In one of the surprising outcomes of the Oct. 25 elections, a notorious ex-lawmaker convicted of murder won a local office.
Viktor Lozinsky, who spent six years in prison for a murder he committed while a member of parliament, won the post of the head of the Pidvysotska hromada, an administrative unit uniting several villages in Kirovohrad Oblast.
In 2011, Lozinsky, a businessman and ex-lawmaker from Yulia Tymoshenko’s political party, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for the 2009 murder of Valery Oliynyk, a 55-year-old villager from Kirovohrad Oblast. He was released early, in 2014.
Although the electoral commission is still counting the vote, it has preliminarily declared Lozinsky the winner. On Oct. 26, the commission said that over 1,000 residents of the area cast their votes for him. His opponents, Vadym Malkov, an independent candidate, and Sergiy Balitsky, a lawmaker from the ruling Servant of the People political party, got less than 400 votes, according to the local election commission.
Lozinsky’s early release was questioned by many, given the severity of his crime.
According to the indictment, Lozinsky, along with local prosecutor Yevhen Horbenko and police chief Mykhailo Kovalsky, participated in the murder of Oliynyk when the villager trespassed on Lozinsky’s land in June 2009. The man was shot with a hunting rifle, hit with a car and beaten up. He later died in a hospital.
Lozinsky never admitted his guilt. He was believed to be the main offender. The other two suspects were sentenced to shorter prison terms.
At that time, many Ukrainians doubted that Lozinsky would be convicted of his crime because, for years, Ukrainian courts failed to punish high-level officials for their wrongdoings. Lozinsky was one of the very few politicians brought to justice in Ukraine.
Lozinsky was supposed to leave prison in 2025, but was released prematurely in 2016 due to the so-called Savchenko Law, which counts each year in pre-trial detention as two years of the prison term.
After the murder, Lozinsky lost the support of Yulia Tymoshenko’s political party and Ukraine’s parliament stripped the lawmaker of his parliamentary immunity. He went into hiding and was arrested in March 2010.
In 2012, his sentence was reduced from 15 to 14 years and, later, in 2013, to 10 years. In 2014, Lozinsky was released because he allegedly had “health issues.” However, doctors made no recommendation for his release, and the case attracted public attention, so Lozinsky ended up in custody again.
After his final release in 2016, Lozinsky’s criminal record was expunged in 2019 by the Dniprovsky District Court in Kyiv for his “exemplary behavior.”
