You're reading: One year after Euromaidan deaths, not a single official serving prison time

Sat in a steel cage at the back of the police van, Vladyslav Tsilytskiy shivered. He was too faint from blood loss and blows to the head to care much about the police officer threatening to throw him in the freezing river. He felt the night cold creeping into his bones as the temperature dropped below minus 10 degrees Celsius.

Opposite him, another young man nursed a broken arm, crying out in agony. Caught and beaten by Ukraine’s infamous Berkut riot police officers during the EuroMaidan Revolution, for three hours they listened to threats in the unheated van and wondered what would happen next.

Tsilytskiy, an IT programmer then aged 23, was one of scores of protesters injured and abused during the three months of demonstrations that led President Victor Yanukovych to flee on Feb. 21.

He was, however, one of the relatively lucky ones — more than 100 protesters were killed. One year later, on the anniversary of the Feb. 18-20 shootings of the protesters known as the Heavenly Hundred, none of their attackers has yet been brought to justice.

“We were beaten with batons, and afterwards they punched me until I lost consciousness,” Tsilytskiy recalls. He was arrested on the night of Jan. 30 as protesters clashed with police.

“Grenades were flying from the police side, rocks from both sides. I climbed up on the colonnade (of Dynamo Kyiv Stadium) to escape. The Berkut threw another guy off the colonnade, breaking his arm, then dragged us along the ground to the van. After three hours, they finally decided to take us to a doctor so that we wouldn’t fade away.”

Tsilytskiy and about a dozen other demonstrators were held in a heavily guarded prison hospital for 23 days while they went through a series of court hearings that made a mockery of Ukraine’s justice system.

“They held the first hearing without me, thinking everything is okay, we can solve this case without him. I was charged with the most serious offenses – organizing protests with weapons and trying to kill, and faced between 8 and 15 years in prison.”

But after power shifted hands, the court decision was just as hastily reversed and he was freed. Following his release, he complained about his treatment and saw it as a test of the new democracy.

Since then, human rights watchdog Amnesty International has been following the complaints of Tsilytskiy and 10 other alleged victims of police abuse closely. Shockingly, in the year since their ordeal, only four have even been interviewed as victims. Amnesty says none has been informed about any progress in their cases.

The organization is deeply critical of Ukraine’s apparent lack of interest in securing justice.

“The deplorable lack of progress in delivering justice for those killed, injured and tortured exposes once again the deep failings of the Ukrainian criminal justice system,” said John Dalhuisen, Amnesty International’s Director for Europe and Central Asia. “The failure to address the widespread abuses during the EuroMaydan protests risks entrenching a long-standing culture of impunity for police officers..”

Prosecutor General Vitaliy Yarema was replaced earlier this month over his failure in making progress in investigating high-profile crimes. That failure is now forcing the European Union to drop sanctions against at least four of the 22 regime officials it had targeted, according to the Wall Street Journal.

But since the appointment of his successor, Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor’s office has focused more on reshuffling his deputies and settling the ruling coalition’s political scores than justice for ordinary Ukrainians. Shokin has sought four high-profile arrests – for three judges involved in the show trials of coalition members Yulia Tymoshenko, the ex-prime minister, Yuriy Lutsenko, the former interior minister, and Oleksandr Yefremov, a former leader of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions.

But police officers who beat Tsilytskiy and others have not been punished.

“I’ve submitted all the necessary documents, even video, to the prosecutor, but they’re in no hurry to find out who in the Berkut was beating me,” Tsilytskiy told the Kyiv Post.

The International Federation for Human Rights found a similar lack of dynamism when they held a series of meetings with the government in January.

According to Delphine Carlens of the federation’s international justice desk, prosecutors argued that it was difficult to gather evidence against former leaders who had left the country and that the Russian-backed war in eastern Ukraine rendered much of the evidence unattainable.

But Amnesty says there is already a wealth of evidence available, including video evidence, implicating individual police officers in the crimes.

“In some videos, particularly of police beating people outside of Bankova, officers have even removed their helmets and should be identifiable,” said Tetyana Mazur, director of Amnesty International Ukraine.

In November 2014, Security Service of Ukraine head Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, said that 16 former Berkut officers and five senior officials of the security service, known as the SBU, had been arrested in connection with the killings of protesters in Kyiv.

But only three of those arrested were remanded in custody. One of the three, Berkut commander Dmytro Sadovnyk, was released on bail and disappeared soon afterwards. The case against the other two has been submitted to the courts for trial.

According to Amnesty, only one case has resulted in a conviction, with two low-ranking officers both given suspended sentences of three and two years for “exceeding authority or official powers.”

“Hundreds suffered at the hands of police during the EuroMaidan crackdowns, yet not a single officer is serving a prison sentence for those crimes,” said Mazur. “Even under the new government, the prosecutor’s office has shown itself not fit for the purpose of investigating crimes by its law-enforcement colleagues. It’s well past time for the creation of an independent body dedicated to investigating allegations against law-enforcement.”

Kyiv Post news editor Maxim Tucker can be reached at [email protected] or via Twitter: @MaxRTucker