KYIV. Jan 13 (Interfax) - The Ukrainian Security Service's Main Investigative Directorate has dropped the criminal investigation into a high treason case against former head of the Ukrainian delegation to the Trilateral Contact Group (TCG) for Donbas and former President Leonid Kuchma and presidential office chief Andriy Yermak.
"The criminal proceedings have been closed," the Ukrainian Security Service told Interfax on Wednesday morning.
Volodymyr Vyatrovych of the European Solidarity parliamentary faction had said earlier on his Facebook account that the Security Service had dropped the high treason case against Kuchma and Yermak.
Vyatrovych also published scans of the Security Service's reply to him, in which the latter said it had concluded that preliminary consent to the establishment of a Consultative Council within the TCG "cannot be interpreted as facilitating subversive activities against Ukraine by a foreign state"
As reported earlier, a Ukrainian court had ruled on April 23, 2020 to grant Vyatrovych's complaint and oblige the Security Service to investigate Yermak and Kuchma for possibly committing high treason.
The investigation concerned a TCG meeting in Minsk on March 11, 2020, whose participants included Yermak, Kuchma, and Russian Presidential Executive Office deputy head Dmitry Kozak, among others, and at which the parties reached agreements on swapping prisoners, separating forces, simultaneously opening checkpoints in the communities of Zolote and Shchastya, and establishing a Consultative Council comprised of ten representatives from Kyiv, another ten from the areas in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions not currently under Kyiv's control, all of them having full voting rights, plus one representative each with consultative votes from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Russia, Germany, and France, given their consent.