Adopting President Viktor Yanukovych’s gross misunderstanding of how jurisprudence should work, we might say: “Ex-President Leonid Kuchma and Verkhovna Rada Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn – prove that you didn’t order journalist Georgiy Gongadze’s murder in 2000.”
Of course, Kuchma and Lytvyn – just like all people – are entitled to the presumption of innocence. But they also deserve to be charged and tried for ordering the Sept. 16, 2000, murder of the journalist who had gotten on their nerves for his journalism on the Ukrainska Pravda website. But this week, it appears that Ukraine’s untrustworthy courts and prosecutors have reactivated the cover-up.
The recordings of ex-Kuchma presidential guard Mykola Melnychenko, which allegedly show that both men wanted to get rid of Gongadze, and other evidence are enough to bring criminal charges against Kuchma and Lytvyn, in our view.
But there’s so much more. After former Interior Ministry Gen. Oleksiy Pukach was finally arrested in July 2009 as a suspect, he reportedly gave testimony implicating his former boss, Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko (killed by two gunshot wounds to the head on March 4, 2005), Lytvyn and Kuchma.
On Dec. 17, Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka – a close Yanukovych ally – appeared to be headed down the path of justice with this statement: “The pre-trial investigation has established that, on the night of Sept. 16, 2000, Oleksiy Pukach under instructions from Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko and other officials, and in preliminary agreement with a group of persons, committed the premeditated murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze, because the victim was fulfilling public and journalistic duties.”
This week, troublesome reports surfaced that the court and prosecutor were no longer pursuing whether Pukach was acting on orders and that Pukach might have changed his testimony and retracted statements implicating higher officials. The next day, the prosecutor’s spokesman cautioned against jumping to conclusions, making the disclosures look like a trial balloon.
Any court ruling that Pukach acted alone defies logic and evidence and will be greeted as more injustice in a case that has seen so much of it.
