The publication of a recording featuring alleged Belarusian KGB employees refutes the official police version of the case into the murder of journalist Pavel Sheremet, the defense lawyers of the official suspects said late on Jan. 4.
EUobserver, a Brussels-based English publication, and the Belarusian People’s Tribunal, an opposition group, on Jan. 4 published a recording in which alleged officials of Belarus’ KGB discussed murdering Sheremet in 2012. The Belarusian government has denied involvement in the murders of Sheremet and other opponents of Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko.
Belarusian-born Sheremet, a critic of Lukashenko, was blown up in his car in central Kyiv on July 20, 2016. The Belarusian government has denied involvement in the murders of Sheremet and other opponents of Lukashenko.
The three official suspects – Andriy Antonenko, Yulia Kuzmenko and Yana Dugar – were arrested in 2019. Critics see the evidence against them as very weak and are calling for the suspects’ release.
Interior Ministry spokesman Artem Shevchenko argued that the Belarusian recording does not contradict the investigators’ official version.
“The information (on the Belarusian KGB’s involvement) confirms the main version of the investigators that the suspects did not act independently and fulfilled the criminal orders of unidentified people,” he said.
But the defense said the official version is untenable because there is no evidence of any links between the suspects and Belarusian intelligence agencies.
“There are no even remote hints at links between the defendants and any intelligence agencies, including foreign ones,” the lawyers said. “…If this information (on the Belarusian KGB’s involvement) is confirmed, it completely destroys the insane version of the prosecution about unknown people who (hired) volunteers who had low moral standards,” the defense said.
The defense team also said that the police version that the defendants murdered Sheremet in order to trigger protests in Ukraine contradicts the version of the Belarusian KGB’s involvement. No evidence has emerged for Belarus trying to trigger protests in Ukraine.
According to the investigators’ initial version, the suspects “espoused ultranationalist ideas, idolized the Aryan race’s greatness” and murdered Sheremet in order to destabilize the political situation. Critics say the investigators have provided no proof of the suspects’ ultranationalism and failed to explain how Sheremet’s murder would destabilize the country.
The police changed the charges in May 2020 and now claim that the perpetrators had unidentified personal motives and planned the murder as a “high-profile event in order to provoke major protests”.
The lawyers also said the Belarusian version also makes sense because the murder happened on the anniversary of Lukashenko’s inauguration in 1994.
The defense said that the police had not investigated the Belarusian version at all and could have avoided such an investigation intentionally.
Makar’s testimony
Meanwhile, fugitive former Belarusian official Igor Makar, who leaked the recording, told Suspilne television late on Jan. 4 that he was ready to give testimony to Ukrainian prosecutors in the Sheremet case.
The ex-KGB employee who made the recording is also ready to testify, Makar said. Currently, he is in the European Union, he added.
He also said he had given the information on the murder to U.S. intelligence agencies.
“I would like to help the Belarusian people to fight this dictatorship,” Makar said. “I’m ready to sacrifice my life to put an end to this dictatorship and to make Belarus free.”
KGB recording
The leaked KGB tape was allegedly recorded on April 11, 2012, with a secret wiretapping device in the Minsk office of Vadym Zaitsev, who was then head of the KGB. Zaitsev was briefing officers from the KGB’s Alfa Group, an elite counter-terrorism unit.
“We should take care of Sheremet, who is a massive pain in the ass,” Zaitsev said, according to the 2012 recording. “We’ll plant (a bomb) and so on and this fucking rat will be taken down in fucking pieces – legs in one direction, arms in the other direction. If everything (looks like) natural causes, it won’t get into people’s minds the same way.”
Zaitsev said Lukashenko had authorized the planned assassinations and allocated $1.5 million to carry them out.
Sheremet has had a long-running conflict with Lukashenko.
He also co-wrote a book highly critical of Lukashenko in 2003 and produced two documentaries on political assassinations in Belarus in 2000-2002.
Lukashenko’s two main political opponents, Viktor Gonchar and Yury Zakharenko, disappeared in 1999 and are believed to be dead. Dmitry Pavlichenko, a police unit chief and a loyalist of Lukashenko, was arrested by investigators in the case into the murders but was later released on the president’s orders.
In 2019, Yury Garavsky, who fled Belarus, claimed to be a member of Lukashenko’s death squads in an interview with Deutsche Welle and admitted to participating in the murders of Zakharenko and Honchar.
Korotkikh version
There is another link to Belarus in the events preceding Sheremet’s killing. On the night before Sheremet’s murder, Sergei Korotkikh, a Belarusian national and member of the Azov volunteer battalion, and other Azov fighters visited Sheremet’s house. Korotkikh has denied having anything to do with Sheremet’s murder and has called him a friend of his.
Korotkikh is a friend and cousin of former Belarusian police officer Valery Ignatovych, who has been convicted for kidnapping in 2000 Sheremet’s cameraman and friend Zavadsky, who disappeared and is believed to be dead.
Oleh Odnorozhenko, a former leader of Azov, has claimed that Sheremet had a conflict with Korotkikh and other Azov members on the eve of the murder.
Korotkikh served in Belarus’ military intelligence in 1992 to 1994 and enrolled at the Belarusian KGB school in 1994.
Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, whose police force is investigating the case, has explicit links to Azov, which is part of his ministry. Several Azov leaders, including Korotkikh, have also worked as top police officials, and Korotkikh is a personal friend of Avakov’s son Oleksandr.
SBU links
Some have also suggested that the Security Service of Ukraine, known as the SBU, could be involved — an accusation the SBU denies.
Avakov acknowledged in December that video footage from four cameras closest to the crime scene had disappeared. The footage was being collected by Avakov’s police and the SBU, prompting suspicions that either of them could have destroyed it.
The Slidstvo.info investigative program offered another possible sign of a cover-up. It reported in 2017 that Igor Ustimenko, a former SBU employee, had been identified as being present near the site of the murder before it occurred. Ustimenko has denied involvement.
In 2020, Vasylisa Mazurchuk, a former spokesperson for the Dnipro 1 and Donbas battalions, published screenshots of what she says is her correspondence with Interior Ministry Spokesman Artem Shevchenko, who alleged the SBU’s involvement in the murder. Shevchenko declined to comment.
Ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s former deputy chief of staff Andriy Portnov also published in 2020 an alleged audio recording of SBU officer Andriy Omelchenko instructing Vladyslav Gryshchenko, who was also investigated in the Sheremet case, on how to testify in the case and mentions that Gryshchenko has cooperated with counter-intelligence officers.
