OLESHKY, Ukraine — From the highway, the forest looks just fine.
But a short drive through the trees reveals countless rows of black trunks, resembling burnt matches. Here, arson destroyed 600 hectares of pine and other trees in late May.
It was not the first forest fire near Oleshky, a Kherson Oblast city of 25,000 people located 650 kilometers south of Kyiv, but it was the biggest one and allegedly all done for commercial gain — to sell the remaining pine trunks for huge profits.
The arson would have remained a simple local corruption story — one of many in Ukraine — had a much bigger crime not been committed several months later in nearby Kherson, the provincial capital of 290,000 residents.
In late July 2018, Kateryna Gandziuk, an outspoken deputy mayor who publicly accused top local officials of profiteering from the illicit wood trade, was attacked with acid. She suffered for three months in a Kyiv hospital before succumbing to her injuries on Nov. 4.
READ MORE: Timeline of Kateryna Gandziuk murder case
Prosecutors say the forest scandal served as the motive behind her murder. Investigators have named eight suspects in the acid attack and arrested six of them.
In February, under public pressure, prosecutors identified top figures in Kherson as suspects, including Vladyslav Manger, head of the Kherson Oblast Council. They also cited evidence that deputy governor Yevhen Ryshchuk was involved in illegal forest sale. Both officials, however, remain free.
Gandziuk’s friends and fellow activists are leading their own investigation into the murder. They pledge to find all the perpetrators “for Katya’s sake.” They publish their findings in a Facebook group that has more than 9,000 followers. Over the months, this group — not the police —has been the driving force behind the investigation.
In the five years since the EuroMaidan Revolution ousted Kremlin-backed President Viktor Yanukovych from power, Gandziuk found her calling in fighting corruption in Kherson. She butted heads with local bosses who run their towns and districts like personal fiefdoms, uninhibited by the Kyiv authorities.
“She was ambitious. It was no secret she wanted to become a politician of national significance,” said Gandziuk’s friend, journalist Serhiy Nikitenko.
The Gandziuk family’s lawyer, Yevhenia Zakrevska, said that, in a few years, Gandziuk “could have become a competitor” to the ruling elite.
Gandziuk’s friends believe it was a “collective agreement” among the local elite to get rid of the person who threatened the status quo. They name Manger, Ryshchuk, and Kherson Oblast Governor Andriy Gordeev as suspects. All three officials deny their involvement in the attack.
This story revealed the business of illegal wood sale, which brings tens of thousands of dollars per week, and links to local elites, war veterans, and criminals.
Its investigation stained the country’s top politicians, including President Petro Poroshenko, who has suspects Gordeev and Ryshchuk in his party, and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, whose party until recently had Manger. Now both Poroshenko and Tymoshenko, who campaign for the presidency, have come under pressure to put justice above politics and ensure justice.
A woman holds a photo of official and activist Kateryna Gandziuk before and after she suffered an acid attack. The event was a protest to demand justice for the slain activist on Feb. 4 near the Presidential Administration in Kyiv. Gandziuk died three months later, in November 2018, from injuries suffered in the acid attack. (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)
Forest standoff
On July 6, about a month after the Oleshky forest fire, hundreds of angry men gathered by the large building adorned with white pillars that houses both the Kherson governor’s office and the Kherson Oblast Council.
Among the protesters were members of the Kordon veterans organization. They accused the regional authorities of committing arson in the forest and of illegal logging. Other protesters — also including many veterans — stood on the building’s steps, ready to fight back against a possible attack on the Kordon members.
Gandziuk, sitting in her office in city hall across the square, mocked this standoff in an angry Facebook post, saying that both sides were just competing for the right to poach the burned forest.
The Oleshky forest is legally protected by the state, making it illegal to chop down the trees. But after a forest fire, the local authorities may allow the remnants of the burnt area to be harvested.
During the May fire, the pine needles burned, but the trunks largely remained intact — and perfectly acceptable for producing furniture. As a result, poachers with political connections can set fire to the forest and later fell the remaining trunks, disguising their work as the removal of dead trees.
