе́дорович Януко́вич, listen (help·info); Russian: Виктор Фёдорович
Янукович; born 9 July 1950) is a Ukrainian politician who was President of Ukraine from
2010 to 2014. He took office in February 2010 after beating Yulia Tymoshenko in
a second round of voting. Four years later, on 22 February 2014, he was
impeached by a vote of 328 out of 340 in the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's parliament
photos
https://www.google.hr/search?q=viktor+yanukovych&client=opera&sa=N&channel=suggest&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&ei=bkMKU8OQDoT8ywOvuoGIBA&ved=0CCQQsAQ4Cg&biw=1024&bih=623
Kiev
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiev
Kiev (Russian: Киев) or Kyiv is the capital and
the largest city of Ukraine,
located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River.
The population as of July 2013 was 2,847,200 (though higher estimated numbers
have been cited in the press),making Kiev at
least 8th largest city in Europe. Not
unexpectedly, it is the largest Ukrainian-speaking city in the world.
Kiev is an important industrial, scientific,
educational, and cultural centre of Eastern Europe.
It is home to many high-tech industries, higher education institutions and
world-famous historical landmarks. The city has an extensive infrastructure and
highly developed system of public transport, including the Kiev Metro.
photos
https://www.google.hr/search?q=kiev&client=opera&hs=iEL&sa=N&channel=suggest&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&ei=lUQKU4D4Esu8ygOMioHIBw&ved=0CCQQsAQ4Cg&biw=1024&bih=623