Yuriy Lutsenko was happy to talk to the Kyiv Post. He says the newspaper helped him improve his English while in prison. Ukraine’s former top cop spent 833 days in jail out of a four-year sentence for abuse of power and misappropriation of state property. The European Court for Human Rights ruled that his conviction amounted to political persecution of the opposition leader, an opinion widely shared in the West and within Ukraine.
He was freed from prison on April 7, courtesy of an extraordinary pardon by President Viktor Yanukovych, after years of Western and domestic pressure to free him.
On April 23, the 50-year-old Lutsenko sat in his wife’s office in Kyiv, joking about the hardest times he spent behind bars and reflecting on the nation’s prospects. He says his time in prison made him “wiser, without political hooliganism.” He read 300 books there, which were his “spiritual escape.”
Above all, Lutsenko wants Ukraine and the European Union to sign a political and trade association agreement in Vilnius, Lithuania in November. It is crucial to Ukraine’s hopes for Western integration and a better life, he said.
“There is no price we can’t pay for the (association agreement) this year,” he says. “And if this price is Lutsenko’s return back to prison, then I agree.”
He had surgery just five days prior to the interview and was scheduled to leave for Poland on April 25 for several months to continue treatment of gastric ulcers and hepatitis, which he says he acquired in prison. He says he still hopes to visit Ukraine during this period and continue conversations with politicians, diplomats and civic leaders that he started once he got out of jail.
Lutsenko was one the leaders of the 2004 Orange Revolution, a popular uprising that led to a fraudulent presidential election being overturned that year, depriving Viktor Yanukovych of the presidency and leading to Viktor Yushchenko’s election on Dec. 26, 2004. Lutsenko was then appointed interior minister and held the job in 2005-2006.
Lutsenko was an unusual top cop, the first civilian in Ukraine’s history. Nicknamed “Yura Terminator,” he featured in a number of fistfights and other scandals. On one occasion, he physically attacked the former mayor of Kyiv, Leonid Chernovetsky. In another, he caused a drunken brawl in the Frankfurt, Germany airport, and would have gone to jail had it not been for his diplomatic immunity.
His allies and foes alike describe him as quick with his tongue and fists. His list of foes includes big names, including first deputy prosecutor general Renat Kuzmin. Lutsenko accuses Kuzmin of fabricating the criminal case against him. Kuzmin refused to comment on these accusations in an earlier interview with the Kyiv Post.
In December 2010, Lutsenko was arrested and later convicted by the criminal justice system he was unable to improve while he served as minister. He regrets his failure now, after getting a good taste of it, first in Lukianivska detention center in Kyiv, and then in Menska colony in Chernihiv Oblast, where convicted police officers serve their terms.
“In the basement of Lukianivska prison there are still oily spots remaining from the blood of people killed there,” Lutsenko said. He says Ukraine’s prisons are still operating by the rules of 1937, the year of the fiercest repressions of the Josef Stalin era.
Lutsenko said he spent 2.5 years in jail in painful introspection and came to the conclusion that the country has no future unless it ditches its Soviet legacy.
“We can’t build a European country on a Soviet foundation. In fact Stalin sits in each of us, and every Ukrainian has to squeeze him out drop by drop. We have to stop our xenophobia, a black-and-white vision of the world, and infighting among Ukrainians,” he said.
He claims he will apply these principles in a new project he calls the Third Republic. It will be a plan of the new country, which he hopes to help shape with intellectuals and civic leaders, and promote through a single oppositional candidate during the 2015 presidential election to unseat Yanukovych.
“I’ve just come out of a small prison into a big one. Every person disloyal to the current authorities may be imprisoned without any reasons,” he said. But he won’t waste time on revenge, because “revenge destroys.”
Lutsenko says he now plans to advise the opposition and enforce it, but does not want to lead it. Volodymyr Fesenko, a political analyst, says Lutsenko is trying to be “the moral leader” of the oppositional forces. But many in this diverse camp believe that Lutsenko has presidential ambitions of his own. He cannot run in elections until his criminal record has been erased, though.
Lutsenko claims that the Constitution allows him to run for president, but he won’t take the opportunity. “I had been robbed of 2.5 years of my life. I want to spend more time with my children and wife,” he said. “I don’t want to participate in this vanity fair.”
In the meantime, Lutsenko wants three top opposition leaders, Arseniy Yatseniyuk of Batkivshchyna, Vitali Klitschko of Ukrainian Alliance for Reform and Oleg Tiahnybok of Svoboda Party to pick a single candidate for president by the end of this year.
Lutsenko says there is not a clear leader among the trio. “One of them is the most decisive, the other one is the smartest, the third one is the most charismatic,” he says, leaving people to guess who is who in his assessment.
He says that the potential pool of presidential candidates should include millionaire Petro Poroshenko and imprisoned ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, his former boss in the government and Ukraine’s political prisoner No 1.
Lutsenko says there are no legal barriers for Yanukovych to pardon Tymoshenko, imprisoned for seven years for abuse of office, whose case is seen by the West as one of the major obstacles for signing of the Association Agreement with Ukraine in November. Her verdict could be also revoked after the European Court of Human Rights makes a decision on her case, he added. The decision is expected on April 30.
Lutsenko calls the European tribunal “the only independent court for Ukraine” and believes its decision will also allow him to legally prove his innocence. “I need this for moral satisfaction and also for future political activity,” he said.
In January, Ukraine paid Lutsenko 15,000 euros of compensation following a European court ruling last year that his arrest was illegal and abused his rights. Lutsenko is confident he will win the two remaining cases in the same court. He is claiming he was deprived of proper medical care in custody, of fair trial and other rights. He is well aware that it can take years to get the rulings.
But his top priority is for Ukraine to secure the Association Agreement with the EU this year. “From jail, I was calling on the European politicians to sign it even if Tymoshenko and Lutsenko remain in prison. And I hope Yulia Volodymyrivna (Tymoshenko) will forgive me if I disclose that she thinks the same,” he says.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected].
