Ukraine investigates, attacks those who collaborate with Russia. Ukraine’s Kyiv – Volodymyr Saldo asserted that he spent 59 days in the Dominican Republic in 2016, about 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) from his home, shackled to a metal bed.
He said that Igor Pashchenko, his former business partner from the city of Kherson in southern Ukraine, electrocuted him to force him to transcribe specific words into a dictaphone.
The lines, according to Saldo, were used by Pashchenko to demand a sizable ransom from his family and to assemble an audio recording of Saldo’s purported confession to working with Russia.
Ukraine investigates, attacks those who collaborate with Russia. Saldo, a construction mogul and the former mayor of Kherson, insisted he had never worked with Russians upon his release and return to his home country.
“I have interesting plans about Kherson and its future,” he told the Interfax news agency in March 2017.
A year later, in Kherson, Pashchenko was shot twice in the head contract-style; his family claimed Saldo had ordered the killing.
Moscow also annexed Kherson and the surrounding area in March, installing Saldo as its ruler.
Traits of tyrants
According to Ukrainian prosecutors, 480 people are being looked into for working with the Russian invaders in the northeast of the country, from Kherson to Kharkiv.
According to the prosecution, the traitors hand over towns, cities, and entire districts, inform on pro-Kyiv activists, provide the Russians with the whereabouts of Ukrainian troops, weapons caches, and minefields, and even coordinate artillery bombardment.
Political commentator: Enough is known about the collaborators to pinpoint their distinguishing characteristics.
Aleksey Kushch, a Kyiv-based analyst, told Al Jazeera that the characteristics of a collaborator include having held a required government job in the past, having local ties and economic interests, and having disagreements with the [central] government.
He said, “A pro-Russian position or games in this political arena, criminal connections, love of money and power that hasn’t been satiated in the current system of coordinates.”
Saldo was one of the vast majority of collaborators who belonged to pro-Russian political organizations that had been banned and disbanded throughout the conflict.
