By Seb Starcevic

Copyright politico

But on Wednesday the General Court, part of the Court of Justice of the European Union, dismissed his action in a judgment excoriating his tenure as Ukraine’s president.

Yanukovych’s actions as Ukraine’s head of state “clearly contributed to the destabilisation” of the country and the EU was right to include him on its sanctions list according to its legal criteria, the court said in its 18-page judgment.

The court also noted the former strongman’s failure “to distance himself effectively from the Russian authorities” since his presidency and singled out his “involvement in a plan” to oust Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in March 2022.

Yanukovych’s son, Oleksandr Viktorovych Yanukovych, was also sanctioned by the EU over his far-reaching business dealings in the Russian-occupied Donbas region. On Wednesday the court dismissed his parallel appeal to have those sanctions lifted as well.

As president of Ukraine, Yanukovych pulled the country out of an association agreement with the EU, plundered state coffers and courted closer ties with the Kremlin, triggering widespread civil unrest.

After calling on Russian President Vladimir Putin to send troops into the country to restore order, and after bloody confrontations between his security forces and pro-democracy protesters that killed more than 100 of his citizens, Yanukovych fled to Russia in early 2014, where he has lived in exile ever since.