Kyiv patrol police officers have detained Serhiy Kalynovsky, a former stepson of Ukraine’s gas oligarch Dmytro Firtash, overnight on Sept. 29 on suspicion of violating traffic regulations.
Kalynovsky was driving his Porsche Cayenne SUV
without a license and was stopped in the left bank district of Darnytsia around
3 a.m. He didn’t have any documents for the car and refused to take a drug
test. The man tried to escape, but then asked police to call an ambulance since
he “felt bad,” police reported.
Police went to the hospital with Kalynovsky
while other officers identified him and took him to the Kyiv Interior Ministry.
Investigators are preparing a request for a court to arrest Kalynovsky and to
hold him in pre-trial detention without bail.
Kalynovsky’s family wasn’t available for
comment.
It’s not the first car accident for
30-year-old Kalynovsky. Kalynovsky has been on the Interpol wanted list since
2007 for trying to escape the
country allegedly after his reckless driving caused the death of two people in
Kyiv.
Volodymyr Kulikovsky, a warrant officer in the
Interior Ministry, was killed on the spot after a BMW allegedly driven by then
21-year-old Kalynovsky hit his car parked on Taras Shevchenko Boulevard in the
early hours of May 30, 2007.
“Thank God that I lived to this day,”
Kulikovsky’s mother was quoted as saying
by Znaj news website when she found out the news about Kalynovsky. “Now I want
him to give an apartment to my daughter-in-law as they promised, but never
actually did. And then go to jail.”
A 25-year-old female passenger in Kalynovsky’s
car died a few days later in hospital.
Kalynovsky tried to flee the country, but was
stopped at Kyiv’s Zhulyany Airport while trying to board a charter flight to
Israel. According to lawmaker and a former Ukrainska Pravda journalist Mustafa
Nayem, the police even didn’t question Kalynovsky then.
Kalynovsky is the biological son of Maryna
Firtash and Ukrainian businessman Zinovy Kalynovsky. She married to Dmytro
Firtash, a shareholder in RosUkrEnergo gas company, and one the closest
oligarchs to former President Viktor Yanukovych.
The couple ended their relationship in 2005.
Kalynovsky began appearing publicly in Kyiv
again in 2013, posting photographs to his social network page.
Anton Gerashchenko, an aide to Interior
Minister Arsen Avakov, said in his Facebook post that someone should
investigate Kalynovsky’s background and how he ” managed to avoid
investigation and confinement for the last eight years and who helped him in
this.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Olena Goncharova can be reached at [email protected].
