Protests launched across Ukraine against Russian cigarettes (AFP)
Hundreds of activists in several Ukrainian cities blockaded on Tuesday the cigarette distribution centres owned by a Russian tycoon with alleged links to ousted pro-Moscow president Viktor Yanukovych.
Ukrainian lawmaker Sergiy Vystotskiy said the protest action was launched in Kiev and the Western city of Lviv and other locations around the warehouses of a firm controlled by Moscow-based retail magnet Igor Kasaev.
Forbes magazine identifies Kasaev as president of the Mercury group of companies that controls 70 percent of the Russian cigarette market and more than 90 percent of those in Kazakhstan and Ukraine.
Vystotskiy wrote on Facebook that Kasaev had secretly split the Ukrainian branch of his company "50:50 with Yanukovych's family" -- an expression used by the ousted leader's critics to describe insiders who allegedly profitted from preferential deals.
A Kiev police spokesman confirmed to AFP that "activists" had launched a protest action in the Ukrainian capital on Tuesday around a warehouse owned by Mercury.
He provided no other details and directed all questions to the organisers of the protests aimed at getting the government to break up the Russian-linked firm.
Photographs in Ukrainian media showed at least 200 protesters gathered in the heavily pro-Western and nationalist city of Lviv alone.
Economic relations between Russia and Ukraine have been effectively frozen since the moment Kiev entered a free trade agreement with the European Union at the start of the year.
Russia and Ukraine have launched mirror import bans against each other's food products that reflect those Moscow has already imposed on the West.
The United States and the European Union had earlier slapped economic sanctions on Russia for its supposed orchestration and involvement in eastern Ukraine's 20-month separatist conflict in which more than 9,000 have died.
Neither Moscow nor the Russian oligarch issued an immediate comment on the protests.
Yanukovych fled to exile in Russia hours after his ouster by pro-European protesters in February 2014. He has since largely avoided the limelight and said nothing in public on Tuesday about his reputed links to the Moscow tycoon.
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