Swedish Police Hold Ex-MP Sentenced to 12 Years in Ukraine

Swedish border police detained former Ukrainian lawmaker Dmytro Sviatash at Arlanda Airport last Thursday after he arrived in Stockholm, stopping him at passport control and denying him entry to the country. Sviatash, who represented Ukraine in parliament from 2002 to 2019 as a member of the Party of Regions, is now being held at the Swedish Migration Agency's temporary detention centre in Märsta. He holds both Russian and Ukrainian citizenship and presented a Ukrainian passport at the border, his lawyer Mark Safaryan said.

A Ukrainian court sentenced Sviatash in absentia in the summer of 2024 to 12 years in prison on charges of justifying Russia's armed aggression against Ukraine and fraud totaling UAH 2.2 billion, or about US$48.1 million. He has also been under suspicion of treason since 2023. Sviatash left Ukraine in 2019 and has lived in Russia since then.

Safaryan said his client traveled to Stockholm to attend a Stevie Wonder concert. The lawyer said the stated reason for denying Sviatash entry was a Polish decision barring him from re-entering that country, with the ban entered into a shared database used by Schengen states. Safaryan called the decision politically motivated and described his client as "one of the most wanted people in Ukraine." He stated in an appeal that Sviatash opposes extradition to Ukraine.

The case lands amid a run of legal actions against pro-Russian politicians in the Baltics. In Estonia, Aivo Peterson, a leader of the pro-Russian Koos party, was sentenced to 14 years in prison for treason. Latvian pro-Russian politician Alexei Roslikov chose to stay in Belarus after his party's weak showing in elections.