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Political Analyst: Belarus Not To Give Away Berkut Officers To Ukraine Just Like That

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Political Analyst: Belarus Not To Give Away Berkut Officers To Ukraine Just Like That
PHOTO: AP

The story with the Berkut officers could turn into an international scandal.

The Ukrainian Berkut settles down in Belarus. Neither the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, nor the Ministry of the Interior of Ukraine are ready to comment the information about the former officers of the Ukrainan special police regiment Berkut, who are serving in the Belarusian police now. There has been no reaction to this information from the side of the official Minsk either. How many turntails-hawks escaped to Belarus, and who these people are, in the material by Ihar Kuley, Belsat TV.

The ex-Berkut men are serving in the Belarusian special police. The online media resource InformNapalm came to such a conclusion after the conducted investigation. Having put together a series of documents and the information from the social networks, the author of the investigation Dzianis Ivashyn makes a conclusion – the ex-Berkut officers are participating in repression.

“It’s hard to tell how many of them stay in Belarus, but, judging even from those three revealed officers, there could be several dozen or even a hundred of them at the territory of the Republic of Belarus. Here, they perform the same criminal functions, protecting Lukashenka’s regime now,” – Editor-in-Chief of InformNapalm’s Belarusian service Dzianis Ivashyn is convinced.

So far, three people have been in the center of the investigation: Nikolai Stogornyak, Sergei Gavrilyak and Sergei Panasenko. Most of the collected materials refer to the first officer. Stogornyak was a sergeant of the Berkut in the city of Pervomaisk, Mykolaiv region of Ukraine, which is confirmed by photographs. Ivashyn found documents that Stogornyak this year was a witness in the case of anarchist Viachaslau Kasinerau. Kasinerau identified Stogornyak by photo as an officer of the Belarusian Ministry of Internal Affairs, who perjured against him in court.

“For me, everything is clear here – a person who lost an opportunity to realize his “talents”, in particular, physical force and excess brutality, gets to some other service, of the same nature, and it is obvious they would fulfill any order to gain a foothold in the service,” – Viachaslau Kasinerau says.

On June 12, the Russian TV-channel Dozhd published photos of the opposition action in Moscow. In one of them - the former commander of the Kyiv Berkut Sergei Kusyuk in the uniform of the Russian OMON commands the dispersal of the rally. In 2014 he, together with 60 officers of the division, fled to the already occupied Crimea. In Ukraine, they suspect a runaway colonel in involvement in the shooting of participants of the Dignity Revolution of 2014 and the export of weapons of crime to Russia, and they ask Moscow to extradite Kusyuk. There has been no answer yet, but it is unlikely that the Kremlin's refusal will further damage relations between the two countries. However, what to do if Ukraine starts dealing with the Belarusian ex-Berkut people?

"There can be a conflict. However, I do not think that Belarus will give away the former Berkut officers just like that. Certainly, the Ukrainian activists who took part in the events of EuroMaidan will demand radical action from the authorities of Ukraine. But in the end, Belarus will not extradite the defectors," - political scientist Roman Korbut said.

During the April meeting between Aliaksandr Lukashenka and Petro Poroshenko, the Belarusian ruler emphasized that the Ukrainians had never been foreigners to Belarusians and that Belarus would do everything to prevent a quarrel between the two peoples. I wonder how this will combine with hiding dozens of law-enforcers involved in crimes in Ukraine?

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