Crime is up in Ukraine, even subtracting the 7 percent of the nation now under Russian occupation.
Nationally, 271,553 criminal offenses were registered by the Prosecutor General’s Office in January-May, almost 1.7 percent more than the same period last year. Many crimes, of course, go unreported because the public doesn’t trust the police.
Police witnessed considerable growth in armed robberies, with 70 percent of those crimes being committed with illegal weapons brought in from the war-torn east, according to Artem Shevchenko, spokesman for the Interior Ministry.
Sociologist Iryna Bekeshkina, head of the Democratic Initiatives Foundation, a Kyiv-based policy center, said that the increased violence is linked with the Russian-separatist war in Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts.
“The tolerance for violence has increased,” she told the Kyiv Post. “People see violence on television every day. Every day people are killed, and this has already become a statistical fact. Dead people have become statistics.”
At least 6,454 people have been killed and 16,146 wounded since mid-April 2014, when the Moscow-engineered invasion of the Donbas began.
However, Ukrainian defense lawyer Igor Fomin, who represented former Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko in his trial under Viktor Yanukovych’s presidency, said statistics understate the extent of the problem.
He said that only about 10 percent of registered cases make it to courts. Police, meanwhile, sometimes fail to register criminal complaints because they are inundated and want to avoid the extra workload.
That’s what almost happened to Ukrainian activist Valentyna Varava and her husband, who was beaten and robbed in Kyiv on April 19. Luckily, the only valuables he had with him were Hr 200, and an old monochrome cellphone, which his assailants left behind. According to Varava, the attackers broke her husband’s skull. The couple reported the crime to the police, but the report didn’t mention the husband’s damaged skull.
“They wanted to classify the act as a simple robbery of Hr 200. But anyway, in the end, no one did anything,” she said.
Other Kyiv victims, all of burglaries, with whom the Kyiv Post spoke said their cases haven’t been investigated. “The police took a report, and we haven’t seen them since,” said Anna Panasiuk, whose apartment was robbed early this year.
A burglar who broke into the apartment of Olga Tkachenko last October was jailed for six years. But her husband, Dmytro Tkachenko, caught him, chased him through the apartment window and handed him over to the police.
Shevchenko, the Interior Ministry spokesman, said “we are doing everything possible to reduce crime. We register every report, and we respond to every report.”
According to data provided by the prosecutor’s office, there was a slight decrease in burglary this year over the same period in 2014.
More crimes happen in summer. Citizens should install metal doors and burglar alarms. To avoid becoming a victim of street violence, the Interior Ministry advises not walking alone late at night, to walk in lit areas, to avoid drinking excessively and to conceal money and valuables.
Kyiv Post staff writer Alyona Zhuk can be reached at [email protected].