After the July 6 rally, Gandziuk published on her Facebook page a photo of council head Manger watching the protest through the window of his office. She posted another photo of governor Gordeev trying to placate the demonstrators.
She also posted a picture of a truck fully loaded with wood, and wrote that it was spotted on the same day that the protests shook Kherson.
“I didn’t give a sh*t who chops down the forest: (Kordon head) Tsehelnyk in small parts, or Manger and Gordeev in bulk. But now I care. There will be a scandal, you bastards, if you want,” she wrote on Facebook.
Gandziuk’s friends say she and Manger had a rivalry dating back to 2015, when he campaigned to become Kherson mayor but lost to Volodymyr Mykolayenko, Gandziuk’s boss. At the time, Gandziuk was leading Mykolayenko’s election campaign.
New vs. old
Gandziuk, 33, a woman with a round face and long sandy hair, was not a gentle person. Her friends describe her as someone who laughed loudly, swore, and mocked people she despised.
Once she threw a fish head into the collar of a Kherson city council member with whom she had a conflict. Another time, she invited two actors dressed as a dog and a snowman to a meeting of a municipal committee.
She had many enemies and, months before the acid attack, had noticed that she was being followed.
Many people in Kherson — officials, business people, and others — didn’t like Gandziuk and told the Kyiv Post that she was corrupt, without providing evidence to support the claim.
Gandziuk studied English and Turkish in Kherson and then public administration in Kyiv. Before entering politics, she worked as a consultant for the United Nations and founded an investigative news site along with her friend Nikitenko.
In 2017, Nikitenko published a documentary about Manger, accusing him of involvement in shady business dealings. Manger responded with a libel lawsuit but eventually lost.
Unlike Gandziuk, who lived in a two-room flat with her father and husband, Manger leads an affluent lifestyle and has a wealthy wife.
Before his election to oblast council, Manger, 48, worked as a tax official in Kherson, headed the regional state agrarian inspection in Odesa, and then managed a grain trading company.
Now his spouse owns three flats in Kherson and a 270-square-meter house near Kyiv, two grain trading companies, and a construction company, according to his tax declaration.
Nikitenko, Gandziuk’s friend, claimed that in 2015 Manger bribed the Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna party to become the head of its Kherson city branch. In protest, Gandziuk left Batkivshchyna. In 2017, she became a founding member and leader of a new party called Simya (Family).
More than a dozen people were named in connection to the murder of activist and outspoken local official Kateryna Gandziuk. Some were named as suspects by the official investigation, while others were named by the family and friends of Gandziuk as somehow connected to the murder. All have denied their involvement except for four suspects implicated in the actual acid attack on her on July 31, 2018.
Dodgy business
During the July rally in Kherson, one of the men defending Manger and Gordeev’s offices was Serhiy Torbin. He is clearly visible, dressed in camouflage, in a Youtube video of the protests.
In late August, three weeks after Gandziuk was attacked, the police arrested Torbin at a bus station in Kherson as a suspect in organizing the assault.
A former police detective, Torbin fought against Russian forces in Donbas as a member of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, an offshoot of the nationalist Right Sector battalion, and was decorated with a state Order for Bravery.
Upon returning from the war, Torbin got involved in disputes over business interests in Kherson Oblast. On May 4, he had a conflict with Tsehelnyk, the head of Kordon, over the Oleshky forest, a Youtube video shows.
Like Tsehelnyk, Torbin has his own veterans organization, Volunteers of God’s Platoon, and heads a private security company called Legion Protection. The owner of Torbin’s security firm, Serhiy Braha, also owns a sawmill.
Nikitenko said illegal logging is an open secret in Oleshky. The arsonists usually place old tires on top of the trees and set them on fire in order start a blaze that consumes branches but preserves the trees’ precious trunks.
He said a group of loggers harvesting acacia trees, which are sold for fuel, may earn some $20,000-$30,000 in a week — an astronomical sum in an oblast of Ukraine where the average monthly salary was only $311 as of December 2018.
With pine wood — which is in high demand in Turkey and is usually transported there through the port of Kherson— the revenues are several times higher, Nikitenko believes.
And where there is big money, there are also big conflicts.
