The Verkhovna Rada has supported at the first reading a bill on amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code regarding the improvement of certain provisions in connection with the implementation of a special pretrial investigation.

Some 299 MPs voted for corresponding bill No. 2164 at a meeting on Wednesday.

The bill proposes to amend the Criminal Procedure Code and determine that the grounds for putting a suspect on the wanted list are the grounds "when the location of the suspect is unknown and when the suspect evades the summons of an investigator, a prosecutor, an investigating judge or a court, provided he is properly notified of such summons, and there are reasonable grounds to believe that he left and/or is staying in another country or in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine."

"In order to condemn a person in absentia now - all those who are in Russia now, in the occupied territories, escaped Berkut members, it is necessary to place a person on the interstate or international wanted list. We cannot put them on the interstate wanted list, since this is only for the CIS countries. Russia tells us that they will not extradite a person, since this does not meet the state interests of the Russian Federation ... Therefore, we must have an instrument so that now those people who are in Russia and in uncontrolled territories, who nevertheless de jure belong to Ukraine, put on the wanted list and convict them in absentia," said Oleksandra Ustinova, member of the law enforcement committee (Holos faction), when discussing the bill.