KYIV — A Ukrainian judge acquired Russian citizenship following Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea, spending more than eight months on the occupied peninsula between 2018 and 2022 and using her Russian passport to travel to Moscow, Schemes, the investigative unit of RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, has found.
Lyudmyla Arestova, a judge on the Donetsk district Administrative Court — which is responsible for the partially occupied Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine and is located in the city of Dnipro due to the Russian invasion — is now the subject of a preliminary investigation by Ukrainian authorities.
Arestova, 44, is a native of Russia who moved to Ukraine in the 1990s. Speaking to Schemes, she denied that she had Russian citizenship or a passport but, aside from suggesting her signature was forged, was unable to explain the official documents obtained by Schemes that show she has both.
In a letter to RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service dated July 24, Dmytro Levichev, the acting district prosecutor in Slovyansk, a government-controlled city in the Donetsk region, said that he had opened a criminal investigation last month into whether RFE/RL journalists interfered with Arestova’s work.
However, the Prosecutor-General’s Office said on July 27 that the authorities had dropped the investigation “due to the lack of evidence of a criminal violation.”
The investigation had been opened following a complaint in which Arestova accused RFE/RL journalists of “interference in the administration of justice” with the aim of discrediting her.
In her complaint to Ukraine’s Higher Council of Justice and Prosecutor-General’s Office, she claimed without evidence that a Schemes journalist working on the story “actively cooperates with the aggressor country,” meaning Russia, transmits information to Russian intelligence services, and “carries out illegal surveillance.”
RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service denied the allegations.
The Schemes findings come amid heightened scrutiny of public officials for ties with Russia as Moscow’s full-scale invasion rages on 17 months after it began.
In October 2022, a Supreme Court judge, Bohdan Lvov, was removed from office after a Schemes investigation revealed he had concealed his Russian citizenship and real estate from government declarations.
In a 2021 disciplinary proceeding against another judge, Yulia Pereyaslovska, for allegedly acquiring Russian citizenship in Crimea, the Higher Council of Justice, the only state body that can terminate a judge’s powers, called dual citizenship for a judge “a direct violation of the main constitutional principles and foundations of the state” that “inevitably undermines the authority of justice and calls into question the observance of the rule of law in Ukraine.” Pereyaslovska is no longer a judge.
Data obtained from Russia’s passport registry shows that a passport for Arestova, originally a registered resident of Crimea, was issued on April 10, 2014, roughly three weeks after the Kremlin claimed to have made the Ukrainian peninsula part of Russia — an assertion that was widely rejected around the world. As part of its seizure of Crimea, Russia granted citizenship to permanent Crimean residents who had not officially stated within a month of the takeover that they wished to preserve “their original citizenship.”
Schemes found no official documents that indicate that Arestova, a Ukrainian citizen since 1999, ever expressed that wish. As of July 13, when the Schemes report was published, the Russian Interior Ministry had not voided Arestova’s Russian passport.
Read more
https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-judge-russian-passport-crimea/32524183.html
