Svyatoslav Piskun has kept a low profile over the last decade. A key figure during the presidencies of Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yushchenko, as general prosecutor he oversaw the investigation into the 2000 murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze and the poisoning of Yushchenko during the 2004 presidential campaign. Neither incident has ever been fully resolved.
On July 13, Piskun talked to Kyiv Post about his time at the heart of Ukraine’s political life, shedding light on the murky workings of the country’s elite.
Victim of system
Read any interview with Piskun and it quickly becomes apparent that it’s tough to get a straight answer from him – except when it comes to assessing his own work, which he cannot find fault in. In Piskun’s eyes, he was as much a victim of Ukraine’s Soviet-era prosecutorial system as anyone else.
Piskun denies being a political instrument of either president, as Ukrainian prosecutor generals to this day have widely been perceived. Proof of this, according to him, were his dismissals. From 2002 to 2007, he was fired three times. Twice over Gongadze, in 2003 and 2005, and the final time in 2007 because he failed to follow Yushchenko’s orders, he says.
Piskun shakes off any criticism of his work, including his inaction over Gongadze’s murder after Kuchma left office. According to Piskun, Yushchenko had “some sort of agreement” with Kuchma not to investigate the case.
Kuchma is a father-like figure in the Ukraine’s political elite, says Piskun. “They are all (Kuchma’s) children, they are all his pupils. All of them are his comrades up to the present day,” Piskun told the Kyiv Post, referring to the Ukrainian presidents who came after Kuchma, including current President Petro Poroshenko.
It is not clear whether Piskun also classes himself as part of Kuchma’s family.
Part of the family?
In a recording leaked right at the end of Kuchma’s presidency, in 2004, a voice resembling that of Piskun can be heard talking to a voice resembling that of Kuchma’s son-in-law, Victor Pinchuk. On the tape, Piskun’s voice can be heard promising that he will continue to be a “great friend” of the “family,” and hints that the situation could develop badly for Kuchma if someone else were to be appointed general prosecutor.
Piskun: “Vitya (diminutive for Viktor) I talked to those guys from Viktor Andreevych’s (Yushchenko) team. They aren’t against me becoming (general prosecutor.) I’m telling you, they will be putting such cases in front of the general prosecutor and in front of the high court, that I’m starting to think, maybe I don’t even need this? Do you understand what I’m talking about? But I think that these tasks will be carried out in a timely way by Mr. (Yuriy) Karmazin (a politician who was then a candidate for the post of prosecutor general), and with a frozen face. And every day the television will show what he’s doing in that case, and who are the enemies of the state.
Pinchuk: There won’t be any cases carried out against us by you?
Piskun: Even if they’re opened, they won’t be investigated.
The next day, on Dec. 10, 2004, a court ruled for Piskun be re-appointed as prosecutor general. When asked about the recording in 2005, Piskun called it a “hoax.” At his Kyiv office in July, however, Piskun told the Kyiv Post he had reached out to Pinchuk to get Kuchma to reappoint him as prosecutor – through the courts. When asked if the conversation took place, he gave a characteristically vague answer:
“I don’t remember. He (Pinchuk) said that the conversation occurred. I don’t remember it. Maybe it happened, because I remember that I talked to Pinchuk when the topic of my return was being discussed. I talked to Pinchuk. Why? Because for me Pinchuk seems more democratic, a more righteous person than Kuchma. Do you understand? So, as I understood it, Kuchma was a Red Commissar, a Red Director – his had the soul of a communist. I considered Pinchuk a more Western person. But there was one part in that conversation: ‘I beg you on my knees.’ I never say things like that. I haven’t even knelt down in front of my own mother.”
Pinchuk has never confirmed the authenticity of the recording.
Gongadze
One of the main obstructions to the prosecution of the Gongadze case was doubt over the authenticity of the so-called Melnychenko recordings, alleged to have been secretly taped by Kuchma’s bodyguard in the president’s office from 1999 to 2000. No senior official or politician, including Piskun, would confirm the tapes are real, meaning that they were not be used as evidence. Piskun now says that he is convinced of their authenticity, and has been since the FBI conducted its analysis of them in 2003.
However, he says they are not evidence that Kuchma ordered Gongadze’s murder, as Kuchma did not use the word “kill.” Instead, he says a case needs to be opened to establish and investigate “causal links.”
Eventually, Ukraine’s Constitutional Court ruled in 2011 that no evidence could be used in the case unless it had been collected with consent, which meant the tapes were not admissible as evidence. The 500 hours of recordings, which allegedly detailed schemes of mass corruption and human rights abuses run from Kuchma’s presidential office, became meaningless according to Ukrainian law.
Piskun: If I say that these tapes are evidence that Kuchma killed someone, that would be a big mistake, because they aren’t accepted as evidence in the case.
Kyiv Post: That’s just laughable. It (the 2011 Constitutional Court decision) is a laughable decision, I’m sorry.
Piskun: There have been lots of laughable decisions. If this was the first that you have smiled at, then I will give you another thousand.
Piskun maintains that the Gongadze case was investigated only while he was prosecutor general so much so that he felt as if was Gonagadze’s “relative.”
Georgiy Omelchenko, the head of the parliamentary investigation into the murder, claimed in 2005 that Piskun’s reappointment was part of the agreement between the two presidents to protect Kuchma.
Donetsk clan
Piskun was also criticized for failing to bring to justice those responsible for poisoning Yushchenko during his campaign for president in 2004. But Piskun claims that, in hindsight, it seems that Yushchenko was not interested in having those who poisoned him brought to justice:
“He didn’t want to give evidence. His people – whom we needed in order to put events together – stopped coming to see us. And I got the impression that (Yushchenko) himself didn’t want it to be investigated. Listen: when the victim doesn’t want it, we don’t do anything.”
Yushchenko, according to Piskun, became “arrogant” and “very greedy” after being elected as president. After Piskun’s third dismissal in 2007, less than a month after he had been reinstated by the courts, he said he was tired of fighting for his position in the courts.
“I understood that people from Donetsk were in charge of him (Yushchenko)…I saw that everything was leading towards an agreement with (former President Viktor) Yanukovych. And naturally, Yanukovych didn’t want me to be the prosecutor,” Piskun told the Kyiv Post.
Though he portrays himself at the time as being in opposition to the so-called Donetsk clan (and he refrained from “naming the names” of those influencing Yushchenko), during this period Piskun served as a Party of Regions deputy. The party was founded by the Donetsk clan and led at that moment by Yanukovych.
As his reason for Piskun’s final dismissal, Yushchenko said that holding both the position of prosecutor general and a lawmaker was a conflict of interests.
Piskun is now the chairman of the Union of Ukrainian Lawyers.
