The Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine conducted an audit of cases involving severe road accidents (resulting in death or serious injury of a participant) and announced 178 suspicions.
This was reported on Facebook by Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko.
“Last month I instructed an audit of all criminal proceedings into road accidents with grave consequences, where investigations had lasted more than 3–5 years. The picture turned out to be discouraging: 178 cases were practically stalled. In these accidents, 69 people died, including 3 children. Another 99 people were seriously injured, including 9 children,” the Prosecutor General noted.
The issue of severe road accidents has always been a “pain point” for Ukrainian society. Most high-profile fatal accidents rarely reached court: if the culprits were relatives of wealthy or influential people, they exerted pressure on investigators or relatives of the victims to make them drop their claims.
In the end, even in court it was difficult to prove guilt due to procedural issues and outdated legislation – a sad “benchmark” of such cases became the murder of a woman on the left bank of Kyiv in 2016, when the defendant, who drove his “Mercedes” onto the sidewalk and crushed the victim, was suddenly found by investigators to have suffered an epileptic seizure at the moment of the accident (which he had neither before nor after), and therefore could not be held accountable.
For a long time, “VIP” road accidents, where at the investigation or court stage cases could be “bought off” or “buried,” were a real barometer for journalists of the quality of law enforcement work – if some high-profile case moved forward at all, the Prosecutor General and the police were considered relatively effective.
Will Kravchenko, who has been the new Prosecutor General for 100 days, be able to change the trend?
According to him, 159 suspicions were issued under Article 286 of the Criminal Code for traffic violations, 18 involved drunk driving, one involved putting defective vehicles into operation, and one involved other traffic safety violations.
This is not the first example of Kravchenko’s involvement in high-profile cases. Another example is his participation in another notable trial — the trial of the murderer of a teenager in the Kyiv funicular. The killer, who turned out to be a state security employee, insisted that the murder happened accidentally (in a scuffle, he pushed the victim in a public transport vehicle, who fell, smashing a glass window, which fatally injured his neck). But Kravchenko, who personally led the prosecution, proved that the killer acted intentionally. In the end, the murderer was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Experts caution, however, that prosecutors’ efforts do not guarantee justice. Wealthy or influential defendants can still sway proceedings through legal resources, and victims’ families may face pressure to withdraw claims, leaving systemic challenges unresolved.