In a bid to convince the West that ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko deserves to be in prison, Ukrainian prosecutors have stepped up a PR campaign to tie her to the 1996 murder of businessman-lawmaker Yevhen Shcherban.
So far, loud allegations are outpacing any formal criminal charges.
A senior prosecutor traveled to London in March to conduct interviews with journalists in which he accused her of paying for the assassination of Shcherban, gunned down with his wife on a Donetsk airport runway on Nov. 4, 1996.
Shcherban’s son, Ruslan, followed up at a press conference in Kyiv on April 4 to say he is sure the imprisoned opposition leader is involved in his father’s murder.
Convicted last autumn to seven years in prison on abuse-of-office charges that are widely seen to be politically motivated, Tymoshenko denies any connection with the murder.
No charges have been filed against Tymoshenko. Prosecutors on April 5 said they had assigned her the status of witness in the case.
The opposition leader’s supporters call the allegations part of the same propaganda campaign to sideline her from politics as President Viktor Yanukovych’s top rival.
The campaign is seen by many as an attempt to persuade the U.S. and the European Union that she is a serious criminal. The West has scaled back relations with Kyiv since Tymoshenko’s conviction in October. Both have expressed concern that the trials against her and other opposition leaders are politically motivated.
Ruslan Shcherban
Since Tymoshenko’s jailing, however, investigators have opened a number of new probes into alleged financial crimes, all of which Tymoshenko denies.
The murder claim, first made last year by Deputy Prosecutor General Rinat Kuzmin, is the most sensational.
“What is your view, in the West, of political persecution? Does this mean that the leader of the opposition can’t be prosecuted, even for murder? That such people are above the law? The view of the prosecutor’s office is that nobody is above the law,” Kuzmin told the Financial Times in an interview published April 1.
Kuzmin alleged that bank accounts controlled by Tymoshenko and former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, her former political ally and alleged business partner, paid killers for the murder of Shcherban.
According to Ukrainiska Pravda news website, prosecutors used Burson-Marsteller, an American PR firm, to organize Kuzmin’s interviews with foreign media where he threw murder accusations against Tymoshenko.
The newest information gathered in the case by prosecutors includes the testimony of Ruslan Shcherban and alleged testimony provided by Petro Kiritchenko, a former associate of Lazarenko.
The latter is serving time in a U.S. prison until November on money laundering and fraud charges.
Oleksandr Turchynov, deputy head of Tymoshenko’s Fatherland party, said Ruslan Shcherban’s new accusations were inconsistent with his earlier testimony and could have been given under pressure from prosecutors and his Party of Regions colleagues.
Ruslan Shcherban told reporters that Tymoshenko “should be questioned in this matter.”
“I have facts, which I will pass on to the investigators,” he said without elaborating. Yet some insiders, including Western diplomats, questioned the credibility of the new investigations against Tymoshenko as well as newly obtained testimony.
For one, the younger Shcherban, 35, is a pro-presidential regional lawmaker. Secondly, Kiritchenko’s wife told the Kyiv Post in March that she was jailed by Ukrainian authorities last year for several months to pressure her husband into testifying.
Lazarenko has denied involvement in the murder. Petro Kiritchenko has not commented on his possible role.
Kyiv Post staff writer Yuriy Onyshkiv can be reached at [email protected].
