It’s not every day the interior minister is summoned to parliament on short notice. So when Vitaliy Zakharchenko came to the Verkhovna Rada on July 2 to report on the investigation of a brazenly brutal rape and beating that unleashed riots in Mykolaiv Oblast, he was listened to attentively.
Zakharchenko
delivered a 10-minute report on the crime that took place in Vradiyevka, a
town of 8,600 people, on the night of June 26. The victim, Iryna
Krashkova, 29, was gang-raped, beaten and robbed by three men. Krashkova named
her rapists to the police, but only two of them, police officer Dmytro
Polishchiuk and his accomplice Sergey Ryabinenko, were arrested. The third
suspect, police officer Yevhen Dryzhak was not arrested because police say he has a credible alibi — that of working the night shift at a local police station when the rape took place.
Outraged over
the latter’s freedom, several hundred Vradiyevka residents stormed the local
court building on the night of June 30 and local police station on July 1 to
demand justice. After six days and two riots, Dryzhak remained free until July 2.
“The third man,
police officer (Dryzhak), was in the police office (at the time of the crime),
and it is proven by surveillance camera video footage. Now this information is being
checked,” Zakharchenko told parliament on the afternoon of July 2.
Several hours
later on July 2, the regional prosecutor’s office in Mykolaiv Oblast reported
that Dryzhak had been arrested, citing the victim’s testimony as the reason for
the arrest.
“Such protests
are inadmissible,” added Zakharchenko about the clashes in Vradiyevka.
According to
the minister, a special group of Interior Ministry representatives was sent to
Vradiyevka to oversee the situation. The police chief of Mykolayiv Oblast and
the chief of district police were dismissed on July 2 on Zakharchenko’s order.
A district prosecutor was also dismissed by Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka.
“Some say now
that Ukraine’s police system needs a complete reset, with all the old officers
fired,” Zakharchenko said. “But note that during 2005-2010, police staff was
fully changed. Out of 16,000 officers who were fired in last 1.5 years, over
1,000 were dismissed for negative reasons.”
Zakharchenko
said that he understood that “the time came for big changes in organization of
Ukraine’s police.”
To improve it, the minister suggested that police officers should
be offered better salaries, more work incentives, including up-to-date equipment.
Head of the
opposition UDAR party Vitaly Klitschko confronted Zakharchenko, saying that
police are already getting Hr 16 billion per year from the state budget, while
the community has very little trust in police officers.
Klitschko urged
the minister to resign, since Zakharchenko was, in his opinion, uninformed
about what is going on in the police. Zakharchenko responded, saying that he
needs time to sort that out.
Batkivschyna opposition
leader Arseniy Yatseniuk also confronted Zakharchenko, asking for his response
to the request about the unsolved murder of a 15-year-old girl in Vradiyevka
that was sent to the minister in 2012 by lawmaker Hennadiy Moskal.
“That case was
taken under the ministry’s control,” Zakharchenko said. His response was met with
angry hooting in parliament. The murder of the teen took place in 2011 and
remains unsolved.
According to
Zakharenko, 217 rapes were registered in Ukraine in 2013. In 75 cases the
suspects were found. He did not specify the number of cases that had been tried and
how many are pending.
Kyiv Post editor Olga Rudenko can be reached at [email protected]. Kyiv Post editor Mark Rachkevych
contributed to this story.
