All things considered, Volodymyr Lutiev is lucky to be alive.
While other journalists who exposed corruption during the lawless pre-Orange Revolution era lost their lives, Lutiev merely spent a couple years in jail on trumped-up charges and has been harassed for the last nine years.
The case of the Yevpatoriyskaya Nedelya newspaper editor is a benchmark in Ukraine’s progress to becoming a full-fledged democracy. While some hopeful trends are taking shape, Lutiev’s supporters say his story illustrates how the nation’s journalists are still hounded, how police investigations cannot be trusted and how too many judges still make unjust rulings.
“Unfortunately, the situation with freedom of speech in Ukraine has not improved fundamentally,” said Nina Karpacheva, Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, who has actively intervened on Lutiev’s behalf over the last six years.
Karpacheva said international ratings that praise Ukraine’s recent advancements in freedom of speech are exaggerating the nation’s improvement.
“The number of journalists harassed has not changed dramatically during the last several years,” Karpacheva said. “More and more journalists are getting dragged into manipulating public ideology, serving oligarchic-clannish structures. The public relations of politicians and oligarchs are dominating over honest news today.”
The ombudsman made her comments at a Sept. 23 press conference in which she praised a Sept. 17 Mykolayiv Oblast appellate court ruling that exonerated Lutiev.
The troubles began in 1997, Lutiev said, when he – working as both a journalist and Yevpatoria’s City Council member – went public with accusations that city officials were “continuously stealing money from the city budget.”
Some of Lutiev’s articles started getting him trouble with one Crimean parliamentary deputy, Mykola Kotlyarevskiy, who the journalist accused of being part of a local criminal mafia. “At that time, Kotlyarevskiy was part of an organized criminal group that wanted to seize control over the city market,” Lutiev said.
Kotlyarevskiy himself said in multiple interviews to the press that Lutiev’s accusations were unfounded.
“I think the whole case was fabricated – they accused me of being a part of a criminal gang in Yevpatoria,’ he once told Ukrainska Pravda, an influential online publication.
Lutiev’s troubles escalated in March 1998, when he was arrested and falsely accused of libel after leaflets surfaced, purportedly written by him, which accused a local organized crime group of robbery and murder. Lutiev said he had nothing to do with the leaflets, and there is no evidence that he did, but he still spent 65 days in a Simferopol pre-detention jail.
Lutiev said that harassment against him stepped up significantly in 1999, after he published a major article headlined “Times change,” in which he made detailed accusations about financial abuses by Yevpatoria officials, including police officers and judges. He said the offices of his newspaper were set on fire, acid was poured on his car and strangers tried to entrap him in a murder-for-hire scheme.
His troubles escalated in November 2002, when authorities accused Lutiev of attempting to order the murder of Kotlyarevskiy. He was arrested. There was, however, no attempted murder – only bloody shots taken near Kotlyarevskiy’s car and broadcast widely on TV newscasts. “On Nov. 11, 2002, Kotlyarevskiy and the organizers of the provocation spoke on TV, accusing me of the murder attempt,” Lutiev said.
“The fabrication of the criminal case started six years of reprisals against the independent journalist,” Karpacheva said.
Lutiev spent the next four years in and out of courtrooms and pretrial detention jails. He went on a 47-day hunger strike and was awarded a medal for courage by Karpacheva in 2005. Then, on June 12, 2006, a Sevastopol court convicted him and sentenced him to eight years in prison.
From the beginning, Lutiev had influential allies, including a local journalists’ association. Journalists Lilia Budzhurova and Vladimir Pritula convinced Karpacheva and others, such as the Institute of Mass Communication and various government officials, to become involved.
Karpecheva believes that the intimidation campaign against Lutiev had one goal in mind: to silence him.
She also believes that, without allies, Lutiev may have been destined for the same fate as Georgiy Gongadze and Ihor Alexandrov, two prominent journalists murdered in 2000 and 2001, respectively, after writing investigative articles that exposed official corruption. In both the Gongadze and Alexandrov cases, the people who ordered their murders have never been identified or punished.
On March 15, 2007, Karpacheva appeared before Ukraine’s Supreme Court and alleged that the charges against Lutiev amounted to “a pure act of revenge for his professional activity.” The court canceled the Sevastopol court’s conviction and redirected the case to the appellate court in Mykolaiv Oblast. After a new investigation, Lutiev was found to be wrongly accused. Even though the acquittal can be appealed, Karpecheva believes the high court’s position will “remain the same – honest and objective.”
“This is an unprecedented victory for justice in the defense of freedom of speech,” Karpacheva said. “I would like to thank the Supreme Court of Ukraine, which consciously directed the case for the new examination not to Crimea, but to an absolutely different region, in particular to the court of Mykolayiv Oblast, which started the whole investigation over and ultimately acquitted Volodymyr Lutiev.”
While Lutiev is well aware of the fate of Gongadze, he did not allow it to terrify him into silence.
“Many people tried to dissuade me from being so harsh in my publications,” Lutiev said. Knowing that so many criminals became politicians in the 1990s, “I just couldn’t. It would not have been me,” he explained
“Perhaps I could have done everything in a less severe manner,” Lutiev said. “But there were no compromises.”
His persecution will make him even bolder, he said, if he can find the financial resources to re-start the publication of his newspaper.
“I will continue to work in the same direction, maybe in even a harsher, more hard-edged manner,” Lutiev said. “I cannot step out.”