Tsehelnyk said gangsters once tried to kidnap him, burned two of Kordon’s cars, sent him a funeral wreath with the words “rest in peace,” and threw grenades into the yards of his companions. The Kordon leader now always travels with a Winchester rifle to defend himself.
Head of Kherson Oblast Council Vladislav Manger (C) sits at his arraignment hearing at Shevchenkivsky District Court in Kyiv on Feb.12. Manger is suspected of ordering the acid attack that killed Kateryna Gandziuk, an autspoken deputy mayor of Kherson who claimed Manger was corrupt. Six men are under arrest in the case, including one suspected middleman, one organizer, and four perpetrators of the attack. (Volodymyr Petrov)
Acid attack
Early in the morning on July 31, a chilling cry pierced the Tavrychesky district of Kherson, a sleepy neighborhood of identical apartment blocks on the city’s northern edge: a young man had poured a liter of sulfuric acid onto Gandziuk’s back as she was getting in her car to go to work.
As Gandziuk tore off her clothing — they came off with pieces of her skin — the attacker escaped between the buildings. His accomplices picked him up a few blocks away.
The four men who fought in Torbin’s unit in the war in Donbas and who later worked for him in Oleshky acknowledged responsibility in committing this attack. Their testimony in court indicates that, after the attack on Gandziuk, they drove Torbin’s Jeep Cherokee to a house in Oleshky that Torbin had rented for them.
Along the way, the man who poured the acid threw away his cap, shorts, sneakers, and a glass bottle containing the remaining acid. All were later found by the police.
Two of the men admitted in court that, in mid-July, Torbin asked them to attack Gandziuk because she was “corrupt,” “pro-Russian,” and had a “bad attitude toward war veterans.”
They chose acid as their weapon and divided the tasks. They selected one man with the nickname Murakha — a slang version of “Ant” in Ukrainian — to pour the acid on Gandziuk because he was the fastest runner. They were promised from $300 to $500 each for the attack.
Investigators later found that two of the men were likely involved in the forest arson. Their cell phones were detected near the arson’s epicenter at the time of the fire, several Kyiv Post sources said.
A burned pine forest is seen on Dec. 18, 2018 near the city of Oleshky in Kherson Oblast. The fire that resulted from arson in May 2018 caused a corruption scandal that allegedly triggered the murder of the outspoken local official Kateryna Gandziuk. Gandziuk accused local offocials of burning down the forest to profiteer from wood sale. (Khrystyna Lizogub)
Campaign for Katya
Gandziuk was a big fan of soccer. But Manger preferred boxing. Athletic-looking men often attended his rallies.
Soccer fans rallied to Gandziuk’s side after she was attacked. They began unfurling banners with the words “Who ordered the attack on Katia Gandziuk?” during soccer matches across Ukraine.
Gandziuk’s friends raised money and hired a private jet to send her for treatment in Kyiv the day after the attack. She refused to cooperate with the Kherson police because she didn’t trust the local officers, who dismissed the attack on her as “hooliganism.”
Gandziuk’s friends, not the police, recruited an artist to draw a sketch based upon a neighbor’s description of her alleged attacker.
When the police published a grainy surveillance camera video showing the attacker, Gandziuk’s friends found and published a higher-quality video. When the police arrested a suspect on Aug. 3, her friends proved that the man had nothing to do with the attack.
Gandziuk’s friends say deputy chief police investigator Serhiy Kurdilov was a close friend of Torbin.
“Torbin once personally told me that,” said Oleksandr Vlasov, a Kherson businessman and district councilmember who was Gandziuk’s friend and also knew Torbin well.
When his friendship with Torbin became public, Kurdilov was transferred the town of Vysokopillia in Kherson Oblast.
In November, the Security Service of Ukraine, based in Kyiv, took over the investigation from the Kherson police. Gandziuk had wanted that from the start.
Driving force
As Gandziuk suffered from excruciating pain and underwent multiple operations at a Kyiv hospital, her friends took up her case. Public support for Gandziuk grew across the country. Meanwhile, officials in Kherson kept silent.
Gandziuk became a symbol not only of the movement to find her attacker, but also of the Ukrainian authorities’ failure to solve other attacks on anti-corruption activists.
