Ever since the 2000 release of the recordings allegedly made by ex-President Leonid Kuchma’s bodyguard Mykola Melnychenko, the lingering question has been whether the Ukrainian leader would ever be properly investigated for his alleged role in the kidnapping and murder of Georgiy Gongdaze.
The answer, almost 13 years on, appears to be no.
The recordings clearly show the president was at least aware of what happened to Gongadze. Kuchma and other officials on the recordings have denied their authenticity and involvement in any crimes.
But Kuchma on the recordings allegedly told Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko to “Take (Gongadze) to the Chechens.” It was one of several exchanges allegedly recorded in which a disgusted Kuchma allegedly pressed his subordinates to get rid of Gongadze.
Instead of investigating the allegations, police and prosecutors did their utmost to ignore the recordings and Kuchma’s possible involvement, coming up with a series of bizarre explanations instead. At one point in 2001, Prosecutor General Mykhaylo Potebenko suggested that Gongadze was still alive, even after the journalist’s body was found in the forest outside Kyiv.
On another occasion that same year, the police tried to blame Gongadze’s death on gangsters named Cyclopes and Sailor Boy who had died.
The March 2005 death of Kravchenko – a close ally of Kuchma – didn’t advance the case. Kravchenko died from two gunshot wounds to the head in a death suspiciously ruled by authorities as a suicide.
Things turned upside down in March 2011 when Deputy Prosecutor General Renat Kuzmin charged Kuchma with abuse of authority causing grave consequences, specifically the kidnapping and murder of Gongadze. According to the criminal case, the charges were based on Melnychenko’s recordings and testimony, as well as testimony by former police general Oleksiy Pukach, who on Jan. 29 was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
In response, Kuchma, the father-in-law of billionaire Viktor Pinchuk, launched a blockbuster defense. He hired a top U.S. lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, who in 1995 helped acquit football star O.J. Simpson of the murder of his ex-wife in one of the most widely covered criminal cases in recent American history. In addition, a number of major international public relations agencies were recruited to work on the ex-president’s image.
The line that Dershowitz took was as straightforward as it gets. He claimed that Melnychenko’s recordings couldn’t be authenticated, while the case against his client itself was politically motivated. “In Ukraine, using these allegations the government is trying to prove that it’s fair, that they went to not only go after the former prime minister, but after Kuchma as well,” Dershowitz told the Kyiv Post in April 2011.
Dershowitz’s job of defending Kuchma soon got much easier.
In October 2011, Ukraine’s Constitutional Court (the same institution that allowed Kuchma to run for president three consecutive times, an opportunity he didn’t dare use) ruled that no charge can be based on evidence collected by a person not authorized to collect such evidence. In other words, Melnychenko wasn’t authoritized to record conversations in Kuchma’s office. Amazingly, the court made this ruling at the request of the Security Service of Ukraine, the same law enforcement agency that in 2009 found and arrested Pukach, in what seemed to be a breakthrough in the Gongadze case.
The decision of Ukraine’s top court made the job of Halyna Suprun, a judge at Kyiv’s Pechersk District Court, an institution that symbolizes what’s wrong with the country’s judiciary, a mere formality.
On Dec. 14, 2011 Suprun declared the opening of a criminal case against Kuchma “unlawful,” citing the Constitutional Court ruling. Needless to say her decision was upheld, first by the Appellate Court and then by the Higher Criminal and Administrative Court.
Meanwhile, Gongadze’s widow Myroslava is appealing the decision to close the case against Kuchma. The odds are high that Dershowitz’s prediction, made in 2011, will turn out to be prophetic.
He said that law enforcement will never solve the Gongadze and Kuchma case.
Instead, he said, the case “will be solved by journalists and scholars.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Vlad Lavrov can be reached at [email protected].
