Human rights activists accuse the Security Service of Ukraine of beating and torturing people that it suspects may have links to Russian-backed separatists.
On the other hand, the service is ignoring evidence that some of its own officers could have links to Russia and Kremlin forces.
SBU spokeswoman Olena Hitlianska declined to comment on the accusations.
Human rights abuses
The Kharkiv Human Rights Group called the SBU “the biggest violator of human rights” and accused them of illegally capturing and torturing people.
The group’s leader Yevhen Zakharov told the Kyiv Post he couldn’t remember any case of SBU officers being prosecuted for violating human rights since the agency’s creation.
The Prosecutor General’s Office told the Kyiv Post it had charged 59 SBU employees in criminal cases from February 2014 through May 2017. However, the Kyiv Post could not find evidence of any SBU officials being convicted for any crimes since the EuroMaidan Revolution.
On Nov. 14, 2014, the police stopped a car near the city of Izyum in Kharkiv Oblast driven by Donetsk resident Oleksandr Agafonov, who was traveling with his wife and a small child.
The police detained the man, suspecting him of having links to Russian-backed separatists. Later SBU officers drove him away in a minivan and brought him back barely alive after a beating. Agafonov died soon after that.
The two SBU officers were put on trial, but as of now they are not in custody, and one of them is still in his job.
In March, the police charged an SBU counterintelligence officer of murdering a 43-year-old resident of Avdiyivka in Donetsk Oblast, whose mutilated body had been found in a forest.
The police said that the SBU officer and two soldiers picked up a random man in Avdiyivka during a raid for drug traffickers. They drove the man by car to a forest where the officer beat him to death, demanding that he confess to being a drug trafficker, according to the police.
The two soldiers were witnesses of the alleged murder and asked for protection as they feared retaliation, the police said. Later they started retracting their testimony.
A suspect of such a grave crime cannot be released on bail under Ukrainian law. However, a court released the SBU officer on $12,000 bail.
Prison terms for phone calls
People detained by the SBU, however, face much harsher treatment than prosecuted SBU officers, and often for much lesser crimes.
In December 2015, a Bakhmut court sentenced a woman from the town of Myronivsky in Donetsk Oblast to eight-and-a-half years in jail for having a phone conversation with her cousin, who serves with Russian-led forces, according to the investigators.
She was accused of creating a terrorist organization — the usual charge brought against those who call people in Russian-occupied areas.
The court charged her with being a separatist artillery spotter for telling her cousin that “on the way to Pakhar (Ukrainian troops) are standing on a hill in the field.”
The woman denied the charges and said the police and SBU officers were beating her for several hours.
Meanwhile, a woman in the city of Toretsk in Donetsk Oblast received four years in jail in April after a court decided that she had given information on Ukrainian military positions by phone to an “unidentified person” in the Russian-occupied area. Despite being disabled, this woman spent two years in preliminary detention.
Prosecutors opened an investigation into allegedly illegal methods of investigation applied to the woman by the SBU, but subsequently closed it.
In January, a Sloviansk court sentenced two young men to five years in prison for posting pro-separatist messages on the VK social network. The men, who were charged with infringing on Ukraine’s territorial integrity, denied the charges and said they had been tortured.
Meanwhile, actual Russian-backed separatist fighters are usually sentenced in Ukraine under a milder Criminal Code article on “the creation of an illegal military or armed unit,” and given prison terms of at least two years.
Pro-Russian leanings
In contrast to detainees accused of having pro-Russian sentiments, some SBU officials suspected of having links to Russia are not facing any problems.
Alexei Kiselyov, an ex-member of Sevastopol City Council, has accused SBU Deputy Chief Vitaly Malikov of backing pro-Kremlin separatist Alexei Chaly and the sham referendum on Crimea’s annexation held in 2014 — accusations which Malikov denies.
In 2014 Malikov, then a member of Sevastopol City Council, voted to call on then President Viktor Yanukovych to crack down on the EuroMaidan protesters, according to Sevastopol’s sevas.com news site.
Malikov’s daughter welcomed Russian dictator Vladimir Putin when he visited Crimea after the annexation, according to her social networks.
Malikov and his wife used to own several businesses in Crimea, which is currently occupied by Russia, according to the Slidstvo.info investigative show.
Under Yanukovych, the SBU was headed by officials accused of having links to Russia’s Federal Security Service.
In May ex-SBU Deputy Chief Viktor Trepak said in an interview with the LB.ua news site that the SBU had become more patriotic since the EuroMaidan but “for many years they had been influenced by Russian intelligence agencies, who infiltrated the SBU, and it’s impossible to cleanse them in one day.”
Oleksandr Dovzhenko, head of Odesa Oblast’s SBU branch, is subject to the lustration law on the dismissal of Yanukovych’s top officials, but has escaped being fired due to gaining the status of a war participant — a common way of evading lustration. He was reportedly a close ally of Yanukovych’s SBU Chief Oleksandr Yakymenko, who is suspected of having ties to the Russian intelligence agencies.
Meanwhile, Vasyl Burba, a former top SBU official and currently chief of military intelligence, participated in the crackdown on EuroMaidan demonstrators on Feb. 18–20, 2014, which led to the murders of some 100 people, according to a document published by Zakarpattia Oblast Governor Gennady Moskal. Burba was not available for comment.
“There are still people in the law enforcement agencies who did not respond to investigators’ questions on whether they committed crimes during the EuroMaidan,” ex-SBU Chief Valentyn Nalyvaichenko said in a reference to the SBU. “Most law enforcers were involved in the crackdowns on the EuroMaidan.”
