The alleged murder of a man by police officers in the city of Kryve Ozero in Mykolayiv Oblast on Aug. 24 exposed the flaws of Ukraine’s ongoing police reform, civic activists say.
They argue that the police officers involved were not vetted properly as part of efforts to expel dishonest and unprofessional officials earlier this year, while Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt and politicized judiciary reinstated one of them.
In mid-2013 a similar incident took place in the city of Vradiivka in the same oblast. Massive protests triggered by a murder attempt by police officers on a woman in Vradiivka became a precursor of the 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolution.
Critics say that the law enforcement system remains as unreformed, corrupt and prone to violence as before the revolution.
The law enforcement agencies of Vradiivka and Kryve Ozero are interlinked. Serhiy Mochalko, chief prosecutor of the Vradiivka district during the 2013 events, was subsequently transferred to Kryve Ozero and now works in the nearby Domanevka district.
Ivan Varchenko, an advisor for Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, dismissed the idea that the Kryve Ozero events demonstrated the failure of police reform, saying that such incidents could happen anywhere in the world.
Vradiivka-2
In June 2013 four police officers in Vradiivka raped and beat up local resident Iryna Krashkova and broke her skull. After a lack of reaction from the authorities and a court’s refusal to arrest the suspects, locals stormed the police headquarters, and rallies against police violence in Vradiivka were held throughout Ukraine.
After the protests, the police officers were sentenced to prison terms of five to 15 years in a rape and murder attempt case.
On Aug. 24, history repeated itself when the wife of 31-year old Oleksandr Tsukerman in Kryve Ozero called the police after a quarrel with her husband, complaining about alleged violence on his part.
According to eyewitness testimony, six police officers arrived and beat Tsukerman with batons, hands and feet. One of the officers shot Tsukerman four times with rimfire ammunition into his heart and lungs and killed him.
Subsequently local residents protested against the police’s actions, tried to storm the police headquarters and burned tires.
Interior Ministry spokesman Artem Shevchenko triggered a scandal on Aug. 30 by saying that it was difficult for the police officers not to hurt Tsukerman, and accusing the ministry’s critics of “insulting” the police.
The authorities’ reaction to the Kryve Ozero events was faster than during the Vradiivka scandal. Three of the six suspects have been arrested, while the leadership of Mykolaiv Oblast police was replaced, and the Kryve Ozero police department is expected to be abolished.
The Kryve Ozero events are not unique.
In a similar incident, police officers are accused of killing a man on June 30 in the city of Kamenske in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, according to an investigation released by the Sobitie newspaper on Aug. 31. The officers are still working in the police, and there is no notice of suspicion against them.
Meanwhile, police officer Serhiy Prikhodko, who was given a suspended sentence for negligence that led to the 2010 death of student Ihor Indylo – which is considered by some to be murder – still works in Kyiv police.
The results of the police reform were also questioned when law enforcers failed to react when activists from the AutoMaidan, Civic Security Council and self-defense non-governmental groups violently dispersed a tent camp of protesters opposed to Mayor Hennady Trukhanov in Odesa on Sept. 1.
Police officers in Mykolayiv also triggered public indignation by failing to adequately react to a group of people beating up passers-by in front of the police, according to video footage posted on YouTube on Aug. 30.
No proper vetting
Alexei Sikharulidze, an ex-member of a vetting commission in Mykolayiv Oblast who represents the Narodny Tyl volunteer group helping the army, told the Kyiv Post he was “shocked by the extremely low level of knowledge” among police officers in Mykolayiv Oblast.
Some of them admitted implementing illegal orders from their superiors and taking bribes, he added.
“In Mykolayiv Oblast, there’s a unique situation with law enforcement and with their links to organized crime,” Olga Khudetska, a journalist and ex-member of a vetting commission in the oblast, told the Kyiv Post. “The mafia world of the late 1990s to early 2000s has been preserved there.”
Four of the suspects successfully passed vetting earlier this year, and one failed to pass vetting but was reinstated by a court. Another one didn’t have to be vetted because he was registered as a car driver, which critics see as a convenient way to bypass vetting.
Activists argue that police officers in Mykolaiv Oblast and elsewhere have not been vetted properly.
Commission members were overloaded with work and had to interview about 30 officers every day for about 15 minutes each, Khudetska said. Many officers were vetted in absentia, which did not allow commissions to properly assess their performance, Khudetska added.
Avakov’s critics have also lambasted him for recruiting loyal civic activists for vetting commissions and using them to make the decisions he wants.
Khudetska said that two activists on her commission had always voted against dismissing controversial police officers, and one of the activists had previously worked for the police.
Another problem is that the Interior Ministry has not released any official absolute figures for the results of vetting and the percentage of those dismissed, giving only approximate estimates.
“They announce some figures, and every time they’re different,” Khudetska said. “We believe all these figures are fantastic.”
Varchenko said the ministry cannot release official figures before vetting is over because that could cause panic among the police.
He said that 20 percent of police employees were being fired by vetting commissions on average.
In another example of the reform’s failure, Olga Reshetilova, a journalist and volunteer helping the army, on Aug. 31 posted screenshots of Kharkiv police officers’ social network pages with posts in support of Kremlin-backed separatists. The officers have been successfully vetted.
Things getting worse
Vetting in Mykolayiv Oblast took place in February to April, when the reform process already had some defects.
In May the situation deteriorated when civil society lost control of many vetting commissions, and Interior Ministry representatives, including Avakov’s advisors, and activists linked to the ministry began to dominate the vetting process. As a result, the expulsion of dishonest and corrupt officers stalled, critics say.
The AutoMaidan car-based protest group and Narodny Tyl left vetting commissions in June to protest against the changed format, accusing Avakov of killing the reform. Varchenko then denied the accusations of sabotage, saying the activists lacked evidence for their claims.
As part of the conflict between the ministry and civil society, Vyacheslav Poyezdnik, an activist from the Law is the Same for Everyone non-governmental group, was expelled from a Kyiv vetting commission on Aug. 31. The police attributed this to his insults against police officers on Facebook, while he said they were afraid of his plans to expose police officials’ corruption.
The reform is also being hampered by the passivity of civil society groups outside of Kyiv and a lack of genuine and independent non-governmental organizations there, Anastasia Leukhina, an advisor for the National Police, told the Kyiv Post.
Another problem is the judiciary’s resistance to reform.
Varchenko said that about 1,500 police officers had appealed their dismissal in courts, and 500 of the appeals had been considered. Courts have ruled to reinstate about 70 percent of these, he added.
“Vetting from the beginning had a lot of defects and problems because of which we called for changing the mechanism,” Khudetska said. “They told us the problems will be fixed, but eventually (the authorities) made them even worse.”
Khudetska said that she and other civic activists had left vetting commissions “when the result became zero” and when the vetting process “lost any meaning and became a façade.”
Sikharulidze agreed, saying that the reform process “used to be just bad because there were unsuccessful reform attempts but now it’s just terrible because commissions are headed by ministry employees who love their subordinates.”
He said that the vetting process had been flawed from the beginning because, instead of recruiting new staff and “building a completely new system”, the authorities had just tried to tweak the old one.
“The system is unreformable and inherently flawed,” he added. “But nobody wants to change it. It’s easier to run a system that is tainted (with corruption).”
