treasury, huge debts, shame before the eyes of the Ukrainian people and the entire world." On 24 February 2014 faction leader Oleksandr Yefremov declared that the party was moving into the opposition. 77 of its MPs had left the faction over the past few days. On 25 February 2014 Anatoliy Kinakh and 32 other mostly former PoR deputies created the parliamentary faction Economic Development. On 28 March 2014 Yanukovych asked the Party of Regions to exclude him. The next day, at a party congress, the party nominated Mykhailo Dobkin as its presidential candidate for the 2014 Ukrainian presidential election. The congress expelled from the party Yanukovych, Azarov, former First Deputy Prime Minister Serhiy Arbuzov, ex-chairman of the Ministry of Revenue and Duties Olexander Klimenko, former Energy Minister Eduard Stavitskyi, ex-governor of the Donetsk region Andrew Shishatskiy and Valery Konovalyuk. On 7 April 2014 the political council of the party expelled Sergiy Tigipko, Oleh Tsariov and Yuriy Boiko from the party. Mykhailo Dobkin was the PoR's candidate in the snap presidential election of 25 May 2014, tallying only 3 percent of the vote. On 3 June 2014 again twenty Party of Regions deputies left the party's parliamentary faction. Thus the faction's strength was reduced from (at its highest point on 12 December 2012) 210 deputies to 80 deputies on 6 June 2014. A by-product of this was that it became the second biggest faction in parliament, after the faction of Batkivshchyna with 85 members. On 2 July 2014 the 32 member strong new parliamentary faction For Peace and Stability, composed mostly of former Party of Regions MPs, was formed. The following months many (former) members of the Party of Regions became objects of the so called "trash bucket challenge" (Ukraine officials dumped in trash containers and the likes). Criminal case against deputies/party members support for separatism On September 17, 2014, amidst the ongoing war in Donbas, a group of 24 people's deputies of Ukraine from the Party of Regions and the Communist Party of Ukraine, who are members of the Ukrainian parliamentary group For Peace and Stability, met with Sergei Naryshkin, the chairman of the Russian State Duma. On September 25, 2014, the Central Investigation Administration of the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs opened a criminal case against those deputies charging them with infringement on the territorial integrity of Ukraine. The Ukrainian press claims that during the days around the February