Ukraine's leading English-language newspaper since 1995

Yushchenko's new top cop has a curious amount of respect for the way the Gongadze investigation has been run

investigating the Gongadze murder. That’s a disgrace.

Journalist Georgy Gongadze, an enemy of the Kuchma crowd, was infamously murdered more than five years ago now – a full half-decade. Yet his killers are still walking free. This, even though there exist actual secret recordings from Kuchma’s office on which Gongadze is discussed. This, even though witnesses to the crime have actually been detained and questioned and have passed along detailed information. All that’s missing here is a Rodney King-style videotape. It seems to us the only reason the murderers haven’t been caught is because some powerful people don’t want the case solved. It’s an outrage.

Oleksandr Medvedko, the man President Viktor Yushchenko recently appointed Ukraine’s new prosecutor general, isn’t as annoyed about all this as we are. According to an article on the Ukrainska Pravda Web site, Medvedko on Nov. 8 said that there was no basis for changing the Gongadze investigation team, which in his opinion is working well. He also said the Prosecutor General’s Office is doing everything it can to bring the Gongadze case to its conclusion.

He has a point, in a way. It doesn’t make sense to change the team that’s been on the case for years. But Medvedko’s satisfaction is unseemly. We earlier claimed in this space that Medvedko is the wrong man to be Ukraine’s top cop. This confirms our view. It’s too late now, but responsible people in the government, starting with the president, should make clear that Medvedko’s setting the wrong tone.

Yushchenko’s behavior in all of this seems increasingly incoherent. Also according to Ukrainska Pravda, he this week instructed Medvedko to punish the people who falsified last year’s elections, and who led the short-lived separatist movement in Ukraine’s east. He told the new prosecutor general to work in the anti-corruption spirit of the Orange Revolution. Earlier, he himself has complained that that Gongadze case isn’t getting solved fast enough.

But Yushchenko himself is the one who for a long time employed as prosecutor general the notorious Svyatoslav Pyskun, a Kuchma-era fixer under whose watch it was ridiculous to expect justice. Medvedko, also, is a deeply compromised insider from whom it is difficult to expect good results. Yushchenko keeps employing people like this, and then wondering why nothing gets done. It’s strange.Ideally, Yushchenko should dismiss Medvedko and appoint an uncompromised outsider to the Prosecutor General’s Office. More practically, he should slap Medvedko’s wrist and tell him that open approval of the miserable way the Gongadze non-investigation has been carried out isn’t allowed.