If you ask Ukraine’s Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, it was an attempt by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine — widely known as NABU — to illegally wiretap its office.
But NABU claims that its officers just happened to be nearby when men from the anti-graft agency blocked their automobile’s path.
The result was a strange clash that reportedly left one man in the hospital with a broken arm.
It is also the latest event in a scandal involving corruption in the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, wiretapping, internal conflict among Ukraine’s authorities, and weak enforcement of the law.
Attempted surveillance
The prelude to the clash began on Sept. 19, when members of the state guard service reportedly discovered a listening device with a cable leading from the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office back to the neighboring Okhmatdyt children’s hospital.
The guards traced the cable to a locked garage at the hospital. Police opened the garage, and discovered the cable led to a safe, an unnamed law enforcement source told the Ukrainska Pravda news site.
Later, the chief anti-corruption prosecutor Nazar Kholodnytsky confirmed this information to Ukrainska Pravda and suggested that NABU could be behind it.
Correct or not, it was not an unreasonable claim. Earlier this year, NABU had indeed planted a bug in an aquarium in Kholodnytsky’s office and used it to uncover evidence of him conspiring to help Ukrainian officials escape corruption charges.
After discovering the second bug, Kholodnytsky informed Ukrainska Pravda that his employees discovered “suspicious people” near the office. They claimed to work for one of Ukraine’s major telecom operators and said they were laying a cable leading to the garage, but otherwise declined to identify themselves.
The prosecutor said that a Ford microbus was also parked near his office with masked men inside, and the license plate suggested it was registered to NABU. As a result, he appealed to the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU.
According to Kholodnytsky, the SBU confiscated the safe and it is now being examined by specialists.
Employees of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s office also approached the microbus. But as they got closer, the men in the bus locked themselves inside and would not even open a window and identify themselves.
In response, the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office summoned the police. But as the police were arriving, suddenly NABU special forces showed-up on the scene.
One of the NABU forces pulled a driver from the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office out of his vehicle (also a microbus), got in, and drove the automobile toward members of the state guards service and others, Kholodnytsky claimed in comments to Ukrainska Pravda. The microbus crashed into several others cars, he said. (A video from the scene confirms the slow-speed collision.)
Then the NABU agent exited the vehicle and walked away, escorted by his colleagues.
“NABU agents used crude force against police officers’ attempts to stop the illegal actions,” Kholodnytsky said.
The driver forcibly pulled from the car was left with a broken arm and is now in the hospital, he claimed.
No attempted surveillance
But NABU director Artem Sytnyk says he doesn’t know what Kholodnytsky is talking about.
“No one was planning to listen in,” he told Ukrainska Pravda. “Our guys were half a kilometer away from [the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office]. Why did employees of [the office] start blocking them?”
According to his version of the events, the prosecutor’s office employees inexplicably blocked the NABU vehicle’s movement. NABU agents asked why, but got no response.
“At a certain moment, our employee got in car that was blocking the way, drove it out of the way, and our guys drove on,” he said. “No one was detained, everyone is at work, work continues.”
Sytnyk also claims that the NABU agents involved in the confrontation are in no way connected to the cable in question. However, he also declined to clarify what the agents were doing at the time of the conflict.
Corruption inside anti-corruption
The Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office has now publicly labeled Sytnyk unfit for service.
The office “calls on international partners not to believe the provocation by Artem Sytnyk, but to give the incident in question an objective assessment. Sytnyk’s efforts have transformed [NABU’s] mandate of trust into a mandate of impunity,” it wrote in a Facebook post.
But NABU is hardly the only one to have it’s “mandate of trust” damaged.
The conflict has boiled between the two agencies since March, when Kholodnytsky discovered a listening device in his office. That one certainly was from NABU, which had been listening in on his conversations for several weeks.
The recordings appeared to provide evidence of Kholodnytsky blocking or subverting corruption cases against powerful suspects. Previously the anti-corruption prosecutor had faced accusations of protecting corruption suspects when it benefitted President Petro Poroshenko or the Narodny Front party, which is allied with the president’s party.
NABU wanted the Prosecutor General’s Office to bring criminal charges against Kholodnytsky over the tapes, but prosecutors have failed to do so.
However, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko and Sytnyk submitted a complaint to the Qualification and Disciplinary Commission of Prosecutors, requesting that Kholodnytsky face disciplinary proceedings and be fired.
Ultimately, the commission concluded that, while Kholodnytsky did indeed violate prosecutorial ethics, he should only face a reprimand.
On Sept. 19, the day of the clash, Sytnyk failed to appear at a session of the Verkhovna Rada. He reportedly was en route, but turned his car around when he learned the NABU detectives had been arrested for planting a listening device in Kholodnytsky’s office earlier this year, Interfax-Ukraine reported.
According to Ukrainska Pravda, the National Police and SBU will open four criminal investigations as a result of the Sept. 19 clash.
