Mezhyhiriya- Yanukovich's luxury residence and the money trail
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What is Mezhyhiriya?
Yanukovych is now the proud occupier of 137 hectares (340 acres) of land on the banks of the river Dnieper. This is an area a little smaller than the principality of Monaco, which occupies 195 hectares. On the other hand, the population of the principality is 30,000, whereas the sultanate of Mezhyhiriya has but one single inhabitant.
The period after Viktor Yanukovych’s inauguration was ‘the golden age’ of Mezhyhiriya. All the buildings constructed in the Soviet period, where the Communist leaders had lived, were demolished. In their place rose a five storey palace of log and stone. Once, Viktor Yanukovych even had an opportunity to boast about his property. On a visit to Berlin in 2010, he was speaking to an audience of local intellectuals and, wishing to pay a compliment to his host nation, he told them had imported German craftsmen to construct his estate and was very pleased with their work.
The mansion itself, crowned with a roof of pure copper, was built by the Finnish company Honka, the world leader in the construction of log buildings of all kinds. Apparently Yanukovych’s home is the largest wooden structure ever built by Honka, and the company even wanted to nominate it for inclusion in the Guinness Book of Records. But its owner declined this honour.
The royal scale of the residence played, however, a bad joke on the president last winter, when its heating system could not cope with the coldest weather for six years. The president was left freezing in his drawing room, where the temperature refused to rise above 16 degrees Centigrade.
Legends are being created about the presidential compound. Among independent Ukrainian journalists there is an unspoken competition as to who will first publish photos of this monument to national corruption.
The sheer scale of Mezhyhiriya is mindboggling. The Ukrainian Customs and Excise Department’s database lists details of fixtures and fittings imported for its embellishment. Each of the mansion’s Lebanese cedar doors cost $64,000. Three sets of wooden panelling for staircases came in at $200,000, wall panelling for the winter garden at $328,000, and cladding for a neoclassical column and parapet for a flight of steps at $430,000. In the course of one and a half years the overall cost of fittings imported for Mezhyhiriya was $9,416,000.
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More: http://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/serhij-leschenko/yanukovych-luxury-residence-and-money-trail-that-leads-to-london
Yeah. This is just a museum Yanukovich kept up when he moved in. 
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Yeah. 
Great OP!
