The case against three suspects charged with blowing up Belarusian journalist Pavel Sheremet in his car in central Kyiv on July 20, 2016, is being sent to trial, but the prosecution’s case is criticized as weak and facing collapse.
There are plenty of political implications in the murder case against a trio of suspects with no previous criminal background.
Many believe solving the Sheremet case is crucial for the political survival of Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, whose police force is leading the investigation. President Volodymyr Zelensky identified solving the case as Avakov’s “primary task.”
Avakov has been mired in corruption scandals since his rise from Kharkiv in the 1990s. As interior minister since 2014, he has denied accusations of sabotaging police reform and high profile investigations with a weak record on solving major crimes. He has survived five Cabinets and kept his job under Zelensky.
Reporters Without Borders said in January that it “is concerned about inconsistencies in the evidence for the Ukrainian authorities’ claim to have solved news website editor Pavel Sheremet’s 2016 murder, and urges them to continue the investigation and to be more transparent as they do so.” Sheremet’s colleagues from the Ukrainska Pravda news outlet echoed these concerns.
On June 3, the National Police said the investigation had been completed, and that the case would be sent to court after the sides studied the documents.
Both the suspects’ lawyers and independent legal experts dismiss the evidence in the case as weak.
Ukraine’s community of war veterans has been particularly critical of the case — one suspect is a military paramedic and the other two are volunteers who helped the army.
But the investigation has also served to highlight journalism’s dire predicament in Ukraine — more than 50 journalists have been murdered since Ukraine became independent in 1991, with the organizers of the killings not identified in most cases.
Neither the Prosecutor General’s Office nor the police responded to the Kyiv Post’s requests for comment
Complicated case
Last December, pediatric surgeon Yulia Kuzmenko and rock singer Andriy Antonenko were charged with murdering Sheremet by planting a bomb in his car on July 20, 2016. They have been under arrest since then.
Military paramedic Yana Dugar was charged with complicity, placed under house arrest and later released on bail.
According to the investigators’ initial version, the suspects “espoused ultranationalist ideas, idolized the Aryan race’s greatness” and murdered Sheremet in order to destabilize the political situation.
Critics say investigators have provided no proof of the suspects’ ultranationalism and failed to explain how Sheremet’s murder would destabilize the country.
The police changed the charges in May and now say that the perpetrators had unidentified personal motives and planned the murder as a “high-profile event in order to provoke major protests”.
Antonenko was initially considered the organizer, but organizers have since been classified as unknown.
At a high-profile news conference in December, attended by President Volodymyr Zelensky, the police played audio recordings of alleged tapped conversations that investigators saw as indirect evidence. Police cited Kuzmenko’s alleged “immoral statements” and “extremist” views.
In the conversations, persons alleged to be Kuzmenko and a friend discuss attacking Kyiv with multiple rocket launchers, with Kuzmenko saying she “has no pity for Kyiv.”
The pair also discuss what the police view as “scenarios of destabilization” – such as the kidnapping of war veteran Marusia Zverobiy’s children to portray it as an act by the authorities and trigger protests.
It is not clear from the recordings whether the two friends were serious in planning something. Kuzmenko’s wiretapped conversations don’t mention Sheremet or her two alleged accomplices, Antonenko and Dugar.
Video evidence
Evidence also rests on police claims that the three arrested suspects matched the images of the crime perpetrators from surveillance cameras.
A CCTV camera captured a man and a woman planting a bomb under Sheremet’s car the night before the murder and investigators say they were Kuzmenko and Antonenko. Another camera spotted a woman taking photos of surveillance cameras in the area days before the attack. The police are sure that this was Dugar.
The videos of those who planted the bomb are blurry, and it’s impossible to identify them based on facial features, as concluded by the forensic experts cited by investigators.
Only Dugar’s face, which is clearer, was determined by forensic experts to be identical to that of the woman taking pictures of cameras.
The Slidsvto.info investigative journalism show, citing leaked investigation materials, reported on May 21 that two hours after Sheremet’s murder Kuzmenko shared the news of the murder on Facebook and searched for “Pavel Grigoryevich Sheremet” – a behavior that would be odd if she had just killed him.
Leaked documents also say that Kuzmenko did not contact Dugar in 2016, which coincides with her defense’s statements that they did not know each other.
Kuzmenko became acquainted with Antonenko five months before the murder, according to the leaked documents. They exchanged two text messages and had 12 calls.
According to a May 28 report by Slidstvo.info, the police also changed the route of the perpetrators from the one confirmed by footage from surveillance cameras. They claim that they turned towards a place where Antonenko allegedly lived on Oles Honchar street, although video footage does not confirm that and Antonenko himself denies having lived there then.
Gait analysis
Uncertainty surrounding the portrait analysis has prompted forensic experts to work with other, less reliable features of the suspects, particularly their gait in the surveillance video.
Police have commissioned Ivan Birch, a certified British forensic gait expert whose assessments have been accepted by law enforcement in the U.K., to examine the gait of the people in the video and compare it to the three suspects. For this purpose, he was given videos of the suspects taken in public places. The expert concluded that the three suspects likely matched the people in the surveillance videos.
