On October 27, the HACC continued hearing the case of fugitive former President Viktor Yanukovych and his son Oleksandr. They are charged with the unlawful acquisition of the Mezhyhiria residence.

The hearing opened with yet another motion to recuse the panel of judges. A newly state-appointed defense lawyer claimed the judges were biased. He pointed to the court’s separate ruling of October 2, in which it decided to notify the Shevchenkivskyi Police Department of a possible deliberate failure by officials of the Northern Interregional Center for Free Legal Aid to comply with a court ruling, and the Sviatoshynskyi Police Department of possible obstruction of its enforcement by a lawyer.

At issue is the Northern Interregional Center for Free Legal Aid’s termination of state-appointed lawyers’ assignments. The court believes this may have hindered enforcement of its ruling.

However, the HACC denied the defense lawyer’s recusal motion.

Both retained and state-appointed defense lawyers systematically fail to appear at hearings in the Yanukovych case.

By the court’s count, the retained lawyer missed seven of 12 hearings in the first six months of the trial. The pattern continued after that. Between July 2023 and December 2024, the court scheduled 38 hearings; eight were taken off the schedule, and the lawyer failed to appear at 14. Since late November 2025, the defense lawyer has missed 15 of 27 hearings. The court has previously raised the issue of the retained lawyer’s disciplinary liability.

The HACC has repeatedly appointed free legal aid lawyers for the defendant. It did so in 2022, 2023, 2025, and 2026. Each time, the court stressed that the appointed lawyer must take part in the proceedings continuously, regardless of whether the retained lawyer shows up.

This did not solve the problem. For example, the hearing on September 22 this year did not take place because neither the defendant’s retained lawyer nor his appointed lawyer appeared in court.

The appointed lawyers, for their part, sometimes withdrew from their assignments themselves. According to the court, two of them terminated their contracts in June and July 2026. On top of that, the Northern Interregional Center for Free Legal Aid terminated assignments on its own initiative, arguing that the defendant was already represented by another lawyer.

We also highlighted the defense’s abuse of procedural rights in our HACC monitoring report. The court still has no power to fine lawyers, and the existing tools for responding to their abuses are not effective enough.

The indictment against the Yanukovyches in the Mezhyhiria case was sent to court on December 6, 2022, and the criminal proceedings have now been before the court for almost four years. The statute of limitations in the case expires in early 2028.

The parties are currently examining the defense evidence, and the lawyers continue to submit documents.