Ex-Major Mykola Melnychenko made a number of sensational statements, in particular referring to those who allegedly ordered the murder of Heorhii Gongadze. Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada Volodymyr Lytvyn responded to Melnychenko’s accusations in a rather emotional way.
Lytvyn dismissed Melnychenko’s accusations of his involvement in Gongadze’s murder as “sheer nonsense,” after the ex-major voiced his allegations at a recent briefing.
Among other things, Melnychenko said that Leonid Kuchma, former head of the SBU Leonid Derkach, and Volodymyr Lytvyn, the then head of the Presidential Administration, had refused to provide European experts with samples of their voices needed to carry out an expertise. In Melnychenko’s words, the General Prosecutor’s Office asked the politicians to do this in order to compare their voices with the voices recorded by Melnychenko in the office of President Kuchma.
Now Lytvyn is more of a public figure than the other two men, so he had to comment on the major’s statements. The speaker expressed his surprise at Melnychenko’s claim that he had refused to provide a sample of his voice: in his words, he is a public person, so it would not be very difficult to obtain the samples even without his agreement.
However, eventually Lytvyn lost his usual composure. He said that Melnychenko is being directed from “one cabinet.” “For doing so [certain] people are given insignia and [tokens of] encouragement here and here,” the Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada said, pointing to his shoulder, where shoulder straps are attached, and then to his chest, where medals are pinned.
Both Kuchma and Derkach have kept mum regarding the accusations of the disgraced major.
As for Lytvyn, he had to deny more than one accusation: Melnychenko also claimed that Russia’s current leaders want to see Lytvyn as Ukraine’s president: “Represented by Dmitri Medvedev, Vladimir Putin, and Head of the FSB Aleksandr Bortnikov, Russia is staking on the presidential candidate Volodymyr Lytvyn.”
According to Melnychenko, Lytvyn “sides with the strong,” a habit that has helped him “outwit Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yanukovych. Now he has an advantage over Yushchenko and is playing with Lutsenko and Tymoshenko.”
Lytvyn’s was a terse reply: “I am not a horse to be staked on.” He conjectured that there is a link between these rumors and the new accusations of his involvement in Gongadze’s murder.
In his turn, Melnychenko expressed his belief that in the near future the expertise of his recordings will be finished, and the General Prosecutor’s Office will be able to open criminal cases on embezzlement, falsification of the results of presidential elections and referendums, and the bribing of MPs by the former leaders of the state.
In December 2008 Melnychenko handed over the originals of his recordings to European experts, who are to establish their authenticity. General Prosecutor Oleksandr Medvedko later said that the expertise might take several months. What concerns the case on Gongandze’s murder, the ex-major assured journalists that those who had ordered the murder remain in Ukraine.
At the moment, the investigation in the case of those who ordered the murder is underway. As for the killers, their case was closed in 2008, when three former employees of the Department of External Surveillance and Criminal Intelligence of Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, colonels Valerii Kostenko and Mykola Protasov and Major Oleksandr Popovych, were found guilty of murdering the journalist. Kostenko and Popovych were sentenced to 12 years in prison, while Protasov was handed a 13-year-long imprisonment sentence. Another culprit, former head of the above-mentioned department Oleksii Pukach, is being sought on an arrest warrant.
Heorhii’s widow, Myroslava Gongadze, believes that the Ukrainian government is covering up Pukach. She has recently expressed this opinion in an interview to Radio Svoboda. “The problem is that despite the statements made by Viktor Yushchenko to the effect that in the past two years Ukraine has been doing everything possible in order to find ‘this person’ and achieve some success in the investigation, nothing is happening in reality,” Myroslava said. “They are not searching for this person, General Pukach, but, what is more, they are covering him up in the highest echelons of power, in particular in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which is headed, incidentally, by Mr. Lutsenko, one of the leaders of the Ukraine without Kuchma movement,” she added.
In late January the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted the resolution “Investigation of crimes allegedly committed by high officials during the Kuchma rule in Ukraine – the Gongadze case as an emblematic example.” According to the document, the investigation of the Gongadze case will be followed in the framework of the monitoring procedure concerning Ukraine. In particular, the PACE demands from our state’s leadership to investigate the circumstances in which General Pukach, suspected of involvement in the murder of Gongadze, was released from custody in 2003, which enabled him to escape justice.
During the hearing in the PACE the BYuT MP Hryhorii Omelchenko said he was intending to initiate the creation of a new investigation commission in parliament to investigate this case. He also presented the resolutions of the commission he headed in 2002–2006 in the Verkhovna Rada. The resolutions identify Kuchma as the one who ordered the crime and Lytvyn as the instigator of Gongandze’s kidnapping.
To establish this commission, Omelchenko will need the votes of 150 MPs, whereas the BYuT fraction has 156 mandates.
