We’d like to know, for instance, who ordered the murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze in 2000, member of parliament Yevhen Shcherban in 1996 and many others.
Unfortunately, Ukraine’s prosecutors and judges lack credibility and prove their incompetence and untrustworthiness time and again.
Currently, the trial of ex-police general Oleksiy Pukach, who is accused of being part of the conspiracy in Gongadze’s murder, is believed to be winding down. But the public will never learn if it was a fair trial or not since the proceedings have been conducted in secret. The public will also likely never get an explanation for why, despite evidence implicating them, ex-President Leonid Kuchma and ex-Verkhovna Rada speaker Volodymyr Lytyvn, are also not being tried for the crime.
Yet prosecutors this month brought explosive new accusations against imprisoned ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, with Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka implicating her in the conspiracy to murder Shcherban on Nov. 3, 1996. Shcherban, a rich and powerful businessman, was gunned down on an airport runway in Donetsk.
Prosecutors claim she paid for the hit by transferring $2.8 million to an offshore bank account that belonged to former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, who prosecutors allege was her business patron and lover during those days. Lazarenko remains in detention for immigration reasons in America after serving several years in federal prison on corruption charges.
We’d like to see the facts, and we’d like them to be made public. We’d like Tymoshenko to get a fair and speedy public trial with a jury of her peers deciding her guilt or innocence. But that’s never happened in this nation and, until it does, the prevailing view will be that prosecutors are simply stepping up their campaign to destroy Tymoshenko, once and for all, so that she can no longer challenge President Viktor Yanukovych.
Tymoshenko has already spent more than 1.5 years in prison for a trumped-up “abuse of office” charge for signing a gas deal with Russia in 2009 as prime minister — a deal her successor has not been able to undo. Another case against Tymoshenko is pending in Ukraine’s courts. She is accused of extortion and causing Hr 3.239 billion damage to the country through her ex-gas trading company United Energy Systems of Ukraine. Moreover, other allegations against her are still being investigated, bringing the total number of cases to six.
Nobody is buying the prosecutors’ claims that they are simply pursuing long-delayed justice. As they pile cases on Tymoshenko, they turn a blind eye to many more contemporary corruption scandals among top officials.
Yanukovych is to blame for this disastrous course. He’s dragging the nation down with him.
