Deputy General Prosecutor Renat Kuzmin was back on the pro-government Inter channel last week in his latest public attack on jailed former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
This time, he said prosecutors had secured evidence that money from Tymoshenko’s account had been used to pay for the killing of Donetsk lawmaker and businessman Yevhen Shcherban on Nov. 4, 1996.
Kuzmin claims that the men who gunned down Shcherban were paid for the contract killing by firms controlled at the time by then Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko and then head of United Energy System of Ukraine Tymoshenko. “The money, nearly three million hryvnias, came to the killlers’ accounts from firms belonging to Lazarenko and Tymoshenko. The firms were controlled by these two people,” Kuzmin said.
The public deserves to know who ordered the 15-year-old murder, but Ukrainian prosecutors aren’t going to be the ones who find out the truth because they have no credibility. The Kuzmin show follows the same tired pattern: Make a public smear first against an enemy, then follow up with charges and — far down the road — possibly a secret trial, even as allegations of corruption against those in power are studiously ignored.
Tymoshenko is yet to be charged with involvement in the murder. If the proof of her guilt is irrefutable, as Kuzmin claims, let’s have the charges first followed by a speedy public trial. Instead, Kuzmin’s showboating looks like part of a propaganda campaign.
The authorities appear to think that by slapping Tymoshenko with more charges and accusations, they will convince the West, which has pushed for her release, that she deserves to be in prison.
This betrays the fact that President Viktor Yanukovych and his allies do not understand the criticism. No one takes any verdicts pronounced by judges seriously. Even if she is guilty of the crimes she is accused of, she is far from the only top-level politician who has serious wrongdoings to answer for.
Kuzmin recently went to Brussels to try to convince the European Union that prosecutors are fighting corruption and other wrongdoing fairly. He even said he would investigate Yanukovych if evidence was handed over because he’s not going to look for it.
Kuzmin is on a one-man mission to destroy Tymoshenko in the courts and her public reputation on television. If the U.S. and Europe are considering visa bans against the people who are complicit in political persecution in Ukraine, Kuzmin would be a good person to start with.
