The investigation into the 2000 murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze has made no progress under President Volodymyr Zelensky, the journalist’s widow, Myroslava Gongadze, said at a news conference on Sept. 16.
“In this case, everyone has fallen silent,” she said. “We don’t know what’s going on in the investigation. If the previous administration (of ex-President Petro Poroshenko) did at least something or pretended to do something, over the past two years we have not had any information about the investigation.”
Gongadze was kidnapped on Sept. 16, 2000 and murdered later.
Four perpetrators of Gongadze’s murder – ex-police officials Oleksiy Pukach, Valery Kostenko, Mykola Protasov and Oleksandr Popovych – have been jailed. The Supreme Court upheld the 2013 life sentence for Pukach, the highest-ranking among them, in July 2021.
Evidence, including recordings made by ex-Security Service of Ukraine official Mykola Melnychenko, points to former President Leonid Kuchma as the possible organizer of the murder, which he denies. Whoever ordered the murder remains unpunished 21 years later.
Another alleged accomplice, ex-Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko, was found dead of two gunshot wounds – suspiciously ruled suicide – in 2005.
In 2005 Myroslava Gongadze won a case against Ukrainian authorities at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The court ruled that the case had not been properly investigated and that Ukraine should reform its law enforcement to achieve progress in protecting journalists’ rights.
So far, the ECHR decision has not been implemented by Ukraine, Valentyna Telychenko, a lawyer for Myroslava Gongadze, said at a commemoration event for Georgiy Gongadze’s death on Sept. 16.
“Ukraine has not implemented any substantial reform in order to make journalists’ work safe,” Telychenko said. “One example of Ukriane’s failure to implement substantial reform and disastrous problems in this sphere is the investigation of the murder of (Belarusian-born journalist Pavel) Sheremet.”
Sheremet was blown up in his car in central Kyiv on July 20, 2016.
The police failed to produce suspects until 2019, when they charged three people. No hard evidence has been presented against them and all three have since been released from detention.
“Today the Ukrainian authorities don’t understand the essence of the problem and what justice and the rule of law are,” Telychenko continued.
Myroslava Borchuk, a journalist at the UA:Pershy TV channel, also spoke at the commemoration event. She received the Georgiy Gongadze award for exceptional journalism in May.
“As the media community and as a society, we have not managed to have the organizer punished. We allowed the situation when the organizer of the murder is called a patriarch of Ukrainian politics today,” she said in a veiled reference to Kuchma.
In 2011, prosecutors charged Kuchma with complicity in Gongadze’s murder. He denied the accusations.
The charges were partially based on the Melnychenko recordings, which were published in November 2000.
The tapes featured a man with a voice similar to that of Kuchma ordering his allies to “deal with” Gongadze, one of his prominent critics. One of the men receiving the orders was Kravchenko.
Later in 2011, the Constitutional Court blocked the case against Kuchma by ruling that the Melnychenko tapes cannot be recognized as admissible evidence. Subsequently, Kyiv’s infamous Pechersk Court closed the Kuchma case.
Pukach claimed that he had received orders to kill Gongadze from Kravchenko and that Kuchma and ex-Verkhovna Rada speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn were also implicated in the murder. Lytvyn denied the accusations.
