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If you come to the police department and say you would like to report that somebody is tapping you illegally, you will either be laughed at or ignored: After all, in this country even the presidents and prime ministers are tapped illegally.

On Jan. 20, an ally of President Victor Yanukovych reported a conversation allegedly held by his rival in the Feb. 7 election runoff, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, and Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.

Made public by lawmaker Vadym Kolesnychenko, Tymoshenko is heard in the conversation requesting observers from Georgia for Ukraine’s presidential election. Using the illegally recorded conversation as proof, Kolesnychenko accused the prime minister attempting to destabilize Ukraine, and asked the State Security Service, Interior Ministry and general prosecutor to investigate what he described as potential “state treason.”

In the recording, passed on to Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency by a erstwhile Tymoshenko ally, political pundit Dmytro Vydrin, Tymoshenko promises to secure official observer status for more than 2,000 Georgian observers, allegedly biased in favor of her candidacy.

Treason or not, the alleged conversations seemed very plausible, and a few hundred Georgian observers did arrive for the first round of presidential elections on Jan. 17.

But the Central Election Commission, de facto controlled by Yanukovych, did not register them. And their arrival sparked quite a bit of controversy during the vote. Some were allegedly beaten up by Yanukovych supporters; others were temporarily detained.

Perhaps, from the practical point of view, many Ukrainians would not mind having their leaders tapped. Bringing their private conversations into the public spotlight could help keep them in line.

But in reality, the dangers of such tapping are very high, and pose a major risk to national security. How could state secrets be preserved under such conditions?

It’s not just top officials in the nation that have been affected. The Ukrainian Helsinki Group and the Kharkiv human rights group, both human rights watchdogs, released a report recently with striking facts about mass tapping in 2008.

According to the report, the State Security Service, better known by its SBU acronym, filed 8,323 applications for permission to tap into personal communications of suspects.

SBU chief Valentyn Nalyvaichenko pointed out in July 2008 that Ukrainians are tapped less than residents of the European Union.

But the problem is that most of these tapping incidents lead to nothing, if one believes human rights watchdogs. SBU annually finishes no more than 900 criminal investigations based on tapping, and only 700 of those lead to court cases. “More than 7,500 sanctions are received by the SBU not with the purpose of investigating crimes,” the human rights report concludes.

The Interior Ministry files even more requests for tapping - 14,815 in the same year. Similar requests are filed by the border services, the prosecutors and the tax police. In 2005 there were 15,000 such requests, but the number grew 1.5-fold by 2008.

Also, knowing that law obedience is not the strongest quality of our law enforcers, one can presume that citizens are tapped not just with the court’s permission, but following internal initiative by the law enforcers.

It is common knowledge that anyone who has money can buy tapping equipment and listen into their political and business rivals’ conversations.

The 2004 election campaign showed clearly that privacy was a fiction. Roman Romanov, head of the rule of law program in International Renaissance Foundation, sponsored by billionaire philanthropist George Soros, had said then: “In 2004 political tailing in Ukraine gained a mass scale, and the problem became public. The objects of trailing were deputies, presidential candidates and head of state power organs.”

He gave the brightest example: “On Aug. 10, 2004 in Crimea several people’s deputies who accompanied presidential candidate Victor Yushchenko spotted a car that tailed the candidate. The police that came to the place of incident discovered that the person detained on the spot had a specialized directional microphone, tapping devices, photo and video equipment. Also found in this surveillance car were recordings of Yushchenko’s trailing, various bits of surveillance equipment, 12 different number plates for this car, an official Interior Ministry surveillance sanction. Other documents in the same car contained information about another candidate, Natalya Vitrenko.”

The most famous case of tapping in Ukraine took place in 2000 in ex-President Leonid Kuchma’s office. He was secretly recorded by his guard Mykola Melnychenko, who then claimed he recorded using a digital recorder placed under a leather couch. The nation was then shocked to hear that many corrupt schemes, punishment of the non-compliant and other dirty deeds were planned out on the top office in the country. Despite the fact that authenticity of many parts of that recording was confirmed, it failed to lead to any punishment of the guilty.

It seems nothing has changed since then: people are still being tapped, officially and otherwise, but it does not help to solve crimes or boycott dirty politicians. The Soviet paranoia lives on.


Yuriy Lukanov is a freelance journalist in Kyiv. He can be reached at lukanov@ukr.net.