A key suspect in the 2000 murder and decapitation of journalist Georgiy Gongadze has turned up in a village in Ukraine’s Zhytomyr Oblast, bringing to an end his nearly six-year status as one of the nation’s most-wanted fugitives.
The arrest of Oleksiy Pukach, formerly one of the highest-ranking police officers with the Interior Ministry, raises the tantalizing prospect that the world will finally learn whether ex-President Leonid Kuchma ordered the journalist’s murder. Kuchma, who ruled in an authoritarian manner from 1994-2005, has called the accusations against him false and part of a smear campaign.
Pukach is cooperating with the investigation, according Vasyl Hrytsak, deputy head of the State Security Service. He said the suspect – during initial discussions with investigators – named those who ordered the murder.
At a July 22 press conference, Hrytsak said Pukach also confessed to strangling Gongadze and promised to say where the late journalist’s missing head is buried.
However, Pukach’s lawyer, Serhiy Osyka, disputed this assertion and said his client has not given any testimony.
“Pukach said that information that he…gave names and agreed to give testimony and show where the journalist’s head is, never happened,” Osyka told Channel 5 on July 23.
Video of the July 21 arrest released by the State Security Service [SBU] shows Pukach handcuffed and lying face down on the grass. Asked what relation he had to Gongadze’s murder, he answers: “A direct one, upon orders.” Hrytsak said Pukach named “high-ranking officials,” including some who are still alive. He declined to elaborate, but promised “a lot more interesting information” later on.
Pukach did not resist arrest. “We asked him ‘have you been waiting for us?’ He said: ‘Yes, all the time I have been waiting for you’,” Hrytsak said. He had no weapons on him or in the house, and only kept his original identification documents – despite multiple passports he may have received while serving in the Interior Ministry’s external reconnaissance department.
Verkhovna Rada deputy and former high-ranking Interior Ministry official Hennadiy Moskal, an associate of Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko, implied that Pukach was easy to find.
“Former colleagues who have retired during meetings often told me that Oleksiy called them and asked how things are. He never really hid. It’s simply that nobody was looking for him,” Moskal said. “Pukach has a mass of passports. He worked in the service where cover-up documents are issued. But, in the end, as soon as he realized nobody’s looking for him, he went on to live a quiet life in the countryside, ate everything fresh, shepherded cows and cared nothing for those who searched for him.”
SBU officials say the arrest was carefully planned and happened on July 21 near Pukach’s home in the village of Molochky of Zhytomyr Oblast. However, Pukach lawyer Osyka, said the arrest took place a day earlier. Hrytsak said Pukach refused to have a lawyer and signed a statement that he will defend himself.
Villagers in Molochky said they saw a few unidentified cars going back and forth for a few days prior to the arrest, as well as strangers pretending to be fishing or doing other things in or around the village.
SBU’s Hrytsak said Pukach changed places of residence several times in the last six years. Before 2008, when he moved to Molochky with a woman and her son, he lived in Luhansk, Kharkiv and Donetsk Oblasts, and visited Kyiv several times. He did not say how police learned where Pukach was hiding.
Pukach’s whereabouts are currently kept secret as his life may be in danger. President Victor Yushchenko said he is concerned about his safety. “I gave an order [July 21] to make sure not a single hair falls off Pukach’s head, that he should be on a territory where every second the security of his life is being controlled,” he told Silski Visti newspaper.
Earlier, other politicians, including Oleksandr Turchynov, the nation’s first deputy premier, called on investigators to protect Pukach. “Many influential people are not interested in the answer to the question of who ordered [the murder] getting to court,” Turchynov said.
Pukach may be the only living witness who might be able to testify against Kuchma. The former president is considered a suspect, along with subordinates, in possibly ordering the murder.
Voices similar to Kuchma and associates are heard calling for Gongadze to be done away with on audiotapes secretively made by the ex-president’s bodyguard, Mykola Melnychenko. On one such recording Kuchma is allegedly heard discussing the need to silence Gongadze for his news reports about high-level corruption on the online newspaper he founded, Ukrainska Pravda. Not only Kuchma, but current Verkhovna Rada Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn and other top-level administration officials, are reportedly heard on the Melnychenko tapes plotting against Gongadze.
Kuchma and other politicians implicated in the murder have consistently denied any involvement. The authenticity of the Melnychenko tapes, released by Socialist Party leader Oleksandr Moroz in November 2000, is disputed and has never been conclusively proved. Currently, the tapes are being examined by experts hired by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, but it’s not clear when they will produce their verdict, the general prosecutor’s office said.
In videotaped testimony in 2000, Melnychenko – who in recent years has been living in Ukraine and the United States – accused Kuchma of ordering the disappearance of Gongadze. Melnychenko said Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko directed a special department within the ministry to kidnap Gongadze at the instruction of the president.
The investigation into Gongadze’s murder before Kuchma left office in 2005 quickly degenerated into farce. It was characterized by stonewalling, misleading statements and outright lies, fueling suspicions of an official cover-up.
Solving the Gongadze case – and other high-profile crimes allegedly captured by the Melnychenko tapes – were among the driving forces of the 2004 democratic Orange Revolution. But Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko have never made good on their promises to solve most of these cases.
On the most recent anniversary of Gongadze’s Sept. 16, 2000, disappearance, the nation’s human rights ombudsman, Nina Karpacheva, blasted the lack of progress. “It seems to me that [the Prosecutor General’s Office] lacks the courage, professionalism or independence to name those who ordered this murder,” Karpacheva said “Until the head of Georgiy Gongadze is found, Ukraine will remain the ‘headless rider.’”
Lower-level Interior Ministry police officers Mykola Protasov, Valeriy Kostenko and Oleksandr Popovych were, in 2008, convicted of abducting Gongadze in Kyiv. During a trial, the three convicted police officers claimed they were only following orders from senior police officer Pukach, who, in turn, is believed to have received an order from above, possibly from Kravchenko.
Kravchenko died of two gunshots to the head on March 4, 2005, just hours before he was to begin providing testimony as a witness in the case. The official ruling of suicide has been questioned. Media reports surfaced that Kravchenko was under surveillance in the days before his death and that his body was found with two broken fingers and other injuries.
Kravchenko left this alleged suicide note: “My dear ones, I am not guilty of anything. Forgive me, for I became a victim of the political intrigues of President Kuchma and his entourage. I am leaving you with a clear conscious, farewell.” Suicide or not, Kravchenko’s death exposed law enforcement officials’ inability to protect key witnesses to the nation’s greatest crimes.
Gongadze’s decapitated body was found in the suburbs of the Ukrainian capital in November 2000. Pukach was first detained in the fall of 2003 on suspicion of destroying documents proving that Gongadze had been shadowed by police. Pukach was released later that year under a court order not to leave town. He left court and was sped away in a waiting Mercedes-Benz automobile. He disappeared soon afterwards.
The official investigation theory is that Pukach sanctioned the surveillance of Gongadze and led the convicted group of officers in kidnapping Gongadze and taking him out to a field near the village of Sukholisy in the Bila Tserkva district of Kyiv Oblast.
According to investigators, after strangling Gongadze, Pukach ordered the other policemen to keep silent about the crime. Pukach might also have reburied Gongadze’s body in a forest in the Tarashcha district. He may have even been rewarded for the crime with a gift in August 2003 – a brand new three-room apartment in an elite housing complex in Kyiv.
