A longtime pro-Russia member of Ukraine's parliament, known in recent years for brawling with his anti-Russia colleagues, faces treason charges following a raid on his home.
“After 2022, he and members of his political faction started to behave differently, they were really scared,” Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Chairman Oleksandr Merezhko told the Washington Examiner. "At the same time, the statements made before 2022 — now we look at them in a new light. Now, after the beginning of the full-scale war, his statements [are seen] in a different light, and they look treasonous.”
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Ukrainian security officials searched Nestor Shufrych's property on Friday and produced a variety of pro-Russia documents. One document that appears to bear the signatures of Shufrych and Viktor Medvedchuk, the former Ukrainian lawmaker who named Russian President Vladimir Putin the godfather of his daughter, reportedly outlined a plan to weaken Kyiv’s authority over the Donbas regions of eastern Ukraine, where Putin had launched an invasion thinly-disguised as a Ukrainian civil war. The document dates to July 2014, two months before the signing of the first Minsk ceasefire agreement.
“This document is enough to prove corpus delicti, elements of the crime of treason ... it sounds like a plan prepared in Moscow,” said Merezhko, a lawyer by training. “If I were his defense attorney, I would probably argue that this plan is their interpretation of the Minsk agreements, something like that ... but if I were [the] prosecution, I would say that this is most likely a plan prepared in Moscow and they were just puppets trying to implement a Russian plan.”
Security officials accused him of trying to weaken Ukraine’s identity as an independent state and society.
“He systematically spread the Kremlin's narratives that the Ukrainian state is an allegedly artificial entity, that Ukraine and Russia have a single history, and that Ukrainians and Russians are supposedly ‘one nation,’” the Security Service of Ukraine asserted on social media. “In this way, Shufrych tried to develop pro-Russian sentiments in Ukrainian society.”
Shufrych has been arrested once already during the war, when Ukrainian territorial defense officials accused him of photographing a checkpoint near Kyiv, less than two weeks after Putin launched his attempt to seize the capital and overthrow Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Shufrych claimed he just wanted selfies with the “city's sights in the background,” an unnamed Ukrainian soldier told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. He also is reputed to have had advanced knowledge of Putin’s intent to invade.
“Then he said quite clearly that there would be some kind of escalation, but the only thing Shufrych never said was about the invasion of the Kyiv region,” an unnamed parliamentary source told the Kyiv Post last year. “He clearly said that the Russians will take the entire Luhansk region and go to Mariupol. How he knew this, I don’t know.”
Shufrych is one of 44 lawmakers who won their seats in 2019 as part of a pro-Russian political party that was banned after the launch of the full-scale invasion. His tenure in the Ukrainian legislature was contentious even before Feb. 24, 2022. He was part of a brawl on the floor of parliament in 2018 when he tore down a poster that declared that “Putin's agent [Viktor] Medvedchuk must face trial.” He was in another public fistfight a week before the full-scale invasion when a Ukrainian journalist punched him during a panel discussion in which he refused to criticize Putin.
“They were unabashedly pro-Russian, for good relations with the Russians until the Russians invaded,” former Ambassador Bill Taylor, who led the U.S. diplomatic mission in Ukraine on two occasions, told the Washington Examiner. “I would be a little bit surprised if there were people who used to be in the opposition party, For Life ... if they were still pro-Russian, because those parties have been so discredited, and all those people have been so quiet.”
Some of those elected officials fled the country after the Feb. 24 invasion, while their colleagues who remained in parliament have compensated for their political background by voting in favor of Zelensky’s priorities.
“They have become the most reliable and cheapest allies of the authorities,” Ukrainian election expert Oleksiy Koshel told openDemocracy.
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Shufrych is accused of working at the direction of Vladimir Sivkovich, the former Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council deputy secretary who has been sanctioned by the United States for working with the FSB, the Russian successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB, to advance Russian interests in Ukraine and the United States.
Shufrych faces up to 15 years in prison, according to Ukrainian authorities. “These charges against him, they still need to be proved in court,” Merezhko said. “From a legal perspective of course, we need to wait for the court decision, yes, before accusing him, but from [the] political perspective, to me, it was obvious that his political party has always been pro-Russian, was trying to push [the] pro-Russian agenda.”