Ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych is pining for a return to the political stage, he told the RIA Novosti news agency.
“I want to return to politics. Today … everything within my power, I am doing. Firstly, I'm helping people who are being persecuted in Ukraine, those who have left Ukraine. And not only to Russia. Whatever I can help with, I do,” he was citing as telling RIA Novosti in an interview on Tuesday.
Yanukovych, who was toppled following mass protests in February 2014, said he also maintained ties with some members of the new Kiev government.
The former Ukrainian president, who fled to Russia following his ousting, sporadically reappears in the Russian media.
In a recent report, he was said to have filed a lawsuit with the European Court of Human Rights against the new Ukrainian government for supposedly violating his rights.
Yanukovych's decision to backtrack from signing an association deal with the European Union in favor of closer ties with Moscow led to violent protest on Kiev's Maidan Square. The protests eventually led to his toppling and marked the beginning of an ongoing conflict between the new government in Kiev and pro-Russian separatists in the country's east.
