Victor Lozinsky, the former parliamentary deputy suspected of murder, surrendered on March 1 after eight months as a fugitive. In turning himself in, Lozinsky raised hopes that a high-level official might finally be brought to justice in the nation. If convicted, Lozinsky would be the first among Ukrainian lawmakers or top officials brought to justice on home soil for a serious crime. But the circumstances of his capture raise doubts about the determination of authorities to pursue justice.
“The only individuals who are today locked up in our jails are those who don’t have enough money to buy their freedom from prosecutors or law enforcement. Those who don’t have money will sit in jail. Those who do, will go free. This is, unfortunately, the way our country works,” said Hennadiy Moskal, a veteran police officer recently fired as head of the Interior Ministry in Crimea.
The official story is that Lozinsky, a former businessman who is alleged to have ruthlessly ruled in his native Kirovohrad Oblast, walked into the General Prosecutor’s Office in Kyiv on March 1. He is said to have identified himself to guards after spending hours sitting outside on a bench by the entrance.
He was detained by a member of the State Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, taken in for questioning, and formally charged on March 3.
The detention ends his fugitive status, which began in June after his immunity from prosecution was lifted in parliament. Lozinsky was most recently a member of the Bloc of Yulia Tymoshenko, but early aligned with the Party of Regions.
Along with Yevhen Horbenko, a prosecutor from Kirovohrad’s Holovanevsk region, and Mykhailo Kovalsky, the local police chief, he is accused of murdering a Kirovohrad resident, Valeriy Oliynyk, on June 16 for trespassing on his land plot.
The arrest on Feb. 26 of Vasyl Perepelytsia, a hunter who is close to the suspect, appears to have led to a break in the case. A Kyiv court returned Lozinsky’s land to state ownership at the end of February. The release of suspected accomplice Kovalsky on bail in December also yielded vital clues after he had contact with Lozinsky.
Yuriy Boichenko, a spokesman for the Prosecutor General’s Office, said investigators gradually closed in on the suspect. “The PGO and the SBU took a number of measures which allowed us to find out where he was and to encircle him,” he said, adding that phone taps were a major source of information. “He felt that the circle was closing around him, and therefore asked his friend to bring him to the prosecutor’s office.”
He was driven to Kyiv from Crimea, followed by a group of SBU agents. Boichenko said Lozinsky had changed residence several times in order to avoid capture, but arrived in Kyiv “shaved, well-dressed and in a normal state.”
The SBU had no comment.
Skeptics say authorities are playing up their roles, nothing that Lozinsky would still be free had he not surrendered voluntarily.
Moskal, the former head of the Interior Ministry in Crimea, told Delo daily newspaper that the idea of Lozinsky being tailed from Crimea by SBU agents was “a fairytale for journalists.” Moskal also questioned authorities commitment to prosecuting Lozinsky.
Others say the timing of Lozinsky’s surrender, just a few days after President Victor Yanukovych took charge, was more critical in the fugitive’s decision to surrender.
“Lozinsky could have thought he was in danger,” said Volodymyr Sivkovych, a Party of Regions lawmaker, speaking on television on March 1. “[He feared that] the person who was now hiding him could do something bad to him, in fact destroy him.”
According to the lawmaker, Lozinsky sat near the entrance of the investigation department for several hours before he was detained. Sivkovych added that the crucial question now is who helped him during his eight months on the run.
Prosecutor’s spokesperson Boichenko rejected the idea of a link between Yanukovyuch’s coming to power and a break in the case.
“There’s no connection. The crime he is accused of is a criminal case – it is murder, not a political or economic crime. It can’t be politicized,” Boichenko said.
Kyrylo Kulikov, a lawmaker from People’s Self-Defense who used to head Ukraine Interpol bureau, agreed, adding that the end of the presidential election campaign has depoliticized the situation. “There’s no political pressure any more. It’s no longer the main driver of the political campaign, so he just gave up,” Kulikov said.
Moskal said he has “big doubts” that Lozinsky, if guilty, would be convicted, adding that Ukraine has in its nineteen years of independence failed to punish any high-level or influential officials for a long list of crimes that are evident to all.
If convicted, Lozinsky would be the first lawmaker and one of the influential politicians and businessmen to have been brought to justice in Ukraine since it declared independence in 1991. It took a U.S. court to indict former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko. Lazarenko served under ex-President Leonid Kuchma as prime minister from 1996-1997. He is now serving an eight-year prison sentence in America for laundering money, part of the ill-gotten fortune he amassed in the nation that he allegedly ran like a mafia boss.
Lazarenko’s close associate, Mykola Agafonov, was in 2000 stripped of his lawmaker immunity in connection with a criminal case. But he allegedly died before trial. With the exception of Lozinsky, Lazarenko and Agafonov, the only other Ukrainian lawmaker stripped of parliament immunity was Victor Zherdytsky, in 2000. A banker, Zherdytsky spent several years in German custody on suspicion that he and associates misused assistance to Nazi war victims. But he returned to Ukraine in 2005 after a quasi-settlement was reached, and continues to maintain his innocence.
Kyiv Post staff writer James Marson can be reached at [email protected]