On Sept. 27, several hundred people gathered at the Presidential Administration in Kyiv protesting violence against civic activists. Gandziuk addressed them in a video. With her hair shaved and multiple burns on her head, she said she still looked “better than justice and the rule of law in Ukraine.”
She died on Nov. 4 due to multiple injuries related to the acid attack.
New links revealed
On Nov. 5, the day after Gandziuk’s death, her friends wrote in their Facebook group that Kherson businessman Ihor Pavlovsky was an intermediary between the people who ordered the attack and those who carried it out.
Pavlovsky was an aide to Mykola Palamarchuk, a lawmaker from Poroshenko’s dominant, 135-member bloc in parliament, and a police general who started his career as a traffic cop in Oleshky, the city near the notorious forest.
Following the scandal, Palamarchuk swiftly fired Pavlovsky but also submitted a draft law criminalizing libel in the media.
Torbin, the attack’s alleged organizer, had obvious links to Pavlovsky. He had registered his two organizations at a business center owned by the former parliamentary aide.
A court ruling seen by the Kyiv Post also indicates that Torbin visited Pavlovsky’s house before his arrest together with Valeriy Odintsov, another aide to lawmaker Palamarchuk.
On Nov. 6, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko accused Gandziuk’s friends of hampering the investigation by revealing the name of a possible suspect and even threatened to resign during an emotional speech in parliament.
On Nov. 12, Pavlovsky was arrested by SBU agents in Kherson and transferred to Kyiv, where he and Torbin are now being held.
On Dec. 4, Lutsenko named another suspect: Oleksiy Levin, convicted earlier of several murders in Kherson Oblast. Only in a month after that Levin was put on Ukraine’s wanted list while had left the country back in August.. Levin was an assistant to Mykola Stavytsky, a member of the Kherson Oblast Council. Stavytsky, who is now serving in the Ukrainian military in Donbas, was an adviser to Manger.
On Feb. 7, journalists from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty revealed that, in July, right before the attack on Gandziuk, Manger’s lawyer leased a large recreational complex on Kherson Oblast’s seaside to Levin for less than $20 a month. Manger said he knew nothing about this deal.
Kateryna Gandziuk’s friends Oleksandr Vlasov and Liliya Yakubson show on Dec. 18 the place where she was attacked with acid near her house in late July. (Khrystyna Lizogub)
Political outcome
On Feb. 3, Poroshenko entered the Central Election Commission in Kyiv through a back door to register as a candidate for president.
Poroshenko has not commented on his covert entrance. But a possible reason was the group of activists standing by the front door with a banner reading “I’m sorry, but who killed Kateryna Gandziuk?” They also held banners with the names of Kherson governor Gordeev and deputy governor Ryshchuk crossed out and demanded that Poroshenko sack both officials, who are members of his party.
On Jan. 28, Gandziuk’s father accused Poroshenko of covering up for Gordeev and Ryshchuk. He also accused Tymoshenko of covering for Manger, a member of her party.
“I believe Petro Poroshenko and Yulia Tymoshenko don’t want to campaign with blood on their hands,” he said.
But going against regional barons is difficult for national politicians, who depend on their support.
Public discontent with old-generation politicians is high.
Comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who currently leads national polls thanks to his hit series “Servant of the People,” is attracting the protest vote — those who dislike both Poroshenko and Tymoshenko.
On Feb. 9, Batkivshchyna expelled Manger from the party.
Two days later, Lutsenko claimed that Manger hired Pavlovsky and Levin to attack Gandziuk and paid them at least $5,600. He said his office also has evidence of Ryshchuk’s involvement in illegal logging, but nothing against Gordeev.
Tymoshenko responded, accusing Lutsenko of attacking her party and protecting Poroshenko’s loyalists.
Meanwhile, the illegal logging in Oleshky forest continues.
In late January, Gandziuk’s friend Vlasov, who says his grandfather helped plant the forest, took pictures of the new stumps and says he heard the sound of the chainsaws.
“I didn’t risk going closer. I know these guys have guns,” he said. “They could kill me and bury me there.”
