Your capture on July 21 comes more than five years after your disappearance. That you are alive comes as relief to the public. We thought you had been killed because you know who ordered the murder of the journalist Georgiy Gongadze.
While you were in hiding, two court trials had implicated you in kidnapping and murder. On May 8, 2007, the Kyiv City Appellate Court found two officers under your command as chief of the Interior Ministry’s Criminal Investigation Department, Oleh Marynyuk and Mykola Naumets, guilty of kidnapping, beating and threatening journalist Oleksiy Podolsky. The court sentenced Marynyuk and Nauments to four years imprisonment each. Your court sentence may await you.
Let me remind you what you allegedly had been done to Podolsky and later Gongadze. According to investigators, court testimony and the Mykola Melnychenko audiotapes that recorded hundreds of hours of conversations involving former President Leonid Kuchma:
– On June 9, 2000, at 10:30 p.m., on Lviv Square, you and your two mates forced Podolsky into your car and drove 130 kilometers out of Kyiv. During the ride, you hit him with a rubber baton and fists, and took his money, passport and personal items. In woods near the village of Petrivka, Pryluky District, Chernihiv Oblast, you pulled him out of the car, violently beat him, forced him to dig his own grave, and threatened to burn him with petrol. You took his belt and tightened it around his neck, and warned him that if he did not stop his political activities and articles against President Leonid Kuchma and the Interior Ministry, you would kill him.
– After Podolsky was kidnapped, your “eagles” set fire to the door of the apartment of his associate, Serhiy Kudryashov. Only thanks to his neighbors, who managed to put out the fire, was a tragedy averted.
– Three days after Podolsky’s kidnapping, on June 12, your boss, Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko boasted to Kuchma about you and your boys with “no morals” are punishing his critics. Kuchma shared a laugh with Kravchenko on how you scared Podolsky to death. Your boss said of your department: “To be brief – I have such a unit, their methods, they have no morals, no nothing. So, God forbid that something happens. Simply, I have a group and they have begun to silence things.”
– On March 15, 2008, the Kyiv appeals court found three of your fellow policemen guilty of the kidnapping and killing of the journalist Georgiy Gongadze on Sept. 16-17, 2000. Mykola Protasov received 13 years in prison, while Valery Kostenko and Oleksandr Popovych got 12 years each. The verdict accused you of directing the murder and suffocating Gongadze. The court sentence on Gongadze awaits you.
– On September 16, 2000, you, as chief of the national department, took personal charge of the operation to kidnap Gongadze. In the morning, you instructed your operatives to spread out across Kyiv in groups of two to places where Gongadze was expected to appear: his apartment, the Ukrainska Pravda office, and [editor of Ukrainska Pravda Olena] Prytula’s apartment. At about 9 p.m., your operatives reported that Gongadze and Prytula had entered her apartment building. Soon afterwards, you arrived with your son-in-law Protasov, who was off duty, and your driver Popovych. You ordered Popovych to lure Gongadze into his car under the guise of providing a taxi ride.
– At about 10:30 p.m., Gongadze left the building and came to the curb to hail a taxi. Popovych stopped and offered him a ride, but told him to sit in the back as the front seat was broken. As Gongadze got into back seat, two other officers, Protasov and Kostenko, jumped in beside him and seized his arms, while you sat in the front passenger seat.
– Your deputies, Oleh Pigol and Volodymyr Petruk, witnessed the kidnapping and followed you in the car with Gongadze to the city limits, where you instructed them to return to base. The person nominally in charge of the operation, your first deputy Volodymyr Bernak, also observed the snatch, but didn’t bother to follow you and went home.
– What happened next to Gongadze was almost exactly what you had done to Podolsky. As the car sped away, you ordered Protasov and Kostenko to hold Gongadze while you beat him with a rubber truncheon from the front. You drove to a forest clearing outside the village of Sukholisy, near the town of Bila Tserkva. Just like with Podolsky, you had Gongadze pulled out of the car, held on the ground, while you tightened a belt around his neck. But, unlike in the Podolsky case, you pulled the belt tightly and strangled Gongadze. You ordered your men to dig a grave, throw the body in it, pour petrol over it, burn him and cover the grave.
– You must agree that these trials could not take place while Kuchma was president. After Gongadze’s disappearance, he, along with the police and prosecution service, protected you by creating a web of lies about what happened to Gongadze, including that he had run away, the headless corpse wasn’t his, that they had organized Ukraine’s biggest ever search for a missing person, and that the [former presidential bodyguard Mykola] Melnychenko recordings, in which the president and his office head, Volodymyr Lytvyn, arranged the kidnapping, were fabrications. Your brotherhood, the more than a dozen CID officers, who either witnessed the kidnapping or knew about it, also kept their silence.
The only attempt during Kuchma’s tenure in office to prosecute you took place on Oct. 22, 2003, when you were arrested on charges of destroying Interior Ministry archives. The arrest took place while Kuchma was on a state visit to South America. On the president’s return, Kuchma saved you by firing Prosecutor General Syatoslav Piskun for ordering your arrest and by having a judge release you from jail.
“If we hadn’t killed him, they would have killed us,” you told your operative, Kostenko, following the murder. The murder was planned. The driver Popovych said that the canister of petrol used for burning Gongadze’s body had been obtained on Sept. 12. This was the day after Kuchma is suspected of giving his fourth and final order to Kravchenko to get rid of Gongadze. After seizing Gongadze, you did not bother even to interrogate him. You were so poorly informed about your victim, that you were surprised he spoke Ukrainian, as you thought he was Georgian. Your first order on arrival in the forest was to have a grave dug, while Gongadze sat in the car. Twenty minutes later, you strangled him.
Kostenko said that you had warned him that as long as he remained silent about what had happened to Gongadze, he would have nothing to worry about. In 2005, Kostenko confessed. Now it is your turn to answer all the questions, especially the following:
1. Who ordered you to kidnap Podolskiy?
2. Who ordered you to kidnap and murder Gongadze?
3. Why did you cut off Gongadze’s head and what happened to it?
4. Did you rebury his headless body in the parliamentary constituency of Oleksandr Moroz? If you did rebury the body, why?
5. What other kidnappings and killings did you carry out?
Jaroslav Koshiw, a formerdeputy editor of Kyiv Post, is submitting a study on ex-PresidentLeonid Kuchma for publication to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. In recent years, he has been a resident scholar at the Kennan Institute and the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University. He is the author of the only Western book on the Georgiy Gongadze murder, “Beheaded: The Killing of a Journalist” (Artema Press, 2003).
