Spain has detained pro-Russian blogger and politician Anatoliy Shari, whom the Security Service of Ukraine suspects of treason.

Investigators believe that he carried out illegal activities to the detriment of national security in the information sphere.

But the court released him home. His documents were confiscated and he was banned from leaving Spain before Ukraine applied for his extradition.

According to El Mundo, Sharia is defended by Gonzalo Boye, the lawyer of Carlos Puigdemon, the leader of the Catalan independence movement in 2016-2017.

Judge of the Central Administrative Court №4 in Spain Jose Luis Calama has decided to release the blogger Anatoliy Shari, who is accused of treason in Ukraine.

Sharia was ordered to report to the police every 15 days at her place of residence, banned from leaving the country and her passport confiscated.

The publication notes that the judge made this decision at the request of the prosecutor’s office, which believes that Shari will not run away because he has lived in Spain for 7 years and has all the residence permits.

Following a court ruling, Ukraine has 40 days to request extradition. The prosecutor’s office will consider the crimes Sharia is accused of and the facts on which the charges are based. The court will then rule on extradition.

According to the publication, Sharia was detained on Wednesday by members of the Spanish National Police in Tarragana, Catalonia.

The operation was prepared for several weeks by Catalan law enforcement officers from the Brigada de Información de Cataluña. However, the publication, citing sources in the police, writes that Shariy last week announced the possibility of his arrest.

According to the SBU press service, on May 4, Sharia was detained by Spanish police.

“This was made possible by the close cooperation of the Security Service of Ukraine with the Office of the Prosecutor General, international partners, including the Spanish National Police and the Office of the Attaché of the Spanish Ministry of Internal Affairs in Ukraine. inevitable, – said in a statement SBU. – There is reason to believe that Anatoly Shariy acted on behalf of foreign agencies. ”

Sharia in Ukraine is suspected not only of treason, but also of “violation of equality of citizens depending on their race, nationality, religious beliefs, disability and other characteristics.”

The procedure of Sharia’s extradition to Ukraine will be launched in the near future, said Fedir Venislavsky, a member of the parliamentary committee on national security, defense and intelligence.

“I am convinced that Sharia’s lawyers will appeal against all actions, so it is very optimistic to hope that he will be in Ukraine tomorrow, but I have no doubt that he will get to Ukraine and be brought to justice,” he said. Venislavsky Interfax.

Anatoliy Shariy himself has previously claimed that the case against him is “purely political” due to the fact that his party is gaining ratings. The blogger’s YouTube channel had nearly three million subscribers. Shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, Sharia’s social media accounts in Ukraine were blocked.

His Sharia Party won 2.23% in the 2019 election without passing the 5% barrier. Putin’s godfather, former leader of the Opposition Platform For Life Viktor Medvedchuk, against whom a criminal case of treason has also been filed in Ukraine, saw Sharia’s allies as potential allies.

“We can believe that our regiment has arrived – there are still political forces that are ready to fight lawlessness, lawlessness, foreign rule, anti-Russian hysteria and cave Russophobia,” Medvedchuk wrote on Twitter in 2020.

On March 19 this year, the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine suspended the activities of the Sharia Party during martial law.

Air Force correspondent Svyatoslav Khomenko

On the night of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it was painful to watch Anatoly Sharia. Right in the middle of the night he started the stream, which lasted ten hours.

He read the news about the bombing all over Ukraine live in embarrassment, and when asked by his viewers, to whom he had explained “for politics” for several years before, “Tolya, what’s going on?” – he answered sincerely: “What is happening now is difficult for me to understand at all.”

At the time, it seemed that at that time the electoral base of Sharia-politician and the Ukrainian consumer base of Sharia-blogger were being reset live.

The former journalist, who has a certain charisma and can speak beautifully, was a leader of opinions for young and active citizens of Ukraine, who were not particularly interested in politics, but took a critical position on the Ukrainian government – for Poroshenko and Zelensky.

Sharia’s short video blogs, in which he sharply criticized Ukraine’s policy (the fact that these videos were often completely manipulative, let’s leave behind), received hundreds of thousands of views.

During one of the online press conferences of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Sharia was allowed to ask questions, of course, on behalf of Ukrainian civil society – despite the fact that he himself has not lived in Spain for the first year.

Sharia’s party won the city councils of major cities in southern Ukraine in the last local elections. In short, Shariy was one of the most prominent pro-Russian figures in Ukraine (according to the SBU, he facilitated Russian special information operations for ten years) and had some prospects.

Russian missiles arriving in all Russian-speaking cities in Ukraine, Russian soldiers looting in towns near Kiev, to put it mildly, have made Sharia’s rhetoric less relevant.

At the beginning of the invasion, Shari distanced himself from politics: according to his statements, his supporters in Ukraine focused on helping – transport, food, medicine – those who need it. But literally a few weeks have passed – and Shari returned to the rhetoric that many in Ukraine perceive as masterful manipulations created in favor of Russia.

According to Sharia’s new videos, Zelensky is a “dictator on minimalism” who pursues a talentless economic policy and authorizes the almost execution of his opponents. “Pumping Ukraine with weapons” will respond by saying that “extremist right-wing radical groups” will start using these weapons in Europe. Ukraine, it is possible, is considering plans to destabilize Transnistria.

In short, the method of Russian propaganda, only adapted to the needs of the Ukrainian public.

The development of this narrative could be traced to wondering if Shari could return to his former heights of popularity. But the thing is that a lot has changed since February 24: both in the behavior of the Ukrainian government, which has not tried too hard to persecute Sharia, and in the attitude of European states to the “soft power” of Russian propaganda.

A visit by a group of Ukrainian activists to the Spanish villa of Sharia in late March and a fight halted by police could be a harbinger of future problems for the blogger-politician. The next time Ukraine visited Sharia was in the form of an arrest warrant and a request for extradition, and this time he failed to do so with little blood.

The outcome of the extradition trial in the Spanish court, of course, is difficult to predict now, but this does not prevent many opponents of Sharia to celebrate the day of his detention as a full-fledged holiday.

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