Ukrainian police said in a statement on Jan. 4 that investigators will probe an audio recording in which alleged officials of Belarus’ KGB discussed murdering journalist Pavel Sheremet in 2012, four years before he was killed in Kyiv.
Belarusian-born Sheremet, a critic of Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, was blown up in his car in central Kyiv on July 20, 2016. The Belarusian government has denied involvement in the murders of Sheremet and other opponents of Lukashenko.
The recording was published by EUobserver, a Brussels-based English-language publication, and the Belarusian People’s Tribunal, an opposition group run by fugitive Belarusian police official Igor Makar.
The publication triggered increasing criticism of the police handling of the Sheremet case.
Critics see the evidence against the three official suspects – Andriy Antonenko, Yulia Kuzmenko and Yana Dugar – as very weak and are calling for the suspects’ release. No evidence linking these suspects with Belarus has ever been published.
“If the incumbent (Ukrainian) government is covering up for the Lukashenko regime’s crimes by insisting on our complicity in Sheremet’s murder, it is sharing responsibility for the crime with the Belarusian government and will be held responsible as an accomplice,” Kuzmenko wrote on Facebook.
Interior Ministry spokesman Artem Shevchenko claimed that the Belarusian recording does not contradict the investigators’ official version.
The National Police said that it obtained the information on the Belarusian recording in December.
“Documents and audio recordings the latest of which are dated 2012 have been obtained by investigators and are interesting from the standpoint of finding the organizers of the crime,” the police said.
Police also said they had obtained a permit to conduct an investigation in an unidentified European country.
KGB recording
The leaked KGB tape was allegedly recorded on April 11, 2012, with a secret wiretapping device in the Minsk office of Vadym Zaitsev, who was then head of the KGB. Zaitsev was briefing officers from the KGB’s Alfa Group, an elite counter-terrorism unit.
“We should take care of Sheremet, who is a massive pain in the ass,” Zaitsev said, according to the 2012 recording. “We’ll plant (a bomb) and so on and this fucking rat will be taken down in fucking pieces – legs in one direction, arms in the other direction. If everything (looks like) natural causes, it won’t get into people’s minds the same way.”
EUobserver and the Belarusian People’s Tribunal also published what they say is a Belarusian KGB surveillance report on Sheremet.
In the recording, people alleged to be Zaitsev and other KGB officials also discuss murdering other opponents of Lukashenko – Oleg Alkayev, Vladimir Borodai and Vyacheslav Dudkin – in Germany. They consider using poison and explosives for killing Lukashenko’s critics.
“It’s clear how we could drown or shoot someone. It’s clear. But how to initiate a chance explosion, how to start arson and not leave traces, murder, and stuff like that – this is unclear,” Zaitsev said.
Zaitsev said Lukashenko had authorized the planned assassinations and allocated $1.5 million to carry them out.
“The president [Lukashenko] is waiting for these operations,” he said. “…We must create a precedent to make the president see the results.”
The quality of the audio is too poor to do biometric “speaker recognition analysis,” Catalin Grigoras, the director of the National Centre for Media Forensics at the University of Colorado, told EUobserver. But the forensics expert “didn’t find” any obvious “trace of audio-manipulation” on the file.
Conflict with Lukashenko
Sheremet has had a long-running conflict with Lukashenko.
In 1997 Sheremet and his cameraman and friend Dmitry Zavadsky were jailed for several months by the Belarusian government for crossing the Belarusian-Lithuanian border after they produced a television report on smuggling between the two countries. This incident caused a major conflict between Belarus and Russia, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin explicitly demanding the journalists’ release.
Sheremet also co-wrote a book highly critical of Lukashenko – “An accidental president” – published in 2003. In the book, the journalist wrote that Lukashenko said before his arrest in 1997 that law enforcers should “put an end to” Sheremet.
Sheremet also said on March 6, 2000, on Russia’s ORT channel that he was prepared for death in the context of his conflict with Lukashenko.
In 2000-2002, Sheremet produced two documentaries on political assassinations in Belarus.
Lukashenko’s two main political opponents, Viktor Gonchar and Yury Zakharenko, disappeared in 1999 and are believed to be dead. Dmitry Pavlichenko, a police unit chief and a loyalist of Lukashenko, was arrested by investigators in the case into the murders but was later released on the president’s orders.
In 2019, Yury Garavsky, who fled Belarus, claimed to be a member of Lukashenko’s death squads in an interview with Deutsche Welle and admitted to participating in the murders of Zakharenko and Honchar.
Korotkikh version
There is another link to Belarus in the events preceding Sheremet’s killing.
On the night before Sheremet’s murder, Sergei Korotkikh, a Belarusian national and member of the Azov volunteer battalion, and other Azov fighters visited Sheremet’s house. The violent and controversial background of Korotkikh, a neo-Nazi, has attracted attention to him since then.
Korotkikh has denied having anything to do with Sheremet’s murder and has called him a friend of his.
Korotkikh is a friend and cousin of former Belarusian police officer Valery Ignatovych, who has been convicted for kidnapping in 2000 Sheremet’s cameraman and friend Zavadsky, who disappeared and is believed to be dead.
Oleh Odnorozhenko, a former leader of Azov, has claimed that Sheremet had a conflict with Korotkikh and other Azov members on the eve of the murder.
Korotkikh’s background is full of various links to Belarusian intelligence agencies, which prompted speculation that he could have acted in their interests. He denies this.
He served in Belarus’ military intelligence in 1992 to 1994 and enrolled at the Belarusian KGB school in 1994.
Korotkikh was also accused of beating up a group of Belarusian opposition activists in 1999 and assaulting Belarusian anti-fascists in 2013.
However, the Ukrainian police has so far failed to investigate the Belarusian version of Sheremet’s murder.
Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, whose police force is investigating the case, has explicit links to Azov, which is part of his ministry. Several Azov leaders, including Korotkikh, have also worked as top police officials, and Korotkikh is a personal friend of Avakov’s son Oleksandr.
