August 1998. Bogdan Savytsky from Lviv Oblast was allegedly beaten by policemen who tried to detain him. The assault was so brutal that Savytsky ended up in the hospital with a broken spine and has since remained paralyzed from the waist down. Savytsky, who uses a wheelchair, for years tried to bring his attackers to justice, but prosecutors and the courts found no evidence of the crime. Like thousands of other Ukrainians, he finally found justice in the European Court of Human Rights, which in 2012 obligated Ukraine to pay a record compensation of €154,000 ($201,000) for the assault and failure to investigate the crime.
June 9, 2000. Journalist Oleksiy Podolsky was kidnapped by three policemen, including convicted police general Oleksiy Pukach, taken to the forest outside Kyiv and beaten. Two police officers – Mykola Naumets and Oleh Maryniak – were convicted and sentenced to 3 years in prison.
Sept. 16, 2000 marks probably the most shocking crime in the history of independent Ukraine. Georgiy Gongadze, a journalist critical to then-President Leonid Kuchma, was kidnapped, murdered and beheaded by a group of policemen that included police general Oleksiy Pukach and officers Mykola Protasov, Oleksandr Popovych and Valeriy Kostenko. Pukach was given a life sentence for the crime, while the officers got 12-13 years. Despite Pukach’s testimony that implicated former President Leonid Kuchma in the ordeal, the investigation never went further.
July 7, 2001. Journalist Ihor Aleksandrov was brutally killed near his house in Donetsk Oblast. Years after the crime, in March 2012, the court sentenced senior policeman Ihor Kryvolap and police officers Albert Vynnychuk, Serhiy Shlomin and Oleksandr Gerasymenko to 7, 8 and 13 years in jail, respectively, for stalling the investigation. The court found them guilty of falsifying evidence to show that a local homeless man killed the journalist. The man was later cleared by the court but died of poisoning.
June 2009. Viktor Lozynsky, then a Batkivshchyna lawmaker, killed a man while vacationing in his native town of Holovanivsk in Kirovohrad Oblast with his friends, including local district police chief Mykhailo Kovalsky and the district’s prosecutor Yevhen Gorbenko. The local victim, Valeriy Oliynyk, died from 10 gunshot wounds. Lozynsky and his friends called the police to report that they had killed a dangerous man who attacked them with two guns and a knife. However, the investigation soon revealed that Lozynsky and accomplices had chased Oliynyk while under the influence of alcohol and had shot him with a rifle. Lozynsky was originally convicted to 15 years in prison, while Kovalsky got 5 years and Gorbenko 9 years. Lozynsky’s sentence was recently reduced by 4 years.
May 2010. Kyiv student Ihor Indylo, 21, died in police custody just hours after being detained. Security video footage showed police officer Sergiy Pryhodko dragging an unconscious Indylo into a cell and abandoning him. Ihor was found dead seven hours later. An investigation revealed that Indylo suffered a fractured skull and internal bleeding as a result of police interrogation. The case was sent back for a new trial which is currently underway.
March 2011. A senior police officer in Vinnysta Oblast assaulted Firdousi Safarov. The man ended up in the hospital with broken ribs and other wounds. After news reports drew attention to the case, the policeman was caught, convicted and sentenced to 5 years in prison.
June 2012. Three police officers in Donetsk detained a local man, Mykhailo Belikov, for allegedly consuming alcohol in public. After assaulting him in the park, the policemen took the man to the police station where they beat him, raped him with a police baton and demanded a bribe of Hr 1,500. Belikov suffered major internal injuries and remains disabled. One of the policemen – Ruslan Sutkovy – was sentenced to 10 years in jail, while the two others involved received suspended sentences.
July 2013. An unnamed Kyiv police officer was detained for allegedly killing elderly people. According to the prosecutor’s office, the policeman murdered lonely, elderly people with the aim of misappropriating and then selling their apartments. In all, the officer confessed to killing 3 people, according to the prosecutor’s office. A Kyiv court will hear the case later this year.
Source: Kyiv Post research
Kyiv Post staff writer Svitlana Tuchynska can be reached at [email protected].
