The chief of police in the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast was sacked after he reprimanded patrol officers for pulling over his personal driver.
On July 29, Serhiy Knyazev, chief of the National Police, and Interior Minister Arsen Avakov agreed to fire Vitaliy Glukhoverya from his post, the National Police said in a statement.
Glukhoverya was sacked after President Volodymyr Zelensky demanded he be removed from office in a Facebook post.
Glukhoverya’s rapid-fire fall from grace came just a day after the Strana.ua news website published a video from a patrol police officer’s body cam that recorded his encounter with Glukhoverya’s personal driver and later the police chief himself.
The officer pulled over a car operated by Glukhoverya’s driver, who seems to have violated the rules of the road. The driver then made a call to his boss and the special police force came to restrain the patrol officers.
The patrol police officers were then brought to talk to Glukhoverya, where they had to explain themselves. One of the officer taped the whole conversation on his body cam.
After publication on Friday, July 26, the video went viral overnight. Strana.ua did not disclose the source of the video, but said that the incident in question occurred on Sept. 12, 2018.
Zelensky reacted to the video the next day, on Saturday, July 27.
“I demand from the Minister of Internal Affairs, Mr. Arsen Avakov, the immediate firing of Glukhoverya from his post, and, from the head of (the State Investigations Bureau), Mr. Roman Truba, I await a quick and uncompromising investigation of the facts made public (in the video),” Zelensky wrote in a Facebook post.
The State Investigations Bureau (DBR) launched criminal proceedings to investigate the alleged abuse of power by Glukhoverya. The National Police said that its Dnipropetrovsk Oblast office had launched an internal investigation into the events and would transfer its findings to the DBR.
Meanwhile, Glukhoverya was replaced by Col. Artem Vasytskyi, the deputy head of Ukraine’s Main Department of the Criminal Police.
