Back in the summer of 2011, Volodymyr Nykonenko and his friend Igor Gannenko thought it would be funny to spray a red dot on the image of a man’s forehead painted on a wall in the northern city of Sumy. They aren’t laughing now.
On Jan. 14, a court sentenced Gannenko to one year and eight months in prison and Nykonenko to one year in a labor camp.
The friends say the harsh punishment is due to the image’s strong resemblance to President Viktor Yanukovych’s face.
“I couldn’t believe we received such a verdict,” Nykonenko told the Kyiv Post. “Now I can’t call our country anything else than a police state.”
Nykonenko, 24, claimed he had no desire to intimidate or offend anybody, and neither Sumy’s residents nor authorities complained about the graffiti. But the court saw things differently, claiming the two young men committed hooliganism and offended the city’s residents.
“Actions by Gannenko and Nykonenko were marked by extraordinary cynicism, which was expressed in putting up indecent images on buildings and construction works of Sumy,” the court’s ruling said.
Yevgen Zakharov, head of the Kharkiv Human Rights Group, said no crime was committed. “There was no hooliganism. The most they could be charged with is an administrative violation and no more,” he said, stressing that in any democratic state, offending the country’s leader would not elicit such a response.
However, Olena Bondarenko, a lawmaker of the pro-presidential Party of Regions, believes the graffiti represented a challenge to the institution of the presidency, presenting society with a very harmful message
“On purpose or not, they led society to the idea that our president could be killed, that an attempt to assassinate him could be made,” Bondarenko said. “This is not as innocent as many, who defend these guys, believe.”
But Zakharov said that Yanukovych was never mentioned during the court hearings. “The police detective, prosecutor and judge were scared to talk about him, though all understood that the drawn person resembled the president,” he said.
While the court made no mention of political motives, many Ukrainians saw things differently and voiced their support for the Sumy graffitists. About 100 people picketed the Sumy court on Jan. 19, claiming the two young men were sentenced illegally. On Jan. 21, a rally in support of the two friends was held in Kyiv, where they were hailed victims of political persecution on par with jailed ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and former Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko. Another rally took place in Kyiv on Feb. 14, which riot police dispersed.
Soon graffiti images that resembled Yanukovych started appearing in many Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, Lviv, Mykolayiv and Kryvyi Rih.
Nykonenko said he was pleased to see such support as “nobody should be persecuted for his beliefs.” But he fears that despite all the protests, the appeals court, whose hearing is scheduled for late February, will not lighten the sentence.
Zakharov believes Nykonenko has chances to seek justice in the European Court of Human Rights if Ukrainian courts leave his verdict unchanged.
Some point to the case as the latest event in a worrying trend. Indeed, the European court is currently examining a similar complaint from Galyna Shvydka, a Kyiv pensioner, who cut the name of Yanukovych out from a wreath laid to the monument of Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko on the country’s Independence Day on Sept. 24 in 2011. The woman, who claims it was her way of protesting against the president’s policies, was sentenced to 10 days behind bars for “petty hooliganism.” Yanukovych later said this punishment was just.
An earlier attempt to protect the president’s dignity took place in January 2012, when the police opened four criminal cases for disfiguring billboards featuring Yanukovych’s face. The damaged billboards were found in the capital and the Volyn, Zaporizhzhia, Rivne and Lviv oblasts. Among those arrested was a 73-year-old man, who said this was his way of expressing discontent about Yanukovych, whom he did not consider a legitimate ruler.
The run-up to last year’s October parliamentary elections had a similar episode, when a photo depicting a cat with an elderly woman who says: “I found out my grandson voted for the Party of Regions, so I rewrote (my will) to bequeath my house to the cat,” gained nationwide popularity.
Its author, Maksym Holosnyi, a local village mayor, was sentenced in March 2012 for taking part in a 2005 fight. The defendant kept repeating the charges against him were political, and on Feb. 1, the High Administrative Court acquitted him.
Oleg Pokalchuk, a social psychologist, says that the nation is a witnessing a return of sorts to Soviet times, when any action against the authorities immediately gains popularity. “The stronger an action is, the stronger the reaction,” he said.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected]
