Verkhovna Rada stalls yet again in removing members’ immunity from prosecution.
How hard can it be for Ukraine’s political elite to help law enforcement find one of their own?
The answer: Very hard, as the case of Victor Lozinsky shows. He is only the latest example of a high-profile criminal suspect evading justice in a nation that, despite its democratic pretentions, still hasn’t shed many of its lawless ways.
Lozinsky, a member of parliament with the Bloc of Yulia Tymoshenko, was stripped of his Verkhovna Rada seat on July 3. By then, he had gone missing and is now is a fugitive whose arrest was sanctioned on July 8 by Kyiv Pechersky District Court, acting on a request by the General Prosecutor’s Office.
Lozinsky lost his lawmaker’s status after becoming a suspect in the June 16 murder of Valeriy Oliynyk, a 55-year-old resident of Kirovohrad Oblast who died of gunshot wounds. Arrested as possible Lozinsky accomplices are Mykhailo Kovalsky, a Kirovohrad district police chief, and Yevhen Horbenko, the district prosecutor.
As a lawmaker, Lozinsky’s broad immunity from prosecution – an exceptional and controversial privilege given to all of the nation’s 450 parliamentarians – may have made his escape much easier ahead of the July 3 expulsion vote. Not only are lawmakers immune from prosecution, law enforcement cannot search their homes or follow them. For all anyone knows, Lozinsky could be hiding out in the home of a former colleague, although some speculation puts him over the border into the breakaway Transdniester region of Moldova.
The scandal prompted President Victor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko to renew their calls for the withdrawal of immunity for all deputies. But these efforts were blocked by Victor Yanukovych’s Regions Party, whose members have physically obstructed passage to the speaker’s podium in parliament in recent weeks.
And critics derided the statements of Yushchenko and Tymoshenko as a well-worn PR stunt. They note that few – if any – of the 2004 Orange Revolution promises to punish lawbreakers or solve dozens of heinous crimes have been kept.
“This is a hidden agreement, a silent agreement among the elite to help each other,” said Yevhen Bystrytsky, executive director of the International Renaissance Foundation, funded by philanthropist George Soros.
“They are the caste of untouchables,” said Iryna Bekeshkina, research director of the Kyiv-based Democratic Initiatives Foundation, referring to parliamentarians. “They believe they are special people who are above society. But sometimes they go too far and lose touch with reality. There has been no improvement in the rule of law since the Orange Revolution. Things have actually gotten worse. It seems that they made a deal. Lozinsky would offer [to withdraw his immunity], and they would help him escape. I have the impression that they took away his immunity only when they knew he was in hiding, when they had decided with him where he was going to go and how.”
Yushchenko sounded tough in criticizing law enforcement. He called on government heads of Kirovohrad Oblast and law enforcement leaders there to resign, citing previous threats of murder from Lozinsky.
“Blood on these people’s hands is due to your professional inactivity,” Yushchenko said. “There is impunity in your system. Hasn’t the prosecutor’s office known how many people Lozinsky threatened to murder?”
Tamara Lysovska, a villager in Lozinsky’s hometown in Kirovohrad Oblast, remembers him well. In an interview with Korrespondent magazine, the Kyiv Post’s Russian-language sister publication, she said the lawmaker pressured locals into selling or leasing their land to him. Lysovska recalled: “He told us: ‘Go ahead, sue me. The prosecutors are mine. The militia is mine. You are all Bydlo,’” a derogatory description of villagers.
An affluent businessman, Lozinsky owned agriculture and bread businesses in the region. He also built up a vast estate of forest land, where he regularly entertained lawmakers with hunting expeditions.
Many, including Yushchenko, insist the problems with inexcusable behavior by political elite and law enforcement are not isolated. “Most of the staffing decisions in the police and prosecutors’ offices are ineffective,” Yushchenko said. “Many people get a job there just by coincidence, because for many it became the protective umbrella and for the rest a source of shadow earnings. We must cleanse the ranks of law enforcement bodies.”
The murder
The victim, Oliynyk, bled to death from gunshot wounds to his legs. Details of the events leading up to the June 16 homicide are still sketchy.
According to the version given by Lozinsky at a June 22 press conference, he was driving past a field near Hruskoye village with Horbenko and Kovalsky when they spotted the suspicious-looking Oliynyk. When the trio got out of their car, Lozinsky said, Oliynyk opened fired and started running away.
After chasing him in the car, Lozinsky claims to have grabbed Oliynyk – who was armed with a pistol – and struggled with him. Several shots were fired, the ex-lawmaker claimed, before Oliynyk escaped and drew another pistol.
But prosecutors have questioned Lozinsky’s version. “Based on the evidence available, I have concluded that Oliynyk didn’t fire any shots,” Oleksandr Medvedko, Ukraine’s prosecutor general, said in an interview with Zerkalo Nedeli newspaper.
Prosecutors also said a fourth person was present at the incident and is now cooperating as a witness.
The escape
Lozinsky’s political allies leapt to his defense. On June 17, Oleksandr Turchynov, first deputy prime minister and a close Tymoshenko ally, said that Lozinsky wasn’t involved in Oliynyk’s death. One Tymoshenko bloc deputy even suggested that Lozinsky should be given an award for detaining an armed criminal.
But Tymoshenko on June 26 said that his immunity should be lifted if his guilt were established. Two days later, Lozinsky asked the prosecutor general to request that parliament remove his immunity. Prosecutor Medvedko opened a criminal investigation into Lozinsky and sent the request to parliament on July 1. But a decision wasn’t passed until July 3, when his mandate as a deputy was also withdrawn.
Today, either no one knows where Lozinsky is or no one is saying.
The oppositionist Party of Regions, led by ex-premier Victor Yanukovych, has remained largely silent on the matter. Lozinsky is a former Regions Party lawmaker with friends in the grouping.
The head of the State Security Service, or SBU, said on July 7 that Lozinsky might already have left Ukraine. The same day, Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko said he thought Lozinsky was in Ukraine, possibly hiding at another deputy’s house, which would be immune to search.
Bystrytsky, of the International Renaissance Foundation, said the Lozinsky matter is comparable to the unsolved murder of muckraking journalist Georgiy Gongadze, whose assassination in 2000 was also allegedly covered up by top officials.
“Nothing has changed in the last 5 years” since the Orange Revolution, Bystrytsky said. “It’s the wish of our political elite to cover for each other.”
