Stop laying flowers

They should stop with the empty rituals and lift the political block that has prevented bringing ex-President Leonid Kuchma to trial for allegedly ordering the murder. Kuchma, long a suspect with a credible trail of evidence implicating him, has always denied the charges.
Like his predecessors, President Petro Poroshenko, who has vowed to seek justice, appears to favor unofficial immunity for the nation’s second president.
It’s disgraceful and, combined with Poroshenko’s rash decree of Sept. 16 banning legitimate foreign journalists from Ukraine, shows that the nation still has progress to make in protecting free speech and upholding the law. Poroshenko quickly moved to announce that he would restore the legal status of the BBC journalists.
Ukraine still ranks as a dangerous country for journalists, with seven journalists killed in 2014 and at least four in 2015.
Gongadze is a symbol of free speech that Kuchma tried to extinguish during his autocratic 10-year rule. He led the obstruction of justice after the murder. There are many other cases of impunity, including the 2001 murder of Donetsk investigative journalist Ihor Alexandrov.
This was all Kuchma’s Ukraine.
The trail in ordering Gongadze’s murder went as high as Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko, a Kuchma confidante, killed by two gunshot wounds to the head in 2005 as he was publicly called to testify. His death was ruled suicide.
Artem Skoropadsky, a former Kommersant journalist and a Right Sector spokesman, believes that nothing has changed in terms of the investigation of the murders and mysterious deaths.
“The prosecutors didn’t report on all those cases when journalists were beaten or intimidated during the (ex-President Viktor) Yanukovych regime,” Skoropadsky told the Kyiv Post. “I haven’t heard about any successful investigation so far.”
Iryna Chulivska, a media expert of the Institute for Mass Information, told the Kyiv Post that Poroshenko “preferred symbolic action” on the anniversary by putting flowers outside the National Union of Journalists. “This crime has no statute of limitations,” Poroshenko wrote on his official Facebook page.
And neither, apparently, does inaction and cover up.