More than 20 men tried to block Dmytro Gnap, a former investigative journalist turned presidential candidate, from attending a traveling session of Poltava Oblast Council in the village of Shyshaky on Oct. 19, the journalist said.
An unidentified person also threw a bucket of feces on Gnap, who said he had come to the council meeting to stop councilors from allocating five gas fields to a group of suspicious private firms, Gnap wrote on Facebook on Oct.19.
Police officers present near the building appeared to ignore the incident and didn’t detain Gnap’s attacker, according to Kristina Berdynskykh, a journalist from the weekly magazine Novoe Vremya who was present at the scene.
She said she had asked a police officer present to intervene, but that he had refused to do so. Police later denied this, however.
“That’s not true. The young lieutenant Berdynsckykh talked to couldn’t leave his post and acted according to the protocol,” Yuriy Sulayev, the head of the communications department of Poltava Oblast National Police, told the Kyiv Post on Oct. 19.
“A young man approached Gnap as soon as he parked his car. He wasn’t local, and acted quickly and then ran away. Police are already searching for him. We’ve already opened a criminal investigation and qualified the incident as hooliganism,” Sulayev said.
Berdynskykh wrote later on Facebook that she had given a statement on the incident to the police.
The group of thugs who then tried to stop Gnap from attending the council meeting were allegedly headed by Serhiy Cherednichenko, the member of Socialists Party headed by Illya Kiva, a former adviser to Ukraine’s Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, Berdynsckykh wrote.
“Those were Kiva’s titushki,” Gnap told the Kyiv Post on Oct. 19, using the word used in Ukraine for pro-government hired thugs. Gnap was eventually able to break through the group of men and attend the council meeting.
Kiva denied the journalists’ claims. He said members of his party, including Cherednichenko, had merely been there to attend the council meeting.
“As for the attack, our party has nothing to do with it. I don’t know, maybe he staged this attack himself in order to draw attention to his presidential campaign, (which is) financed by Sergiy Lyovochkin,” Kiva told the Kyiv Post on Oct. 19.
Cherednichenko told the Kyiv Post that the Socialist party members had just been arguing with Gnap, but had not tried to prevent him from attending the council meeting.
He said that Gnap came to the council session in order to protect the interests of Lyovochkin, an Opposition Bloc Party member and former head of the presidential administration of President Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted from his post after the EuroMaidan Revolution in 2014.
Gnap in turn said these accusations were baseless.
In July, Poltava Oblast council granted permits for gas extraction to 14 firms linked to the oligarch Pavlo Fuks, the Nashi Groshi news website reported on July 14.
“Today four more private companies of five got licenses for gas extraction,” Gnap told the Kyiv Post on Oct. 19.
Poltava Oblast councilors called the incident with Gnap “a publicity stunt” during the council session, which was broadcast live on YouTube on Oct. 19.
No one at Poltava Oblast Council press service was available to comment on the incident.
In June, Gnap announced that he had quit journalism to run for president in 2019.
The attack on Gnap is the second such attack in a three days. On Oct. 17, unidentified people threw feces on Sergey Kaplin, the leader of Simple People Party, during a trade union protest near the Cabinet of Ministers building in Kyiv.
