OP-ED

Liliane Bivings: Avakov under fire over police reform failures

By Liliane Bivings.

Published July 1, 2020. Updated July 1 at 7:48 am

A protester holds a pink bat as he attends one of the several protests which took place in the downtown of Kyiv at once demanding the resignation of the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine Arsen Avakov on June 5, 2020.

Photo by Kostyantyn Chernichkin

On May 24, 2020, Nelya Pogrebitska from Kaharlyk in the Kyiv region was brought to a local police station to be questioned as a witness to a theft. According to Ukraine’s State Investigation Bureau, police officers then tortured and raped the 26-year-old several times. On the same evening, police officers also allegedly beat another man in custody at the same station.