KYIV: Ukraine on Thursday indicted its former prime minister on charges of justifying Russia’s invasion and calling for the overthrow of the Ukrainian constitution.

The General Prosecutor’s Office did not name him, but published a slightly blurred photo of Mykola Azarov, a pro-Russian prime minister who resigned in 2014 amid Ukraine’s pro-European Maidan revolution.

Ukrainian media also reported it was Azarov, who has long been the target of legal proceedings in Kyiv, that was charged.

Azarov and then-President Viktor Yanukovych fled to Russia in 2014 after their security forces killed dozens of protesters who had camped out in central Kyiv demanding pro-EU reforms.

“Prosecutors have submitted to court an indictment in the criminal proceedings against the former prime minister of Ukraine,” the Prosecutor General’s Office said in a statement on Thursday.

It alleged that the official had worked with Moscow to advance Russian narratives about the war, denied Russian forces committed atrocities in the town of Bucha and sought to justify Russia’s invasion as a defensive special operation.

“The ex-official calls the events in Bucha ‘fake’, calls for ‘denazification’ and a violent change of the Ukrainian government, and says that Putin’s ‘special operation’ saved Donetsk from capture,” it said.

Published in Dawn, January 19th, 2024