Politician and oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, known for years as “Putin's man in Ukraine” and who went into hiding after Russia's war of aggression began, has been caught by the Ukrainian authorities.

The secret service SBU arrested the 67-year-old Medvedchuk as he tried to flee the country, dressed in a camouflage uniform of the Ukrainian army.

At least that's what it said in a video message from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

In his speech on Wednesday night, Zelenskyi scoffed at Moscow's claims that the Russian war crimes incidents in Ukraine were "staged" by Kyiv.

Then he cited the arrest of the politician as evidence of unstaged Ukrainian successes.

Gerhard Gnauck

Political correspondent for Poland, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania based in Warsaw.

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Zelenskyj described it as "particularly cynical" that the arrested man wore an army uniform: "What a warrior, what a patriot." Since he wore a uniform, he had to be treated under martial law.

The president suggested exchanging him "for our boys and girls," Ukrainian prisoners of war in Russian hands.

Medvedchuk still played a controversial role as a lawyer in Soviet times, including as the public defender of the dissident poet Wasyl Stus, who was later to die in a Gulag camp.

After the end of the dictatorship, the lawyer succeeded in breaking into the country's political elite: in 2002 he became head of the presidential office in Kyiv.

In 2004 his daughter Daryna was baptized;

The godfather was Vladimir Putin, who was already the Russian President at the time.

After the start of the Donbass war in 2014, Medvedchuk assumed a role as a mediator in talks with Russia.

In recent years he has been a private multi-millionaire, one of the leaders of the opposition party "Opposition Platform - For Life" (OPSSch), which made up about ten percent of the MPs in Parliament.

The party was considered pro-Russia;

however, the outbreak of war triggered intra-party conflicts.

After some time, the OpSSch and some other organizations were suspended for the duration of the hostilities, citing the war situation.

Medvedchuk – as a beneficiary of economic activities in the annexed Crimea – had been under court-ordered house arrest in his villa in Kyiv since May 2021 on charges of suspected high treason.

Years ago, pro-European journalist and politician Serhiy Leshchenko predicted that Zelenskyy's success as president would depend on his ability to reverse the influence of Medvedchuk, Moscow's "Trojan horse".

Medvedchuk's goal is to make Ukraine a satellite of Russia again.