Former SBU officer, Rada deputy and anti-corruption campaigner Anatoly Yermak dies when his car is hit by truck on road in Zaporizhya Oblast
Anatoly Yermak , a former SBU colonel and former parliamentt deputy, died on Feb.11 when the VAZ sedan in which he was traveling as a passenger collided head-on with a large MAZ truck.
The accident occurred on the Zaporozhya-Mariupol highway near the Zaporizhya Oblast town of Polohi. Yermak was returning to his home in Kherson from his mother’s funeral.
Interior Ministry officials in Zaporizhya reported on Feb. 12 that the accident occurred at 5:45 p.m. when the sedan spun out of control on the icy highway and plowed into the truck.
The driver of the sedan, Yermak’s older brother Mykola, also died. Yermak’s 23-year-old son Oleksandr survived the crash and was hospitalized.
The driver of the truck was not hurt.
Yermak, an outspoken critic of President Leonid Kuchma, was elected to the Rada in 1994 and 1998.
He worked closely with fellow deputy Hryhory Omelchenko, also a former SBU officer, to investigate allegations of corruption among government officials.
Yermak, a member of the Ukrainian Republican Party Sobor, ran unsuccessfully for re-election in March 2002 as an independent candidate in a single-mandate constituency in Zaporizhya Oblast. He came fifth in the race.
After losing his seat in the Rada, Yermak subsequently worked as an assistant to Omelchenko.
Omelchenko is a member of Yulia Tymoshenko’s opposition faction and chairs the ad hoc commission investigating the murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze.
Yermak will be buried on Feb. 15 at the Baykovy Cemetery following a 10 a.m. memorial service at the Teachers’ House in Kyiv.
The crash was the latest in a series of automobile accident involving well-known political figures from the past several years.
Valery Malev, the former director of Ukraine’s state arms export company Ukrspetsexport, was killed in a car accident in Poltava Oblast in March 2002 when his sedan collided with a Kamaz truck.
Yulia Tymoshenko, an opposition leader and an outspoken critic of President Leonid Kuchma, was injured in a car accident in Kyiv last January.
The former head of the Presidential Administration, Volodymyr Lytvyn, suffered a concussion when his Toyota land cruiser collided with a car driven by a pensioner in December 2001. The driver of the car died at the scene.
Reforms and Order deputy Oleksandr Yemets died in January 2001 after his car spun out of control on the Kirovohrad-Zaporizhya highway.
Yehven Marchuk, chairman of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, suffered a fractured pelvis in a car accident in February 2000.
In March 1999, Vyacheslav Chornovil, a deputy and founder of the original Rukh, died after a Kamaz diesel truck hauling two trailers filled with 11 tons of grain flattened his Toyota sedan outside of Kyiv.
