A Ukrainian journalist and blogger accused of treason in his home country has been arrested in Tarragona under an international arrest warrant.
Anatoly Shariya, 43, has been taken to Madrid to appear before the National Court which will rule on his extradition to Ukraine.
Ukraine’s security services announced the arrest on Thursday.
They claimed that Shariya ‘was acting on behalf of foreign entities’.
Shariy has been a vocal critic of Ukraine’s government and has been accused of being a propagandist for Vladimir Putin ever since Russia invaded and annexed the Crimea in 2014.
He’s lived in the Tarragona area of Catalunya since 2016.
He fled Ukraine to live in Lithuania in 2012, which granted him a five-year residency visa on the basis that he was a persecuted journalist.
Shariy had argued that Nazi groups in Ukraine had targeted him due to his work as a journalist exposing government corruption.
On Tuesday, Shariy said that he had been warned that Ukrainian intelligence was trying to track him down.
He created a political party that many Ukrainians consider pro-Russian and it was reported in February that Shariy sought asylum in the European Union.
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