Ukrainian Live

She said she doesn’t believe the allegations and suspects they stem from lingering rivalries in the Ukraine.

“It’s not true. It’s not true,” Zubriene, 60, who saw Pravilov last week, told The Associated Press during an interview Friday at her home. “He’s a good man.”

Starchenko, 33, tells a different story. In a phone interview from suburban Detroit, he said people feared Pravilov. Now, Starchenko said, he hoped his book “Behind the Iron Curtain: Tears in the Perfect Hockey ‘Gulag’” would spur other players to come forward.

“I think it’s going to start snowballing like crazy,” Starchenko told The Associated Press.

Starchenko played for Pravilov’s Druzhba 78 team from the time he was 8 until he was 17.

Pravilov lost his job at a school in Kharkov several years ago and came to the U.S., Zubriene said. He has a U.S. visa through June despite an Interpol warrant seeking his arrest over a 2007 assault in the Ukraine that involved several men, according to court papers.

Pravilov last entered the United States in June 2007, according to a federal law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss details of the case. The Interpol alert was issued later in 2007.