Police have responded to public criticism that two police officers shot dead on Sept. 25 in Dnipro, a city of 1 million people located 477 kilometers southeast of Kyiv, were not properly trained.
Khatia Dekanoidze, the head of New Police, defended the officers’ actions in a Facebook post, saying that the cops had faced a dangerous criminal and an experienced gunman.
Dnipro police officers Artem Kutushev and Olga Makarenko were killed after the officers stopped a driver near a bus station for going through a red light. He shot and killed Kutushev and wounded his partner Makarenko, who died of her injuries later in the day in hospital.
“Olga (Makarenko) was careful while shooting back because of the many civilians standing on the other side of the road from the bus station,” wrote Dekanoidze.
Dekanoidze said this was the first incident in the history of Ukraine’s new National Police in which cops were murdered during their work.
A witness of the shooting, a bus driver, tried to block the killer but was unsuccessful.
“Before the deaths the guy (Kutushev) was sitting in a police car, filling in a protocol,” the driver of the bus, Valeriy Tymonin, told the Dnipro news portal 056.ua.
“His partner (Makarenko) was standing behind the car. When it all started, it seemed the female cop got confused and scared. She didn’t start shooting immediately. The bandit first shot her, and then he killed her partner in the car.”
A video of the incident published on YouTube on Sept. 25 by a Dnipro resident showed the moment when the suspect, wearing a hat and standing near the police car, started shooting.
In the video, one cop was in the car and the other seemed at a loss what to do. After a few seconds of chaotic shooting, the second cop falls to the ground, and the killer tries to escape in his car. A bus driver attempts to block the killer’s car with his bus, but is forced to reverse away as the criminal starts shooting at the bus, which was full of passengers.
Anton Gerashchenko, an interior minister adviser and People’s Front Party lawmaker, wrote on Facebook on Sept. 25 that the suspect, Oleksandr Pugachov, is an ex-fighter of a disbanded Interior Ministry volunteer battalion called Tornado.
Gerashchenko said the suspect has long been wanted on suspicion of numerous crimes. He was arrested the same day he came to a hospital seeking medical aid. Interior Minister Arsen Avakov wrote on Facebook that Kutushev had managed to return fire and wound the killer.
Gerashchenko wrote: “The (suspected) killer of police officers arrested in the hospital, where he came for help with a gunshot wound in his stomach. The doctors are busy saving the life of this bastard, so that he can face justice.”
Pugachov, originally from Torez, a city in Donetsk Oblast, 800 kilometers southeast of Kyiv, was on the wanted list of the Interior Ministry for more than a year as a suspect in cases of kidnapping, creating a gang, and rape, Interior Ministry spokesperson Artem Shevchenko wrote on Facebook.
Shevchenko told the Kyiv Post that the two officers had not being wearing bulletproof vests because this is not standard practice during daytime shifts – officers would only wear such vests if specifically ordered by their commander.
Vadym Troyan, the deputy head of the National Police of Ukraine, told Ukrainska Pravda that police squads from six oblasts were involved in catching Pugachov.
The Tornado Battalion was disbanded under Avakov’s orders in 2015 after numerous cases of looting, kidnapping, and torture in the war-torn Donbas. Several other members of the battalion have been put on trial.
“Kutushev and Makarenko sacrificed their lives to help arrest a dangerous criminal, and everyone must know this fact. Especially those people who made fun of the fact that Pugachov took the gun of one of the cops. He took it from a dead cop,” wrote Shevchenko.
Avakov also raised the question of granting police more power to use weapons and force during arrests in a post on Facebook on Sept. 26.
Kyiv Post staff writer Veronika Melkozerova can be reached at [email protected]
