The trial quickly began to revolve around Petliura's responsibility for the 1919-1920 pogroms in Ukraine, during which Schwartzbard had lost all 15 members of his family.

[3] On 25 May 1926, at 14:12, by the Gibert bookstore, he approached Petliura, who was walking on the Rue Racine near boulevard Saint-Michel in the Latin Quarter, Paris, and asked him in Ukrainian, "Are you Mr.

During the trial, the German special services also alleged to their French counterparts that Schwartzbard had assassinated Petliura on the orders of an emissary of the Union of Ukrainian Citizens, an intermediary for Christian Rakovsky, an ethnic Bulgarian, a Soviet ambassador to France (1925–27), a former revolutionary leader from Romania, and a former prime minister of the Ukrainian SSR.

The act was according to the prosecution consolidated by Mikhail Volodin, who arrived in France on 8 August 1925 and who had been in close contact with Schwartzbard.

Torres was a renowned French left-wing jurist who had previously defended anarchists such as Buenaventura Durruti and Ernesto Bonomini and also represented the Soviet consulate in France.

In the civil suit Madame Olga Petliura (nee Bilska) and her brother-in-law Oskar were represented by Albert Wilm and Cesare Campinchi (who was the chief prosecution lawyer).

Schwartzbard was charged with violations of Articles 295, 296, 297, 298 and 302 of the French Penal Code (all of which pertained to premeditated murder and provided for the death penalty).

He also lied about his service in the Red Army, stating that he fought on the side of Alexander Kerensky[7] rather than have led a battalion under Kotovsky.

A notable witness for the defense was Haia Greenberg (aged 29) who survived the Proskuriv pogroms where she had worked as a nurse for the Danish Red Cross.

[13] Time reported that the outcome of the trial gripped all Europe and was regarded by the Jews as establishing proof of the horrors perpetrated against their co-religionists in Ukraine under the dictatorship of Simon Petliura; radical opinion rejoiced, but the conservatives saw justice flouted and the decorum of the French courts immeasurably impaired.

Divergent assessments of the assassination committed by Schwartzbard coincided with the political sympathies and antipathies of the particular newspapers, which fell into three groups: According to a defected KGB operative Peter Deriabin, the assassination of Petliura was a special operation by the GPU, and Schwartzbard was an NKVD agent and acted on the order from a former chairman of the Soviet Ukrainian government and then-Soviet Ambassador to France, Christian Rakovsky.

[15][6][16][17] Mykola Riabchuk wrote: "In fact, the trial turned into an ostentatious demonstration of retribution against Ukraine's demonized 'nationalism and separatism'; no Lubianka could ever have come up with anything better.