Free Republic

Ukraine has imposed sanctions on former president and opposition politician Petro Poroshenko, including asset freezes and a ban on withdrawing capital from the country, a presidential decree published on Thursday said. Poroshenko, one of Ukraine's richest men who heads the largest opposition party in Ukraine's parliament, served as president from 2014 until 2019 when he lost his bid for a second term at an election won by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. The decree did not say why the sanctions were imposed, but Zelenskiy said earlier that his security council would announce sanctions targeting people who had undermined Ukrainian national security. "The...

The Russian invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 sparked the beginning of an intensified war between the two forces. Now, the richest man in Ukraine, Rinat Akhmedov, set out to build shelters for Ukrainian soldiers as the war raged on with all of its devastations. According to Bloomberg's report, a Ukrainian steelworks controlled by billionaire Akhmetov has started constructing prefabricated dugouts and transporting them to soldiers engaged in front-line combat with Russia. WAR CAPSULES According to steel manufacturer Metinvest Holding LLC, the capsules can resist impacts from 150-millimeter rounds after being buried 1.5 meters (5 feet) beneath the surface. They...

In an explosive legal complaint filed last month in Delaware, attorneys for a major Ukrainian bank alleged that two oligarchs who founded the bank and controlled it from 2006 to 2016 laundered hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent corporate loans to purchase assets in the United States and unjustly enrich themselves and their associates. Dubbed the "Optima Schemes" in the 104-page document, these "brazen fraudulent schemes" were successful, among other things, in making the oligarchs and their co-defendants the largest commercial real estate holders in Cleveland. With money siphoned from public bonds and 20 million private Ukrainian citizens who'd...