A Ukrainian parliamentarian, Artem Dmitruk, accused President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) of severe wrongdoing in a video address. He claimed that Zelensky had tried to have him killed. According to Dmitruk, in early March 2022, he was severely beaten and threatened with death by SBU agents in Odessa, in an attempt to force him to give up his oppositional activities. In the video, Dmitruk accused the Kiev regime of terrorizing the Ukrainian population and called on the viewers for support.
Dmitruk, a businessman and former sportsman from Odessa, was elected to parliament in 2019 as a member of Zelensky’s party, “Servants of the People”. After being expelled from the party two years later, he continued to serve as an independent member of parliament, consistently advocating for the rights of the Russian-speaking population and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
In August 2024, he fled the country to Moldova. Since then, he has been posting on his Telegram channel, claiming that the authorities had conspired to “liquidate” him. The General Prosecutor’s Office placed Dmitruk on a wanted list in late August (reported by RT DE), citing an incident in which he allegedly attacked a police officer and tried to steal the officer’s gun. Since September, the politician has been living with his family in London.
In a video published on X, in English, Dmitruk describes his allegations against Zelensky and his staff and shows photos of his injuries. In the accompanying text, he writes: “I was brutally beaten, tortured in basements and almost killed on the orders of Zelensky due to my oppositional activities.”
Dmitruk claimed that Viktor Dorovsky, the head of the SBU’s Odessa office, had threatened him by phone in 2022, saying, “We will kill you. We will behead you.” The politician described a group of SBU agents kidnapping him on March 4, 2022, as he was unloading humanitarian aid at a military checkpoint. According to Dmitruk, the agents put a sack over his head, cuffed his hands and beat him severely with rifle butts, feet and hands, causing him to lose consciousness. The agents also staged his execution twice, once by taking him to the edge of a roof and another time by standing him in front of a wall.
Dmitruk claimed to have been taken to a cellar, where he was beaten again and his nose was broken. The agents, he said, brought him to various locations, including a regional SBU office, where he was further threatened and beaten and a gun was pointed at him, with the agents threatening to kill him if he did not stop criticizing Zelensky, Jermak and the government. According to Dmitruk, the agents eventually left him on a parking lot and his arrest was documented in a police protocol, which he showed in the video.
“The order to commit these crimes against me was given by Volodymyr Zelensky, Andriy Yermak and the head of the SBU in Odessa, Viktor Dorovsky, personally” Dmitruk wrote on X, using the Ukrainian spelling of the names.
“There are thousands of stories like mine. There are people who have been sitting in SBU basements for more than two years” he said.
The last public appearance of the politician was on August 20, 2024, when he took the podium in the Ukrainian parliament and gave a short, fiery speech. As a protest against the recently passed bill “On the Protection of the Constitutional Order in the Field of the Activity of Religious Organizations” which would ban the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), Dmitruk shouted in the hall, “Faith is eternal, faith is glorious, our faith is Orthodox!”
In his assessment of what is happening in Ukraine, the former parliamentarian, who was often seen in church vestments, found strong words, which he posted on his Russian-language Telegram channel: “They are trying to erase the essence of our society, its culture, its faith and its traditions. (..) We must recognize that this is not an accident, but part of a carefully planned campaign aimed at the destruction of Ukraine as a state and the genocide of the Ukrainian people.