Volodymyr Oliynyk

Volodymyr Mykolaiovych Oliinyk (; born 16 April 1957) is a former Ukrainian politician who served as a People's Deputy of Ukraine from 2006 to 2014. He previously served as mayor of Cherkasy from 1994 to 2002 and was a candidate in the 1999 Ukrainian presidential election. Oliinyk was the author of the anti-protest laws and fled Ukraine after the Revolution of Dignity, serving as president of the Moscow-based Ukraine Salvation Committee.

Early life and career, family Volodymyr Mykolaiovych Oliinyk was born on 16 April 1957 in the village of . He served in the Soviet Army from 1975 to 1977 and subsequently studied at the Kharkiv Law Institute (now the Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University), graduating in 1981. Following his graduation, Oliinyk worked as a judge in the city of Cherkasy.

Oliinyk is married to Liudmyla Hennadiivna Oliinyk. The couple has three sons: Ruslan, Denys and Volodymyr.

Political career From 1987 to 1988, Oliinyk was a member of the Cherkasy municipal committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine. He subsequently served as a member of the Cherkasy regional committee from 1988 to 1990, and was deputy mayor of the Cherkasy municipal executive committee from 1990 to 1994. endorsing Yevhen Marchuk.

In the 2006 Ukrainian parliamentary election Oliinyk was elected as a People's Deputy of Ukraine for the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, placed 30th on the party's proportional representation party list.

Oliinyk returned to the Verkhovna Rada (parliament of Ukraine) on 30 March 2010 as the 185th candidate on the PR party list of the Party of Regions. He was re-elected in the 2012 Ukrainian parliamentary election, this time as the 17th candidate on the Party of Regions' PR party list. He was deputy chairman of the Committee on Legal Defence of Human Rights Activities. By December 2014, he had fled Ukraine to Russia, living in Moscow and Yalta in Russian-occupied Crimea. Upon being approached by news outlet Television News Service, he described the post-Revolution of Dignity government as a "junta".

Oliinyk was appointed president of the Moscow-based Ukraine Salvation Committee on 3 August 2015. He was stripped of his diplomatic passport by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in August 2015 alongside 89 other politicians who had supported Yanukovych's government.

In January 2022, Oliinyk was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department and accused of being part of a group led by Oleh Voloshyn and Taras Kozak, working on behalf of the Russian Federal Security Service to destabilise the Ukrainian government. The U.S. Treasury stated that Oliinyk had gathered information about Ukraine's critical infrastructure for Russian intelligence.

Along with fellow former People's Deputy Oleg Tsaryov, Oliinyk was charged with treason by the Security Service of Ukraine (, SBU) in September 2022. The SBU accused Oliinyk and Tsaryov of participating in the Russian occupation of Kyiv Oblast, travelling to the village of and advocating for the Russian world.