UKRAINE’S President Petro Poroshenko had two top officials dramatically arrested at a televised cabinet meeting yesterday morning.

State Emergency Services head Serhiy Bochkovsky and his deputy Vasyl Stoyetsky were led away in handcuffs on charges of receiving bribes in return for procurement contracts.

“This will happen to everyone who breaks the law and sneers at the Ukrainian state,” Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk declared.

But critics pointed out that the arrests could be part of a power struggle that saw Mr Poroshenko sack his hand-picked Dnepropetrovsk governor Ihor Kolomoisky just hours earlier.

Billionaire oligarch Mr Kolomoisky was a key ally of the Kiev regime in its war against anti-fascist rebels in eastern Ukraine, having been enraged when Crimean authorities took land he owned there into public ownership following the region’s vote to unite with Russia.

He funds “volunteer militias” fighting to impose the regime’s control over the separatist Donbass region, including the neonazi Azov battalion headed by Andriy Biletsky, who claims to be leading “the white races” in a “final crusade against semite-led subhumanity.”

Other groups funded by Mr Kolomoisky include the Aidar battalion, linked by Amnesty International to “abductions, unlawful detention, ill-treatment, theft, extortion and possible executions.”

But his sacking stems from a dispute over control of the state-owned oil pipeline UkrTransNafta. After his protege Oleksandr Lazorko was dismissed as the firm’s chief executive earlier this month, the oligarch sent hired muscle to take over its HQ and expel the new Kiev-appointed boss.

A taped conversation in which a man — said to be Mr Kolomoisky — threatens to “transfer” his militias from the east to Kiev to “grab” control of the pipeline firm has been circulated online.

The oligarch had also hinted in a French TV interview that, if he did not get his way, Dnepropetrovsk might face a separatist uprising.