You're reading: Two persons missing, but possibly alive and not involved in EuroMaidan

A teenager who ran away from home and a 54-year-old man remain the only persons on a list of missing EuroMaidan activists circulated after a violent police crackdown on Nov. 30 on Kyiv's Independence Square. However, there are indications that the two are very much alive and, moreover, that they were not active participants in EuroMaidan. 

The list
contained the names of more than 30 people, but all but two of them have been
found alive since then.

Suspicions
quickly surfaced that the missing persons fell victim to violence, possibly by
police, but those reports are not confirmed and may be unfounded.

In response
to member of parliament Hennadiy Moskal’s appeal for information about the
missing people, the General Prosecutor’s Office recently said that all but
three have been located. Officials identified the remaining three missing
persons as Inna Grygoryan, Oleh Brovko and Anatoliy Shinkaruk.

However,
EuroMaidan activist Zoryana Khrystyna confirmed that Grygoryan, allegedly a
missing student from Lviv, turned out to be a fake report. Both police and
activists looked for a person with such name in Lviv Oblast and didn’t find any
traces of her existence. There are also no accounts with such name in popular
social networks, as Kyiv Post found.

Brovko, a
15-year-old student in Uman, was supposed to come home to Sushkivka village in
Cherkasy Oblast on Nov. 20, but never showed up. But there are indications he
is very much alive. His mother, Larysa Brovko, reported to police and found out
that her son was using his credit card at an ATM in Khreshchatyk Street in
Kyiv. She came to Kyiv several times to look for her son and spread leaflets
with his photos.

On Jan. 7,
police sent her a video from an ATM security camera footage in Kyiv showing her
son using his card. The woman recognized the boy and is going to go to Kyiv
again soon to look for him.

“I suppose
he is hiding because he found out that police was looking for him and got
scared. Maybe he doesn’t know that police only wants him because of our report
(that he is missing),” told the woman over the phone. The boy, according
to his mother, is very quite and secretive, and had problems with his teacher
and classmates in school. She doesn’t think he was involved in the EuroMaidan
demonstrations, she said.

The only
other unaccounted for person, Shinkaruk, 54, left his home in Vinnytsia on June
1, 2013 and never came back. He left his monthly salary and his identification
documents at home. There are also indications he may be alive.

His wife and son looked for him everywhere for the past months, but never heard
of him until they spotted him in TV footage showing rally at Maidan
Nezalezhnosti on Nov. 24. The missing man was standing in the crowd, looking
thinner than he had been, and holding a flag. The family rushed to Kyiv, but
found no trace of the man.

Shinkaruk’s
wife, Violetta, a nurse in Vinnytsia, says her husband has always been a
stay-at-home person, who hardly ever went anywhere accept for the local heating
station where he worked and nearby village where his relatives lived.

“I have a
thousand versions. My guess is that something like a stroke happened to him
that day when he left home. It was a hot day and he had high blood pressure,”
the woman says. “He is a big man, and I guess if people saw him lying on the
ground they would just think he was drunk and pass by. And then maybe something
happened to his memory and he is now wandering somewhere.”

Violetta says police was doing very little to find her husband at first. But
the search really kicked out when she spotted him in Euromaidan footage.
According to the woman, the local investigator had to report to the Interior
Ministry about the case, because the man’s name appeared in the list of people
missing at EuroMaidan.

The woman’s
guess is that her husband was brought to the rally among some hired protesters,
but she has no idea where the people could be brought from. She says Shinkaruk
looked sane on the video, just thinner than usual, “like 15 years ago.” The
couple would have celebrated their silver wedding anniversary this February.

Violetta
doesn’t think her husband could go to EuroMaidan consiously as a protester,
although she says he “did like to follow political news.”

Kyiv Post
lifestyle editor Olga Rudenko can be reached at [email protected]