After Belarusian journalist Pavel Sheremet was killed in Kyiv on July 20, 2016, the police faced criticism for dragging their feet on finding suspects for years.
When three suspects were finally arrested in the Sheremet case in late 2019, the police were again lambasted for lacking evidence to prove their guilt.
And when an alleged tape implicating the Belarusian KGB in the murder was published on Jan. 4, the Ukrainian police claimed the Belarusian version does not contradict the guilt of the official suspects. There are no known links between the suspects and Belarus, and their lawyers argue that the official version has been effectively refuted by the new evidence.
Read also: 4.5 years after Sheremet’s murder, all eyes turn to Belarusian regime
One of the possible reasons why the police investigation has been ineffective is that the police and Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, who oversees the police, have multiple conflicts of interest in the Sheremet case.
Overlooked Azov
An example of it is that while investigating the murder, the police apparently didn’t look into Sheremet’s relationship with Azov, a regiment subordinated to the Interior Ministry. Several members of Azov met with Sheremet on the eve of the murder.
Among them was Sergei Korotkikh, a Belarusian nationalist who lives in Ukraine. In Belarus, Korotkikh was known to attack members of the Belarusian opposition, and to have connections to intelligence services. Sheremet himself was one of the most prominent critics of Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko.
Korotkikh repeatedly denied involvement in the murder of Sheremet, and said that the journalist was his friend.
Multiple sources told the Kyiv Post that Ukrainian investigators of Sheremet’s murder didn’t pursue a version that Korotkikh, or someone else in Azov, was involved in the murder and acted in the interests of the Belarusian regime.
A law enforcement source who was involved in the Sheremet investigation told the Kyiv Post that the Belarusian-Azov version was, in his opinion, one of the most plausible ones but it had not been properly investigated due to the political connections of Azov members to Avakov. The source spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press.
The political connections are there. Korotkikh used to work as a top police official and calls himself a personal friend of Avakov’s son Oleksandr. Azov’s leader Andriy Biletsky, who also met with Sheremet before the murder, was a lawmaker from Avakov’s People’s Front party at the time.
Alexei Martsinkevich, a journalist at Sheremet’s publication Belarusian Partisan, told the Kyiv Post none of the Ukrainian investigators had gotten in touch with the publication.
Responding to the critics’ accusations of sabotaging the Sheremet investigation, Avakov’s spokeswoman Natalia Stativko told the Kyiv Post that Avakov “does not carry out criminal investigations.” The police, which has previously denied accusations of blocking the investigation, did not respond to a request for comment.
Sheremet also had a personal conflict with some political allies of Avakov, and surveillance of Ukrainska Pravda started in 2015 when it investigated alleged corruption in Avakov’s People’s Front party.
Alleged police surveillance of Sheremet
Another possible conflict of interest that Ukrainian police have in Sheremet’s case is the fact that the police allegedly surveilled Sheremet and his colleagues in the run-up to the murder.
From the fall of 2015 until the spring of 2016, Ukrainska Pravda journalists, including Sheremet, suspected that they were subject to surveillance by the authorities.
Olena Prytula, Sheremet’s common-law wife and owner of Ukrainska Pravda, told her colleagues that she and Sheremet spotted unknown people conducting surveillance next to their house and following them in a car in the autumn of 2015, according to the newspaper’s editor-in-chief Sevhil Musayeva.
The police denied following Ukrainska Pravda employees and said what they took for surveillance was a private security firm that had conducted surveillance of an illegal casino located near Sheremet and Prytula’s house.
However, Saken Aimurzayev, former chief editor of Vesti Radio, told the Kyiv Post that he and Sheremet suspected the police of conducting this surveillance. Aimurzayev worked with Sheremet at Radio Vesti and lived in the same house with him.
Then Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko said on July 23, 2016 that prosecutors had opened a criminal case into reports on alleged surveillance of Ukrainska Pravda journalists by Vadym Troyan, a former leader of Azov who became the senior deputy head of the National Police in March 2016.
The surveillance began when Ukrainska Pravda started investigating alleged corruption within the People’s Front party of former Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk and Avakov, including that of former lawmaker Mykola Martynenko, Musayeva told the Kyiv Post.
Martynenko’s spokesman Andriy Lyashenko described speculation on a potential conflict between the ex-lawmaker and Ukrainska Pravda as “nonsense.”
Musayeva said the surveillance could have been carried out by the police and she did not find explanations about the casino convincing.
Criticism of Avakov and his allies
Sheremet publicly criticized Avakov, who now oversees the investigation of his murder, and lambasted his allies.
Sheremet had a long-running conflict with a representative of the People’s Front and Avakov ally, Mykola Knyazhytsky.
Knyazhytsky was a lawmaker from Avakov’s People’s Front from 2014 to 2019.
In 2013 Sheremet briefly worked at Ukraine’s TVi channel, whose CEO was Knyazhytsky. Sheremet and Konstantin Kagalovsky, who was the channel’s owner, accused Knyazhytsky, TVi CEO Artem Shevchenko and Deputy Prime Minister Serhiy Arbuzov, an ally of then-President Viktor Yanukovych, of unlawfully seizing the channel, which they denied. Sheremet was fired amid the conflict.
In December 2015 Sheremet wrote a column in which he criticized Knyazhytsky again and called him a fraud. In the same column, Sheremet lambasted Avakov and Yatsenyuk and accused them of stupidity and xenophobia due to their PR campaign against ex-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.
“Unfortunately Avakov and Yatsenyuk have not understood yet that they can’t keep old (corruption) schemes anymore,” he wrote.
In response, Knyazhytsky accused Sheremet of being a “Kremlin agent.”
He did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Martynenko and Odesa Portside Plant
Sheremet also stepped on the toes of another associate of Avakov: ex-lawmaker Martynenko from Avakov’s People’s Front party, whose alleged corruption was investigated by Ukrainska Pravda.
In a July 17, 2016 column, three days before his murder, Sheremet criticized the release from custody of two suspects in a corruption case involving the Odesa Portside Plant, Serhiy Pereloma and Mykola Shchurikov. Martynenko was investigated in that case, and Pereloma and Shchurikov are his alleged partners.
Sheremet also lambasted war veterans and People’s Front lawmakers, including Knyazhytsky, who came to the court building to support the suspects. He said that the July 15 coup d’etat attempt in Turkey had prompted speculation about a possible coup d’etat in Ukraine by war veterans.
On the day the op-ed was published, a group of camouflaged people tried to block the court building where the case was heard, to prevent the arrest of the suspects. Among them was Yevhen Deidei, a veteran of the Kyiv-1 volunteer battalion, subordinated to Avakov’s Interior Ministry, and then-lawmaker of Avakov’s People’s Front.
In 2012, before his political career started, Deidei was sentenced to a suspended five-year prison term for banditry, battery and robbery. However, prosecutors revoked the sentence and sent the case back for additional investigation in 2014 when Deidei was running on the People’s Front list for parliament – something that his critics attribute to Avakov’s political influence.
In June 2020, Deidei was appointed an aide to the head of Kyiv Police. He is still there.
