Pro-Russian politician Medvedchuk's movement headed by supporter of Russian aggression established in Serbia

A branch of the Drugaya Ukraina (Other Ukraine) NGO, created by Viktor Medvedchuk, a close associate of the Russian president who was exchanged for over 200 Ukrainian prisoners of war in September 2022, has been registered in Serbia. It is headed by Dragan Stanojević, a candidate for the Serbian parliament and supporter of Russian aggression.

Source: Skhemy (a Radio Liberty project) with reference to information from the official registers of Serbia and the Russian Federation 

Details: The Drugaya Ukraina organisation founded by Medvedchuk in Russia has been renamed. Now it is not a "regional" but an "international social movement".

The representative office of the Russian Drugaya Ukraina organisation, according to the register of legal entities in Serbia, was opened in August 2023. According to the official extract, it declares the purpose of its activities to be "establishing mutually beneficial cooperation between the peoples of Serbia, Russia and Ukraine", and the authorised person of the representative office is Dragan Stanojević.

Stanojević is a pro-Russian Serbian public figure and politician. Since June 2021, he has been sanctioned by the Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council and banned from entering Ukraine for three years.

Stanojević has repeatedly publicly expressed his admiration for the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin, approved of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s stance on the issue, and supported Russian military aggression in Ukraine. He also happily posted his reaction to the Russian attack on the city centre of Kyiv and was outraged when Viktor Medvedchuk was detained by the Security Service of Ukraine in 2022.

Stanojević is currently a candidate in the early parliamentary elections to be held on 17 December 2023 from the pro-Russian party We Are the Voice of the People.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Stanojević lived in Ukraine, headed the Serbian Community in Ukraine, participated in public rallies in Kyiv and in meetings of Putin's Policy Party.

As the YouControl platform stated, in Ukraine, Stanojević is still the head of the Joint Ukrainian-Yugoslavian Company Yug-Ukr-Contract LLC, and has property in Kyiv and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts.

In a comment to Radio Liberty, he said: "My idea is not to help Medvedchuk, I am sure he does not need my help, but to help Ukrainians who apply. I will not be sucked into your political war, because the government is temporary, but the people are eternal, and I am doing everything I can for the people. I have never supported any aggression and I am not going to."

He stated that the Ukrainian authorities "destroyed the Ukraine I loved, which is destroying the bloom of the Ukrainian nation with its policies and waging a war against dissent".

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