Ukraine’s counter-intelligence may be implicated in the murder of journalist Pavlo Sheremet, President Volodymyr Zelensky said at a news conference on May 20.
“There is a likelihood that certain people linked to counter-intelligence could have been implicated (in the murder) during the previous presidency,” Zelensky said.
The counter-intelligence unit is part of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), which did not respond to requests for comment.
Belarusian-born Sheremet was blown up in his car in central Kyiv on July 20, 2016. The case has been investigated by Interior Minister Arsen Avakov‘s police force.
Andriy Antonenko, Yulia Kuzmenko and Yana Dugar were arrested as suspects in the Sheremet case in December 2019.
Zelensky took part in a joint news conference with Avakov and then Prosecutor General Ruslan Riaboshapka in December 2019, when they claimed that the trio were murderers of Sheremet. They were then accused of blatantly violating the presumption of innocence and political interference in a criminal case.
Critics of the investigation see the evidence against the official suspects as very weak, and all three have now been released from jail. The main alleged proof against the suspects is gait analysis, which cannot be used as primary evidence, according to forensic science guidelines.
Other statements
Zelensky also said that he had been exchanging messages with Dugar.
“I’m thinking of this a lot and studying a lot of information,” he said. “This correspondence (with Dugar) is not accidental, and if I were 100% sure that this girl had something to do (with the murder), I would not exchange messages with her.”
“I do care if these people were unlawfully tried or imprisoned,” he said. “There is no 100% evidence that they are guilty, and there is no 100% evidence that they are not guilty… If they were tried unlawfully, I will have a serious talk with (Avakov) about whether he can remain (on his job) in this situation. No, he can’t. And he knows it.”
Zelensky’s words about Avakov’s possible dismissal now appear to ring hollow since he has stubbornly resisted firing the minister ever since 2019 despite numerous corruption scandals around him and the failure of police reform.
Previously Zelensky claimed Avakov would be held responsible if he failed to resolve the Sheremet case. But even now – when all suspects have been released from jail and no strong evidence has been presented against them in court – Zelensky is not dismissing the minister.
SBU involvement?
Interior Ministry and police officials have long hinted that the SBU might have something to do with Sheremet’s murder. But, since the police have not charged a single SBU official in the case so far, critics dismissed this as a public relations campaign and part of a competition among law enforcement agencies.
One possible hint at the SBU’s alleged role is that the charges against the suspects were updated in 2020 to include the phrase that “the organizers were acquainted with the methods of law enforcement agencies.”
Avakov acknowledged in 2019 that video footage from four cameras closest to the crime scene had disappeared. The footage was being collected by Avakov’s police and the SBU, prompting suspicions that either of them could have destroyed it.
The Slidstvo.info investigative program offered another possible sign of a cover-up. It reported in 2017 that Igor Ustimenko, a former SBU employee, had been identified as being present near the site of the murder before it occurred. Ustimenko has denied involvement.
Meanwhile, in March 2016 unknown people sent to Sheremet’s common-law wife Olena Prytula, chief editor of newspaper Ukrainska Pravda, an envelope with investigators’ reports on Ukrainska Pravda journalists’ wiretapped conversations. Sevgil Musayeva, chief editor of Ukrainska Pravda, told the Kyiv Post that, based on her sources, these reports were produced by the SBU department for protection of the state.
From the fall of 2015 until the spring of 2016, Ukrainska Pravda journalists, including Sheremet, also said that they were being surveilled by the authorities.
Saken Aimurzayev, former chief editor of Vesti Radio, told the Kyiv Post that he and Sheremet suspected both the SBU and the police of conducting this surveillance. Aimurzayev worked with Sheremet at Radio Vesti and lived in the same house with him.
Other evidence?
In February 2020, Vasylisa Mazurchuk, a former spokesperson for the Dnipro 1 and Donbas battalions and a former wife of an SBU officer, published screenshots of what she says is her correspondence with Interior Ministry Spokesman Artem Shevchenko, who alleges the SBU’s involvement in the murder. Shevchenko declined to comment.
“Your friends from the SBU fucked up and got the guys involved in the murder and gave it to us for investigation — what the hell?” Shevchenko allegedly wrote. “They should have investigated their stuff on their own. But instead they made cops suffer and get slammed by journalists for the Sheremet case.”
Ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s former deputy chief of staff Andriy Portnov also published an alleged audio recording in January 2020 of a potentially related phone call.
In the audio, a person whom Portnov identifies as SBU officer Andriy Omelchenko instructs a person identified as Vladyslav Gryshchenko on how to testify in the Sheremet case and mentions that Gryshchenko has cooperated with counter-intelligence officers. Gryshenko has been investigated in the Sheremet case but has not been officially charged.
“You’ve got to find the intelligence officers who worked with you,” Omelchenko said. “They instructed you and put technical equipment on you.”
An Interior Ministry source told the Kyiv Post that the three official suspects allegedly have links to 15 SBU officers. All three deny their guilt, as well as any connection to security services.
“I believe (Sheremet’s murder) could have been carried out by the secret services of the aggressor country (Russia) through their agents here in Ukraine,” Deputy Interior Minister Anton Gerashchenko told the Kyiv Post in a reference to the SBU.”
Volodymyr Boiko, a journalist who writes about law enforcement, has long accused the fifth unit of the SBU counterintelligence department of complicity in Sheremet’s murder. He has cited extensive evidence and testimony for the unit’s alleged crimes but provided no direct links to the Sheremet case.
Belarusian version
There is, however, another version that has not been properly investigated by the police, according to law enforcement sources interviewed by the Kyiv Post.
In January EUobserver, a Brussels-based English-language publication, and the Belarusian People’s Tribunal, an opposition group run by exiled Belarusian police officer Igor Makar, published a recording of alleged Belarusian KGB officials discussing murdering Sheremet. The recording was made in 2012, four years before he was killed in Kyiv.
The suspects’ defense attorneys argued that the new Belarusian evidence refutes the official version since there is no evidence of any links between their clients and Belarus.
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 Ukraine’s 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.
Azov is part of Avakov’s Interior Ministry, and several of its leaders have secured top ministry jobs.
Korotkikh has denied having anything to do with Sheremet’s murder and has called him a friend of his.
