Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko formally submitted a resignation letter to the Presidential Administration on Nov. 7, according to his press secretary Larysa Sarhan.
“Yes, not long ago today (he) filed a statement to the president,” Sarhan told Ukrayinska Pravda.
President Petro Poroshenko has not yet commented on whether he will accept Lutsenko’s resignation. He is in Helsinki, Finland, at the summit of the European People’s Party, the European Union’s largest political party, on a working visit until Nov. 8.
Lutsenko announced his resignation at parliamentary hearings on Nov. 6 after members of parliament criticized his office’s investigation of the attack on activist Kateryna Gandziuk, who died two days earlier.
“In order that there are no doubts that nobody clings for power, today I will submit a statement of resignation to the president of Ukraine and you should consider this question,” Lutsenko told the parliament.
Parliament Speaker Andriy Parubiy called a vote on whether the Rada should consider the general prosecutor’s resignation – even though Lutsenko had not then submitted an official letter of resignation, as parliamentary protocol demands.
Only 38 lawmakers voted to consider Lutsenko’s resignation, with 226 votes needed for a vote in parliament to pass – a predictable outcome in the parliament controlled by the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko, with 135 out of 422 seats, to whom Lutsenko is a firm loyalist.
Lutsenko staged his resignation as a protest to the deputies’ demand to create a parliamentary commission on investigating Gandziuk’s murder. However, following the failed vote on Lutsenko’s resignation, the Rada proceeded to create the commission.
Gandziuk, a civic activist and local council member from Kherson, a regional capital of 290,000 people located 550 kilometers south of Kyiv, was attacked with acid on July 31. She was hospitalized with severe burns to her head and body and died on Nov 4. Investigators have so far failed to identify who may have ordered the attack.
So far, 84 non-governmental organizations, including Transparency International Ukraine and the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union, have signed a statement deploring the quality of the investigation into Gandzuik’s murder and demanding Lutsenko’s resignation.
In the statement, the general prosecutor was also criticized for the state’s failure to solve cases of other recent attacks on journalists and activists. The most notable cases that have gone unsolved during Lutsenko’s tenure are those of the mass killings of more than 100 people during the EuroMaidan Revolution that ended President Viktor Yanukovych’s rule in 2014; the July 2016 car-bomb assassination of Pavlo Sheremet, a renowned journalist; and many others.
Some cases currently in court have dragged on for years, with suspects being released or convicted and sentenced to minimal jail terms.
The case of journalist Vyacheslav Veremiy, who was beaten and fatally shot on Feb. 19, 2014, after he tried to take a picture of armed men, is still being heard in court. Yuriy Krysin, one of the attackers, initially received a four-year suspended sentence. After a huge public outcry, the ruling was eventually overturned, with Krysin receiving a five-year sentence. Krysin has appealed against the latest sentence.
In another notable case, one of the men who savagely beat lawmaker Tatyana Chornovol in 2014, when she was a EuroMaidan Revolution activist, was sentenced to five years in prison only on Oct. 25 this year. Two more suspects are still awaiting trial, and another is yet to be apprehended.
