Editor's Note: Contract killings and organized crime flourished in Ukraine during the corrupt 1990s under President Leonid Kuchma and President Leonid Kravchuk.
Businessmen and government officials are falling.
Since mid-September, at least five important businessmen and government officials have died from bullet or knife wounds, while two more died in accidents.
Meanwhile, three brewery employees were killed in an unexplained explosion, and one would-be assassin did himself in.
Official statistics were unavailable, but the Kyiv Post’s review of major newspapers found only half as many apparently organized-crime-related deaths in August.
The Interior Ministry reports it intensified its war against organized crime in mid-September.
Could there be a connection?
Interior Ministry spokesman Oleksandr Naumov says no.
‘In fact, according to our numbers, cases connected with organized crime have fallen slightly,’ he said. ‘But it is also true that per a recent order of President Leonid Kuchma’s, we are intensifying activity against persons who perform so-called ‘raids’ on small- and medium-sized businesses.’
In recent months law enforcers have prioritized reduction of racketeering in farmers markets and in export-oriented industries, he said.
Naumov said there are no numbers for racketeering or contract killing, but the official figures have the overall crime rate dropping 2.9 percent over the last nine months.
Naumov flatly rejected the suggestion that mobsters had returned from summer vacations and were getting back to their workaday routines.
He attributed the apparent jump in mob violence to a freer flow of information from his ministry and more thorough Ukrainian crime reporting.
The following incidents were culled from major Ukrainian newspapers:
Oct. 9, Dnipropetrovsk: A bomb detonates underneath a 700-series BMW belonging to the director of a large trading company. A would-be assassin slipped while installing the device in the car’s engine. The accidental explosion blew off an arm and a leg, killing him.
Oct. 8, Ivano-Frankivsk: A bomb detonates outside the apartment of an Orian company director in the early morning, blowing the armored door off its hinges. Police believe racketeers intended the blast as a warning.
Oct. 5, Simferopol: A condensation container at the Krympivo beer brewery explodes, killing three and hospitalizing five. Police say the explosion might have been a result of racketeering, sabotage by competitors or a technical failure.
Oct. 3, Odessa: Pavel Puzyrny, the head of economics at the Odessa Oblast administration, is found dead on a dark city street. He was knifed while walking home from work.
Oct. 3, Kyiv: Berkut police uncover a bomb underneath a sofa cushion on the Oleksy Vachenko river steamer. The boat was scheduled to take some 200 parliament and Kyiv City Council members that evening on a Dnieper River pleasure cruise. Sappers tossed the device into the river, disarming it. The party went on as planned.
Oct. 1, Lviv: Police find Roman Melnik, a middle-grade customs officer, dead from gunshot wounds at the wheel of his Volkswagen. His wife, Oksana Kondratyuk, chairwoman of the International Educational Center, is also shot and killed. The couple planned to purchase an apartment and was apparently robbed while carrying the cash.
Sept. 29, Kyiv: Aleksandr Lazebny, the former director of the joint venture Evro-Konsult, is shot and killed near his apartment in the city’s central region. Police find a pistol at the scene.
Sept. 29, Donetsk: An unknown assailant with a Makarov pistol ambushes Yury Pavlenko, director of the Donetsk Beer Brewery, in the doorway to his apartment. Hit four times, Pavlenko dies instantly.
Sept. 24, Chervonograd: Unknown persons fire on a police jeep with automatic weapons as it overtakes their BMW on a rural road. Two policemen are wounded, one seriously.
Sept. 22, Kyiv: Security Cars, a firm specializing in armored Mercedes, opens its first office in Ukraine. ‘We just can’t keep up with demand,’ says company spokesman Berner Resch.
Sept. 17, Ovidiopol: A police helicopter pilot finds the body of Nikolai Smarusya, director of Bank Ukraina’s Odessa branch, in the Dniester River. He drowned accidentally, fishing companions said. They did not initially report the death.
Sept. 15, near Vinnytsya: Colonel Valery Demich, commander of the Interior Ministry’s elite Jaguar regiment, dies instantly in a head-on collision with a VW microbus on the Uman-Krakovets highway.
