Oleksandr Atamaniuk, Deputy Prosecutor General and chief of military prosecutions, has made it clear that the Prosecutor-General’s Office of Ukraine does not think it necessary to launch an investigation into the supply of Kolchuga radar systems to China. “I do not see what to investigate, there is nothing to investigate here. The Kolchugas were delivered to China under a contract. It is common knowledge,” Mr. Atamaniuk told a press conference in Kyiv on December 3. Commenting on the claim of People’s Deputy Hryhory Omelchenko that he has evidence about the supply of three Kolchuga systems to Iraq and thus suggests a closed-door parliamentary hearing of this matter, Mr. Atamaniuk said he had “repeatedly turned to this people’s deputy.” “He has given me no evidence, no materials. What is the matter then?” said the Deputy Prosecutor General. Mr. Atamaniuk also noted he had had five meetings with the experts who visited Ukraine. It will be recalled that, after the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine had conducted a number of inspections last summer, it decided not to institute criminal proceedings over the alleged illegal trade in Kolchuga early warning radars for lack of corpus delicti.
The Deputy Prosecutor General also made public his office’s attitude to some other high-profile cases. In particular, the Prosecutor General’s Office insists that the wreckage of the Tu-154 plane downed by a Ukrainian missile during an air defense exercise be lifted from the Black Sea bottom in order “to prove the guilt of the officials who broke the missile firing rules.” Mr. Atamanov explained that the material evidence furnished by Russian prosecutors as part of this case includes “not a single fragment of the airplane and not a single fragment of the missile’s outer body.” “To bring somebody to criminal justice, we must gather all the evidence because the court will ask if it was technically possible to lift the plane’s wreckage,” he said. In Mr. Atamaniuk’s opinion, it is technically possible to salvage the wreckage from a 2000-m depth. The chief of military prosecutions noted that this case is now under a pretrial investigation and “not a single official has been indicted.” Yet, should the culprits be identified, they may be indicted under such Criminal Code articles as criminal negligence of duty and power abuse. Mr. Atamaniuk confirmed there are “no other evidential versions” in addition to the one that the airplane was hit by an S-200 missile. “But there is no answer to the question how it happened,” he noted. According to Mr. Atamaniuk, about 700 witnesses have already been questioned in the course of inquiry.
As to investigating another air disaster — the crash of a Su-27 plane during the Lviv air show, — the Prosecutor General’s Office intends to bring to criminal justice 13 officials, including 8 generals. Mr. Atamaniuk did not rule out that the list of the indicted might be expanded in the future. The Deputy Prosecutor General announced that one of the pilots, Volodymyr Toponar, has been arrested. The other flyer, Yury Yegorov, still in a Vinnytsia hospital, has been indicted under Article 416 (violation of flight rules). Mr. Atamaniuk also said all the witnesses in this case have already been questioned and all the expert examinations have been done, i.e., all the required investigative actions have been taken to complete the pretrial inquiry. “What immediately caused the tragedy was the pilot Toponar’s error in performing an unplanned aerobatics element, but his actions was just the last link in a chain of offenses committed by officials — beginning with the flight plans they signed,” said the Deputy Prosecutor General.
What also aroused interest in the light of the current parliamentary hearings into the freedom of speech was the announcement of another press conference participant, Deputy Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, that General Prosecutor’s Office is expecting the arrival of an FBI team to render legal assistance in the journalist Heorhy Gongadze case. “We are waiting for them, but, in my view, they will be unable to help us,” he said. Mr. Shokin confirmed that prosecutors believe that “setting up” the President of Ukraine might have been the prime motive for murdering Gongadze. However, other versions have not been brushed aside, such as murder for failure to pay a debt, murder by a criminal group of “werewolves,” etc. The Deputy Prosecutor General also confirmed there would be another independent examination of “the Tarashcha body” — participated by a French expert Jean Rivolet — in Sweden in the second half of January.
Before that, in mid-December, Jean Rivolet will examine in Ukraine the body of another Ukrainian journalist, director of the Ukrayinski novyny information agency Mykhailo Kolomiyets. According to Mr. Shokin, the criminal case now under investigation involves five versions of suicide motivations (he refused to concretize the versions). “We are also checking the version of a murder, but I do not think this is what happened,” Mr. Shokin said.
