A lawyer closely involved in Ukraine’s most high-profile unsolved crime said former President Leonid Kuchma and current parliament speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn are implicated in ordering the crime.
A lawyer closely involved in the case of Georgiy Gongadze, the hard-hitting journalist murdered in 2000, said former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma and current parliament speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn are implicated in ordering the crime.
Kuchma and Lytvyn have repeatedly denied involvement in Gongadze’s murder, but a rising amount of evidence points to their involvement in both the crime and in the subsequent cover-up orchestrated by subordinates.
Oleh Musienko, the former lawyer for ex-police general Oleksiy Pukach, said Kuchma and Lytvyn should stand trial for the killing.
Pukach, who has been in jail for more than a year without trial in the case, allegedly admits taking part in the actual murder of Gongadze.
But the suspect also said he did so at the order of the nation’s highest officials at the time, according to his testimony.
In an interview published on Oct. 21 on Ukrainska Pravda, the website that Gongadze founded a decade ago, Musienko revealed fresh details about the case, which triggered an international scandal that turned Kuchma into an international pariah in the last years of his corruption-riddled, decade-long tenure.
The interview was published days after the General Prosecutor’s Office announced that Musienko had been removed as Pukach’s lawyer. It’s a move that Musienko is disputing and could still challenge.
The Gongadze case was thrust back to the nation’s attention last month after prosecutors revealed that they had completed pre-trial investigations.
Prosecutors said that Pukach got the order to kill Gongadze from Yuriy Kravchenko, the former interior minister who was killed by two gunshot wounds to the head in 2005 – the same day Kravchenko was supposed to give testimony in the investigation. The death is highly suspicious with many doubting official claims of suicide.
Despite testimony by Pukach and other evidence that pointed to involvement by Kuchma and other top officials, prosecutors initially insisted they did not have enough evidence to pursue a case beyond Kravchenko.
But international and domestic pressure forced prosecutors not to end their investigation by blaming Kravchenko.
“I fell victim to the political intrigues of Leonid Kuchma.”
– Yuriy Kravchenko, the former interior minister in his supposedly suicide note.
So the investigation – long sidetracked by cover-ups and stonewalling – remains open. The possible involvement of Kuchma, Lytvyn and other top officials at the time appear to be the hottest leads.
Based on Pukach’s testimony, Musienko joined others involved in the case in telling Ukrainska Pravda that enough evidence exists to indict Kuchma, Lytvyn and other top officials.
But investigators may still be trying to protect the former and current officials, including Kuchma, from being indicted, Musienko told journalist Serhiy Leshchenko in the online news site.
Musienko says Pukach told him that Lytvyn, Kuchma’s presidential chief of staff in 2000, former deputy Interior Minister Mykhailo Dzhiha (now governor of Vinnitsa Oblast), former Interior Ministry generals and current state prosecutors were also involved in the conspiracy.
Describing his former client as a simple village man, Musienko said Pukach initially refused to follow Kravchenko’s orders to kill Gongadze. But the interior minister pressured Pukach, Musienko said.
At one heated moment while Kravchenko was pressuring Pukach, the former interior minister’s office phone rang. It was, allegedly, Kuchma on the other end of the line.
Kravchenko was heard by Pukach as saying: “Yes, of course, Mr. President. We will execute it.”
Upon finishing this conversation, Kravchenko allegedly turned back to Pukach and said: “You see who is calling?”
Musienko also cited a suicide note left by Kravchenko as pointing to Kuchma’s involvement. The note allegedly read: “I fell victim to the political intrigues of Leonid Kuchma.”
According to Musienko, testimony given by Pukach about events that followed the murder also implicates other Kuchma loyalists.
He said that Pukach gave testimony saying: “Kravchenko gave the order [to Pukach] to rebury Gongadze after the murder. He did this after [Lytvyn] met with Kravchenko in his office. It happened this way: Lytvyn, Dzhiha, and former police general Eduard Fere met in Kravchenko’s office in the fall of 2000 for drinks. They summoned Pukach, and told him around 11 p.m. on that evening to re-bury Gongadze,” Musienko recalls in the interview.
The revelation of such new details strengthen the long and widely held belief by many that Kuchma’s administration was heavily involved in Gongadze’s abduction, murder and subsequent cover-up of the case.
Snippets of secretly made recordings of conversations in Kuchma’s office made during the summer of 2000 implicated the president, Lytvyn, Kravchenko and former State Security Service head Leonid Derkach.
In several recordings, a man with a voice resembling Kuchma’s orders Kravchenko to do away with Gongadze.
Other recordings tie in the other aforementioned officials as having been involved to various degrees.
Musienko says that documents in the case that he studied show that tests of the so-called Melnychenko recordings verify the voices to be that of Kuchma, Lytvyn and other officials.
But, he said, tests cannot rule out that the recordings may have been doctored.
Some questioned Musienko’s motives for coming out with the information.
Yuriy Boychenko, the spokesman for the General Prosecutor’s Office, told the Kyiv Post on Oct. 21 that Musienko’s revelations represent a clear violation of the law, which prohibits divulging information before cases go to trial.
Valentyna Telychenko, who represents Gongadze’s widow Myroslava in the case, agreed with Boychenko’s view.
After reading the interview with Musienko, Telychenko, who has been involved in the case since 2000, added that it appeared to her that Deputy Prosecutor General Rinat Kuzmin, who in September replaced Deputy Prosecutor General Mykola Holomsha in overseeing the case, has a different political agenda than his predecessor.
“Whereas Holomsha seemed to be going for indictments of Lytvyn and Kuchma, Kuzmin looks to be trying to protect both,” she said.
In the interview, Musienko also speculated that Kuzmin may be trying to create the appearance that he is serious about solving the Gongadze case, while not doing so in action, in order to win support for his candidacy to be the next General Prosecutor.
The tenure for current General Prosecutor Oleksandr Medvedko expired this year.
According to constitutional rules, President Viktor Yanukovych is to either extend his tenure for another five years, or appoint a new lead prosecutor.
Both Medvedko and Kuzmin have declined recent Kyiv Post requests for an interview. With their lips tight and vested interests apparently high, it appears political intrigues are further tangling up the 10-year old Gongadze investigation.
Kyiv Post staff writer Peter Byrne can be reached at [email protected].
