Ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko said she believes ex-President Leonid Kuchma and current Verkhovna Rada speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn should be put on trial for ordering the Sept. 16, 2000, murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze.
Ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko said she believes ex-President rent Verkhovna Rada speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn should be put on trial for ordering the Sept. 16, 2000, murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze. “If we are talking about my personal position as a citizen, it is that Kuchma and Lytvyn ordered the murder of Gongadze,” Tymoshenko said in a Nov.17 interview with the Kyiv Post. “And President Viktor Yanukovych is today doing everything possible to cover this up, to protect them. They are people from the same team.
For the last decade, Kuchma and Lytvyn have consistently denied any involvement in the murder of Gongadze and have never been charged with any crime. Meanwhile, since becoming president on Feb. 25, Yanukovcyh and other top administration officials have pledged to finish the investigation left undone by two predecessors – Kuchma, who ruled from 1994-2005, and ex-President Viktor Yushchenko, who served from 2005-2010. Tymoshenko’s unequivocal remarks are certain to intensify the scrutiny of how Yanukovych and his chosen prosecutor general, Viktor Pshonka, ultimately resolve the Gongadze murder investigation. The unsolved murder – complete with allegations of cover-up and involvement of top-level officials — continues to harm Ukraine’s attempts to present itself internationally as a civilized democratic nation. When asked the basis for her opinion, Tymoshenko cited numerous reasons:
- leaked testimony from ex-Interior Ministry general Oleksiy Pukach, imprisoned for more than a year as the suspect who carried out the actual murder;
- tape recordings made in Kuchma’s office before Gongadzes’s murder, in which top administration officials discussed with Kuchma the need to silence the crusading journalist;
- various statements by prosecutors in the last decade; and
- a note ostensibly left by the late Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko, killed from two gunshot wounds to the head in 2005. Kravchenko, whose death was officially ruled a suicide, allegedly left a note in which he claimed to be a victim of Kuchma’s intrigues.
“Based on all of these facts and documents, society has reached the clear conviction that Kuchma and Lytvyn ordered the murder,” Tymoshenko said. The latest official word from Pshonka, appointed Nov. 4 as top prosecutor by Yanukovych, is that the Gongadze case will go to court in January. Suspect Pukach, a former Interior Ministry general, went in hiding for several years before his arrest in Zhytomyr Oblast on July 21, 2009. Authorities say he has confessed to the crime, while his lawyers have said that he also implicated Kuchma and Lytvyn in the murder. He ran the ministry’s foreign surveillance unit at the time of Gongadze’s murder. Prosecutors also this year said that Kravchenko ordered Pukach and his subordinates to kill Gongadze, but many — including Tymoshenko — believe the ultimate order came from Kuchma through Lytvyn, then the president’s chief of staff. Last month, Oleh Musienko, the former lawyer for Pukach, told the Ukrainska Pravda online news source that the suspect’s testimony provides ample reason for Kuchma and Lytvyn to stand trial for the killing. In 2008, three former police officers with the Interior Ministry were convicted of involvement in the crime and are serving prison sentences. They are: Col. Valeriy Kostenko, Col. Mykola Protasov and Maj. Oleksandr Popovych. In October, the prosecutor general replaced Oleksandr Kharchenko, the head of the investigative group in charge of the Pukach case, with Vladyslav Hryschenko. Tymoshenko’s opinion that Lytyvn was an accomplice to Gongadze’s murder did not prevent her from working with him when he was parliament speaker and she was prime minister, most recently from 2008 to March. Before Yanukovych’s election as president on Feb. 7, Lytvyn’s minority faction in the Verkhovna Rada aligned with Tymoshenko’s parliamentarians and other groups to form a tenuous ruling majority. Tymoshenko defended her involvement with Lytvyn as a matter of political expediency to help the nation overcome the global economic crisis that started in the autumn of 2008 and caused gross domestic product to plunge 15 percent in 2009. “I have not changed my position as a citizen of Ukraine. But I am not the general prosecutor and can’t lead the investigation or make charges,” Tymoshenko said. “When I was prime minister, in the middle of a huge economic crisis, I did everything possible to unite Ukraine’s politicians as much as possible to deal with the challenges at hand, to adopt anti-crisis legislation. I didn’t have a choice of who to choose from in terms of political allies. President Viktor Yushchenko was then sabotaging my government’s work. Yanukovych was doing the same. The only choice was to work with part of Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine party and Lytvyn.”
Kyiv Post chief editor Brian Bonner can be reached at [email protected].