Birch did not respond to requests for comment.
Gait analysis has been used for criminal trials in Western countries in recent decades and is viewed as a genuine method of identifying suspects.
“Forensic gait analysis can assist in comparing features of the way a criminal, caught on video, walks – their gait,” Michael Nirenberg, head of the American Society of Forensic Podiatry, told the Kyiv Post. “The perpetrator’s gait could be compared with the gait of a suspect to help with a criminal investigation.”
There are, however, caveats and limitations.
“As such, it is much more usual for forensic gait analysis to be used as a secondary form of evidence although the use of forensic gait analysis as primary evidence cannot be entirely ruled out – particularly when dealing with a closed population,” British forensic expert Wesley Vernon told the Kyiv Post.
Birch himself refers to “Forensic Gait Analysis,” a book that says that there is no evidence that human gait is unique and that gait analysis cannot be used as the main evidence in a criminal case – though it was indeed used as the main evidence in the Sheremet investigation.
Ukrainian forensic expert Gennady Pampukha and lawyers Olena Storozhuk, Zlata Simonenko, Tetiana Kozachenko and Vitaly Tytych also cast doubt on the gait analysis in the Sheremet case. They say that it is subjective and cannot be used as the main evidence.
Another problem is the low quality of footage, with blurred images of the suspects.
“A forensic gait analyst would initially consider various factors when assessing the suitability and quality of footage for its potential use in gait analysis,” Vernon said. “For this purpose, a Footage Assessment Tool would be utilized and work would only proceed beyond a preliminary analysis if use of that tool indicated that the footage was of suitable quality for forensic gait analysis.”
Forensic expert Pampukha told the Kyiv Post that there are no legally accepted gait analysis methods and no gait specialists in Ukraine. Gait analysis, he said, had never been used in Ukraine.
Antropometry, including analysis of facial features, from footage from surveillance cameras has been used in trials in Ukraine, he said, but they must be of sufficiently high quality. To find a way out of the impasse, defense lawyers can conduct additional forensic assessment, he added.
‘Non-verbal behavior’
A group of Ukrainian experts have also worked on forensic assessment in the Sheremet case. But none is a gait or biomechanics specialist and the group has called the subject of their analysis “non-verbal psychological behavior” — Pampukha says the term is not used in Ukraine and is not a legally accepted forensic assessment method.
Leonid Maslov, a lawyer for Antonenko, told the Kyiv Post that the Ukrainian experts are psychologists and lack any qualifications to assess biomechanics, including gait. Hence, the new term for gait analysis — non-verbal psychological behavior.
“They abused their status to give a ‘scientific form’ to a layman’s observation,” Maslov said.
The books cited in the Ukrainian assessments, he said, refer strictly to psychology, with no reference to biomechanics or gait analysis.
“They refer to methods on how to analyze a person’s thinking and, based on this method, claim to identify two people in video footage,” Maslov said. “Do you understand that it’s charlatanism?”
One of the articles cited in the assessment is called “Ontologization of psychological portraits based on the Geisenberg uncertainty principle” – a concept from quantum mechanics unrelated to psychology, gait or biomechanics.
The Ukrainian forensic assessment was carried out by the Kyiv Forensic Research Institute, which critics allege is biased and subject to political meddling.
The institute has declined to comment on the case, citing investigative secrecy.
Its head, Oleksandr Ruvin, told the Ukraina channel last December that “it’s impossible to change the gait characteristics of a person – like handwriting” and “everyone has a unique gait.”
In 2019, alleged audio recordings were leaked from the State Investigation Bureau in which Roman Truba, then head of the bureau, says that Ruvin’s experts “write whatever you want when there is will from (Zelensky’s) Presidential Office.” Truba, who denied the accusations of wrongdoing, was fired after the recordings were leaked.
Ex-Prosecutor General Ruslan Riaboshapka and Artem Sytnyk, head of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, have said the leaks are being investigated. Sytnyk said their authenticity had yet to be established.
In 2016 Ruvin was also filmed meeting Oleksandr Hranovsky, ex-President Petro Poroshenko’s top ally who was accused of giving orders to judges and prosecutors.
Yuriy Irkhin, the chief forensic expert in the Sheremet case, is also controversial. He has co-authored books with Vladimir Sednev, who is currently a deputy head of the prosecutorial forensic unit of the Donetsk People’s Republic, a Russian proxy group fighting against Ukraine. The assessment in the Sheremet case cites works authored by Sednev.
Oleksandr Lemenov, head of anti-corruption watchdog StateWatch, said Ruvin’s institute “has a scandalous reputation” and “is pressured in cases where there is a political aspect.”
Lawyer Tetiana Kozachenko also said the institute “cannot provide independent forensic assessments.”
Meanwhile, it has been six months since the three suspects were arrested on charges of murdering Sheremet. Two of them have spent all of this time in jail.
Regardless of what the court decides, the suspects’ lives will never be the same again.
“Television has ruined my life,” Kuzmenko said in December after a televised police briefing on her arrest.
