SUKHOLUCHYA, Kyiv Oblast - Three scared workers at the hunting residence of former Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka, who has gone into hiding, swear a lot when they talk about last night. Five times overnight, armed people broke into the house, ordered them to get down with their faces on the ground and rooted through the house.
Some of the visitors seemed to be local police officers who took all arms out of storage. But they neither know where the arms went, nor do they think they will survive another night and are desperate to leave the house.
“I drank a bottle of vodka after the last break-in without eating, and I don’t think we will survive another night,” one of the guards said. They are too scared to give their names.
Sukholuchcha is a state-owned hunting reserve within a fenced area of 20,000 hectares, about 30 kilometers away from the presidential estate of Mezhyhirya north of Kyiv.
It has very few buildings, including three luxurious hunting lodges of the former president and prosecutor
and well kept-forests full of game.
Two of the residences in Sukholuchcha were broken into last night. Guards at Pshonka’s residence said at least once the attackers talked about going after stocks of weapons at the shooting range.
There is a lot of breakage in one of the bedrooms in Pshonka’s house, as if the visitors looked for hidden treasures, documents and the like. The visitors talked about proceeding to go tot the shooting range
for its stocks of weapons, guards said.
Taras Kaduk, a local police department head, said that the Sukholuchchya area is seeing a significant upsurge of criminal activity.
“There is a lot of criminality coming in from Vyshgorod here,” he said. As of Feb. 24, the police and Maidan’s Self-Defense attempted to coordinate their actions to guard the estate.
Kaduk said that most of the weapons from the shooting range were taken away to the police department the day before. But Mykola Hordiychuk, head of Kedr hunting organization that officially runs Sukholuchcha, said it could not prevent an attack.
As he shows a broken door to one of the residences, he says there were many separate acts of vandalism and thievery on the hunting ground. He said two buses and snowmobiles were stolen.
“Thank God the weapons were evacuated a day before,” he said.
But Dmytro, a self-defense guard who goes under the nickname Volya, said that at least 40 Kalashnikovs were taken out of Pshonka’s house on Feb. 22. He said self-defense units saw masked people carrying them out, but they were not in the mood to explain who they were and what they were doing.
“You see, people who have masks on, do not want to talk much,” he said. “But we gathered from their behavior that they were with the authorities, just picking up what they had left behind.”
Andriy Volkov, a local game keeper, said that visitors to the state hunting ground also shoot game uncontrollably. “People are scared and tired. They need some authority here,” he said.
The only residence on the ground that remained untouched was the most luxurious presidential mansion. It goes by the name of Island Object and resembles Mezhyhirya in its grandeur. A huge photograph featuring ex-president Viktor Yanukovych, oligarch Rinat Akhmetov and Russian singer Iosif Kobzon adorns one of the walls, prompting a question about who the real owner of the place was.
Parts of Sukholuchya is officially rented by Dim Lisnyka, a company whose beneficiary owner is
believed to be Yanukovych.
Multiple documents about its activity were recovered by journalists working in Mezhyhirya after an attempt to dump them in the river. DimLisnyka, along with Tantalit, which officially owns Mezhyhirya, was essentially managed by Pavlo Litovchenko, who signed off on payments and business decisions.
Although well-kept, Sukholuchcha was not frequently visited. Guards in Pshonka’s house said guests came about five times a year, with their own guards, and the locals were asked to leave the territory of the residence.
But a note found in Object Island gave a hint at what they used to do there apart from hunting. Inscribed in pencil was a note to make sure there are 100-150 non-drinking guards for an event, as well as a musicalband called White House, and 6+2 sauna keepers.
Kyiv Post deputy chief editor Katya Gorchinskaya can be reached at katya.gorchinskaya@gmail.com and staff writer Vlad Lavrov atlavrov@kyivpost.com.
