You're reading: Zhukov Island fight turns deadly with activist’s murder

A peaceful national reserve on the outskirts of Kyiv becomes the center of heated battles for land and resources.

A wildlife preserve in the south of Kyiv, Zhukov Island, is a breeding ground for rare white-tailed eagles and not-so-rare illegal sand quarries damaging the environment. This sliver of land, once five times the size of New York’s Central Park, is a priceless sanctuary coveted by many who would like to put a price on it.

Despite a ban on development and other business activities, trucks full of timber and sand regularly exit the island through the feeble checkpoint, to the outrage of ecologists.

The ruckus over these sand-hauling trucks may have sparked a recent murder on this island. Oleksiy Honcharuk, a 59-year-old environmental activist, was killed outside his home on Zhukov Island on May 26 after repeated attempts to expose allegedly illegal sand quarrying.

Two Kyiv residents, owners of hydraulic equipment used for digging sand from the bottom of rivers and lakes, are suspected of commissioning the murder, said Kyiv police spokesman Volodymyr Polishchuk. One of them has already been detained, while the other man is still on the wanted list. Their identities have not been released.

It took a human’s death for the authorities to seal up the pipes sucking up the sand and pledge to control the area to prevent future crimes.

Zhukov’s problems, however, are more complicated and stretch beyond the sandy shores of its pristine rivers and lakes. Strips of the picturesque land – less than half an hour’s drive from the city center – are at the heart of an ownership dispute.

In August 2007, the Kyiv City Council downsized the area of the national preserve to 165 hectares from its original 1,630 hectares. Two months later, these free-floating recreational zones along with others in Kyiv were given away in a non-transparent manner to undisclosed recipients.

Independent experts and city deputies who opposed what they said was a sham vote estimated the scale of the land grab at $10 billion. A total of 3,000 hectares of highly-regarded Kyiv land changed hands during that session on Oct 1, 2007, for a fraction of their market price.

In the case of Zhukov Island, environmentalists said that not only was the land deal dubious, the preserve’s boundaries were violated. They filed a court case against the municipal authorities. “There are 15 dubious companies which took this land for building cottages; their ownership is unknown,” said Oleksiy Vasyluk, deputy head of the National Ecological Center of Ukraine, a non-profit non-governmental watchdog. According to the Vitaly Klitschko bloc, the world heavyweight boxing champion’s minority faction on the city council, beneficiaries have direct ties to deputies in the Kyiv council.

In court, prosecutors have challenged the city authorities’ decision to transfer land rights. After more than a year, the case reached the Supreme Court of Ukraine on June 4, only to develop a new twist in the plot: Fearing that the case would be lost in the highest court, with no opportunities for appeal, the National Ecological Center asked the judge to send the case back to a lower court.

“Considering that the prosecutor’s office loses tens or even hundreds of cases in the Supreme Court, we asked the court to send the case for a second trial to a court of first instance,” Vasyluk said. “There is no political will right now. Otherwise, this case could be solved in one day.”

Ihor Lutsenko, head of the non-profit organization Save Old Kyiv, said the recent murder and court cases are only the tip of the iceberg involving Zhukov Island. “It’s a fight for the land,” Lutsenko said.

In the nearby Koncha-Zaspa posh suburban district, the asking price for a 100 square meters starts at $10,000. Most land on Zhukov Island cannot be bought or sold because it’s a part of the national reserve.

Deputies from all factions elected to the Kyiv City Council last year, excluding Mayor Leonid Chernovetsky’s bloc, campaigned to save the island, Vasyluk said. However, all failed to live up to the promises.

Environmentalists say that the disputed island is a part of the Dnipro River corridor that migrating birds use. Developing the sanctuary would disrupt migration. Illegal sand extraction, for its part, wrecks the river bottom, which endangers some 30 kinds of fish.

“Without any legal sanctions, people plainly cut trees down and build what they want,” Lutsenko noted.

The State Ecological Inspection in Kyiv, an arm of the central government, said they were aware of construction and sand mining on land that used to be part of the preserve.

“They [developers] usually give us an uneasy welcome. But when they produce official documents of property rights, what can we do?” asked Gresko.

Lutsenko from Let’s Save Old Kyiv wants security guards hired for the green zone. Anyone can now drive through a shabby gate with a truck of sand or timber, or a bucketful of fish in the spawning season, Lutsenko said.