MOSCOW, February 26 (RAPSI) – The US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued a recommendation for financial institutions to closely monitor transactions with accounts connected with ousted Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich.

The FinCEN guidance states: “FinCEN is reminding U.S. financial institutions that they are required to apply enhanced scrutiny to private banking accounts held by or on behalf of senior foreign political figures  and to monitor transactions that could potentially represent misappropriated or diverted state assets, the proceeds of bribery or other illegal payments, or other public corruption proceeds.”

The guidance is focused on potentially suspicious transactions involving senior members of the Yanukoych administration or those acting for or on their behalf, and is not intended to call into question the maintenance of normal relationships between financial institutions in the United States and Ukraine.

President Viktor Yanukovich, who was ousted by Ukraine’s Supreme Rada (parliament), was placed on a wanted list Tuesday.

Unrest in Kiev erupted this month anew as thousands of people marched on the parliament building, where a standoff was taking place over proposed constitutional reforms that the opposition said could provide a way out of the political crisis that is paralyzing the country. The violence that ensued resulted in numerous deaths and hundreds of injuries.

Fighting between radical anti-government protesters and police has claimed 82 lives since the violence escalated on February 18, according to the Ukrainian Health Ministry. Yanukovich, who fled the capital, had earlier called the move a coup and compared it to the rise of the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s.