On July 22, the biggest news in Ukraine was the arrest of Lieutenant General Oleksii Pukach, former head of the Interior Affairs Ministry’s Criminal Investigation Department, officially regarded as the chief perpetrator in the Heorhiy Gongadze murder case. Pukach was apprehended in Zhytomyr oblast late on July 21, and the president’s press secretary Iryna Vannykova told the media later that Viktor Yushchenko was aware of the fact. The arrest was made as a joint SBU-GPU operation pursuant to the president’s executive order to find and arrest all the perpetrators and organizers of the Gongadze murder.
According to Deputy Prosecutor General Viktor Kudriavtsev, Pukach was interrogated throughout the night of July 21—22. At a briefing held later, Deputy SBU Chief Vasyl Hrytsak said that Pukach had identified the persons who had ordered Gongadze’s murder and promised to show the place where Gongadze’s head was buried. Time will show whether this is true. However, a number of questions arise today.
First, were they really trying to find and arrest Pukach but failed to do so all this time? Ex-Prosecutor General Piskun is quoted as saying, “Three years ago I told them that Oleksii Pukach is in Ukraine” — this was when Oleksandr Medvedko was Prosecutor General. Hrytsak also said during the briefing that Pukach had never left Ukraine.
Following his arrest, Viktor Yushchenko said in an interview to the Silski visti that he had put the responsibility for Pukach’s safety directly on Deputy Prosecutor General Mykola Holomsha and SBU Chief Valentyn Nalyvaichenko.
MP Serhii Holovaty had this to say in an interview to Glavred: “I am almost certain that Pukach’s breaking the surface on the eve of the presidential campaign is anything but a coincidence… Pukach’s escape was engineered, and then he was allowed to hide away until this H-hour.”
Second, what course will this investigation take? Is it possible that the investigators will be deliberately led astray? If this is being designed to produce political tensions, who will benefit? Objectively, this would benefit the incumbent head of state, considering that one of Viktor Yushchenko’s campaign promises in 2004 was to see to it that the Gongadze case would be finally solved—in other words, to detect and apprehend all those who ordered the journalist’s assassination.
Under the circumstances, considering his latest administration appointments, the whole situation does not make sense. Yushchenko appears credible when he says that he really wants to have the Gongadze case solved, but then one is led to conclude that the Head of State is unable to keep his Secretariat under control. How can one explain the mysterious appointment of Oleksandr Birsan, formerly a bodyguard of the then president, Leonid Kuchma, as head of the Government Security Directorate? Or that of Petro Shatkovsky, as deputy head of the Secretariat and the president’s aide authorized to monitor the SBU—the man had also occupied important law enforcement posts under President Kuchma. In a word, these are people from Kuchma’s inner circle.
THE GONGADZE MURDER CASE
Ukrainska Pravda‘s journalist Georgy Gongadze was kidnapped during the night of Sept. 16, 2000. A month and a half later, on Nov. 2, 2000, a headless body was found in the Tarashcha Forest, 100 km from Kyiv. Numerous forensic tests proved it was Gongadze’s body. The investigators version says that Pukach arranged for surveillance and headed the militia task force consisting of officers Valerii Kostenko, Mykola Protasiv, and Oleksandr Popovych that kidnapped Gongadze. The victim was taken to a field not far from the village of Sukholisy in Bila Tserkva raion, Kyiv oblast, where Pukach strangled the journalist with his own hands and ordered his accomplices to keep their mouths shut. Later, the body was buried in the forest.
The question is, Whose orders did Pukach follow? Experts believe that Pukach could not have acted on his own, without the knowledge and consent of Eduard Fere, the then head of the Interior Affairs Ministry’s Criminal Investigation Department, who was hospitalized in July 2003, comatose, and died several months ago. Also, Yurii Kravchenko, who was the minister of internal affairs at the time of the Gongadze murder, was found dead at his dacha in 2005. The case was officially recognized as an act of suicide, which still raises doubts, considering that lots of leads centered on Kravchenko.
Pukach was apprehended by the GPU back in October 2003 on the charge of destroying documents that contained evidence that Gongadze was under surveillance in May–June 2000. In order to maintain this surveillance, General Pukach received a brand-new three-room apartment in Kyiv’s elite downtown district, but in November that same year the Kyiv Court of Appeal released Pukach ordering him not to leave his place of residence after which he disappeared.
His case was taken off the shelf thanks to the taped recordings made in November 2000 by Major Melnychenko, former member of Leonid Kuchma’s personal security detail. These tapes allegedly confirm the complicity of Kuchma, Lytvyn, and Derkach in the Gongadze murder. In this connection numerous scandals ensued, but the proceedings in the Gongadze case were brought to a halt.
With Viktor Yushchenko coming to power, the case seemed to have received a fresh impetus. In March 2005 Yushchenko declared that the Gongadze case was solved, and Prosecutor General Piskun announced that certain ranking militia officials involved in the Gongadze case had pleaded guilty. After long court hearings the final verdict was returned in March 2008: three former officers of the Interior Affairs Ministry’s Criminal Investigation Department—Protasiv, Kostenko, and Popovych—were sentenced to 13, 12, and 12 years in prison, respectively, but those who had ordered the murder remained at large.
The Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly demanded that crimes perpetrated under President Leonid Kuchma be duly investigated. On Jan. 27, 2009, PACE adopted Resolution 1645 (2009), entitled “Investigation of crimes allegedly committed by high officials during the Kuchma rule in Ukraine: the Gongadze case as an emblematic example,” calling on the officials to “investigate the circumstances in which General Pukach was released from custody in 2003, and was later reportedly able to avoid arrest in Israel, and to open criminal cases against those responsible, as appropriate.”
In 2005 the media reported that the Israeli authorities made an abortive attempt to arrest General Pukach. In 2009 Prosecutor General Medvedko declared that Pukach had stayed in Ukraine for a while in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.
