Two years after the killings of more than 100 protesters during the EuroMaidan Revolution, murders in which fugitive ex-President Viktor Yanukovych and his top aides are suspects, the investigation is about to come to an abrupt halt.
The reason is that
the legal authority of prosecutors to investigate the case is expiring as Ukraine
shifts legal investigative duties to a State Investigations Bureau that has yet
to be created.
Who is to blame for
this fiasco? Verkhovna Rada lawmakers didn’t pass legislation allowing the
Prosecutor General’s Office to continue the investigations to their conclusion.
Public anger, already
intense because of unpunished corruption two years after the revolution, is
likely to rise with such legalistic excuses being made for making no progress
in punishing the murders or trying the suspects in absentia.
Besides Yanukovych,
other suspected organizers include Interior Minister Vitaly Zakharchenko, Yanukovych’s
chief of staff Andriy Klyuyev, ex-Security Service head Oleksandr Yakymenko,
ex-Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka and Stanislav Shulyak, former head of Interior Ministry
troops.
Serhiy Horbatiuk,
head of the department in charge of EuroMaidan investigations at the Prosecutor
General’s Office, said on Feb. 19 that parliament will not reconvene until March 15 to
consider amendments to let prosecutors keep investigating. That means the EuroMaidan investigations will stop on March 1, he said.
At a Feb. 18 news
conference, Horbatiuk was aiming to prove that a lot of progress has been made
in the investigations, but critics say the results are miniscule.
Horbatiuk blamed
courts for some of the failures in the EuroMaidan investigations, arguing that
it’s taking them too long to consider the cases and sometimes cases are sent
back to prosecutors on dubious grounds.
The overall result so
far of the EuroMaidan cases nationwide is that 26 people have been sentenced by
courts for crimes against EuroMaidan protesters, he boasted.
Though the figure
appears to be big, in reality the achievements are not convincing.
Horbatiuk was talking
about EuroMaidan investigations in the whole of Ukraine, and the number for
those punished for crimes during the Kyiv protests is smaller.
Out of the 26
sentences, 21 are just small “administrative penalties,” including minor fines,
Horbatiuk told the Kyiv Post.
Only five of the
suspects have been sentenced to prison terms, he said. These include
pro-government thugs, or “titushki,” who were found guilty of assaulting
protesters in Kharkiv, as well as two “titushki” who beat EuroMaidan activist
Tetiana Chornovol in Kyiv.
The pro-government
thugs who assaulted Chornovol have already served their terms and been
released.
Horbatiuk also said
that 9,500 investigative actions had been carried out, 6,000 witnesses had been
questioned, 126 indictments against 162 people had been taken to court, 276
people had been declared suspects, and 43 of them are top officials.
Seven prosecutors, 11
judges and 91 law enforcement officers are waiting for court decisions in their
cases, he said.
In the most
high-profile EuroMaidan case, the killing of over 100 protesters in Kyiv in February 2014, the results are also meager.
In February 2015
prosecutors sent to court criminal cases against two Berkut riot police
officers accused of killing demonstrators.
A year later – on
Feb. 6, 2016 – prosecutors also submitted indictments against a Berkut squad
commander and two other officers.
“They are suspected of
a terrorist attack, killing 48 activists and an attempted homicide of 80
protesters,” Horbatiuk said.
Yet there is not a
single conviction in the murder cases so far.
Horbatiuk also said that notices of
suspicion had been issued for “six top government and law enforcement officials
who organized the shooting of activists on Institutska Street in Kyiv on Feb.
20, 2014,” including Yanukovych.
But none of the cases
against the suspected organizers has been sent to court.
Activists and lawyers
are not optimistic about the results of prosecutors’ work.
Roman Maselko, a
lawyer for the AutoMaidan car-based protest group, told the Kyiv Post that “the
real results of the EuroMaidan killings investigation are (convictions against)
five ‘titushki’
from Kharkiv two of whom were jailed for four years on charges of attempted
homicide, and one of them was fined Hr 40,000.”
“The cases of three
more ‘titushki’ are still in court,” Maselko said.
Maselko also said
that five police officers had been found not guilty of persecuting AutoMaidan
activists.
“Five Kyiv Berkut
officers of the so-called Black Squad are on trial,” he said. “The trial is
under way but the investigation has strong proof that 48 activists were killed
and 80 were wounded by the weapons issued in (the suspects’) names. Investigators launched two examinations to
prove that. So now we are waiting for (riot police officers) Pavlo Abroskin,
Mykola Zinchenko, Olexandr Marinchenko, Serhiy Tempura and Oleh Yanyshevsky to
face justice,” he added.
The first examination
didn’t yield any results, which is strange, according to Maselko. The activist
suspects this is a result of sabotage by the Prosecutor General’s Office.
A special department to examine facts of sabotage of the
EuroMaidan investigations was created at the Prosecutor General’s Office in
2015.
“After its creation, the investigations have made some progress,”
Maselko said. “The department has many questions for prosecutorial staff and
has called (some people) for questioning.”
There are three people
that the department’s investigators would like to speak the most: Oleh
Mahnytskiy, who was acting prosecutor general in February to June 2014; Vitaly
Yarema, who succeeded him and was fired in February 2015, and Viktor Shokin,
who submitted his resignation as prosecutor general earlier this week,
according to Maselko.
Kyiv Post staff
writer Veronika Melkozerova can be reached at [email protected] and Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected]
