Branch of Medvedchuk's ‘Another Ukraine’ movement registered in Serbia

This was reported by journalists of Radio Svoboda's Schemes investigating project.

According to the register of legal entities in Serbia, the representative office of the Russian organization Another Ukraine was opened in August 2023. The Another Ukraine project indicates "establishing mutually beneficial cooperation between the peoples of Serbia, Russia and Ukraine" as the purpose of its activities, and the authorized person of the representative office is Dragan Stanoevych.

Stanoevych is a pro-Russian Serbian public figure and politician. Since June 2021, he has been sanctioned by the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council and banned from entering Ukraine for three years. 

Stanoevych has repeatedly publicly admired the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin and supports Russian military aggression in Ukraine. He was also outraged by the detention of Viktor Medvedchuk by the Security Service of Ukraine in 2022. He is the chairman of the Serbian World Diaspora Organization Parliament of the Serbian Diaspora and the international pro-Russian non-governmental organization United Serbian Diaspora of Eurasia.

Currently, Dragan Stanoevych is a candidate of the pro-Russian party We Are the Voice of the People in the early parliamentary elections to be held on December 17, 2023.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Dragan Stanoevych lived in Ukraine. He headed the Serbian Community in Ukraine, participated in public rallies in Kyiv and in meetings of Putin's Political Party.

According to the YouControl platform, in Ukraine, Dragan Stanojevic is still the head of the LLC Joint Ukrainian-Yugoslav Firm Yug-Ukr-Contract in Ukraine and owns property in the Kyiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions.

"My idea is not to help Medvedchuk, as I am sure he does not need my help, but to help Ukrainians who come to me. I will not be dragged into your political war, because the government is temporary, but the people are eternal, and I am doing everything I can for the people. I have never supported any aggression and I am not going to. Just as I am not going to support the Ukrainian government, which has essentially destroyed the Ukraine I loved, which is destroying the color of the Ukrainian nation with its policies and waging a war against dissent. I warned Ukraine where the Maidan policy would lead," Dragan Stanoevych told reporters.

After the creation of the branch in Serbia, the Russian registry renamed the organization "Another Ukraine". It was no longer designated as a "regional public movement" but as an "international public movement." Viktor Medvedchuk's organization also changed its leader - instead of Denys Zharkykh, former host of the 112 Ukraine TV channel, it was Roman Kovalenko, a Russian citizen.

The 53-year-old Kovalenko is a native of Donetsk region. In 2021, he appeared in court materials as a defendant in criminal proceedings for committing a criminal offense under Part 2 of Article 258-5 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (financing of terrorism). On his social media pages, Kovalenko shares Medvedchuk's articles and states that he is a lawyer, PhD in Economics and chairman of the executive committee of the international organization "Another Ukraine". At the same time, the website states that Viktor Medvedchuk is the chairman of the organization's board.

• In September, journalists found out that the personal confessor of the family of Viktor Medvedchuk, Putin's godfather accused of treason, and his wife, Oksana Marchenko, continues to live in the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra as a monk of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate).