KIEV, Ukraine -- Also a victim allegedly of Oleksiy Pukach, Oleksiy Podolsky doesn’t believe Ukraine’s leaders want to solve the Georgiy Gongadze case.
Oleksiy Podolsky cannot forget the perverse joy that Oleksiy Pukach took in strangling him nine years ago, just three months before the Sept. 16, 2000, kidnapping and murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze.“Unlike the other officers who were beating me, it seemed like Pukach was not just carrying out orders, but getting delight in doing so. He took off his belt and tightened it around my neck. I saw pleasure on his face. That was the same he [allegedly] did with Gongadze.”Pukach, a key suspect in the Gongadze case, was arrested on July 21 in rural Zhytomyr Oblast. The former Interior Ministry general’s detention ended nearly six years on the run for the man who allegedly organized Gongadze’s kidnapping and strangled him with his own hands. Three of his ex-subordinates, all police officers at the time, have been convicted and sentenced to 12-13 years in prison for their role in the murder. The three convicted are Mykola Protasov, Valeriy Kostenko and Oleksandr Popovych.The big question now is whether Pukach will identify those who ordered the murder of Gongadze, whose investigative journalism had angered ex-President Leonid Kuchma and former high-ranking members of his administration.Podolsky, whose human rights activists had also run afoul of the Kuchma administration, does not think that Pukach’s arrest will solve the case. He sides with those who dismiss Pukach’s arrest as a re-election campaign stunt by President Victor Yushchenko.“Pukach’s arrest was a clever stroke of the coming election campaign. Those who helped him to hide once, gave him up today.” Podolsky said. “I do not believe he could have been hiding for six years under his own name and nobody could find him. It’s nonsense! There was just no political will to show him earlier because all of our politicians were born amid the surroundings of Kuchma, including Yushchenko.”Podolsky thinks the political will to solve the Gongadze case may have died with former Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko, Pukach’s boss. Kravchenko died of two gunshot wounds to the head on March 4, 2005, the day he was supposed to give testimony to investigators in the Gongadze case.The official ruling that Kravchenko committed suicide has always been in dispute.“If they were interested in letting people know the truth, they would not have let Kravchenko die in the first days of Yushchenko’s presidency,” Podolsky said. “They quickly let Kravchenko’s body be cremated, just not to let [independent forensic] medical experts prove it was not a suicide,” Podolsky said. “Pukach is just a pre-election [chess] move.”Exposing the truth about who ordered Gongadze’s murder would also reopen the events described on the Mykola Melnychenko tapes. Those voluminous tapes were recorded by Melnychenko, Kuchma’s former bodyguard. They purportedly show Kuchma having a conversation with his top assistants – including current parliament speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn (then presidential chief of staff) and Kravchenko, among others – about the need to silence Gongadze.But the Gongadze murder was only one of many high-level crimes allegedly captured by the tapes. The 700-plus hours of recordings purportedly covered events in 1999 and 2000. If true, they show that Kuchma ran the nation like a mafia boss by plotting to harass political enemies, ordering the rigging of the 1999 presidential election in his favor and discussing corruption of other officials.Kuchma has denied the allegations. A succession of prosecutors, meanwhile, has stalled for nine years on authenticating the Melnychenko tapes, much less confirming or refuting the events described on them through credible, aggr-essive and competent investigations. But many others note that events described on the Melnychenko tapes mirrored actual events, including Gongadze’s murder, lending credibility to their authenticity.Podolsky is among those who suspect that Yushchenko privately offered Kuchma immunity in the Gongadze case and possibly involving other events, perhaps in exchange for allowing the 2004 Orange Revolution to end peacefully with the Dec. 26, 2004, election of Yushchenko as president.“When the Prosecutor General’s Office does not want to surrender Melnychenko’s tapes for international independent expert examination, it proves Yushchenko’s guarantees to Kuchma,” Podolsky said. “If it is proved that the tapes are authentic, we’ll establish evidence of the crimes against Gongadze and Podolsky” and many others, including privatization scandals and election fraud, he said.Like Gongadze did with his investigative reporting, Podolsky evidently ran afoul of the Kuchma administration with his human rights activity.As he does now, Podolsky in 2000 had been working as a political scientist at Ukrainian Initiative political fund and We, a Kyiv-based human rights organization that had been criticizing Kuchma’s regime in articles and booklets.On June 9, 2000, Podolsky was kidnapped the same way and by the same car as Gongadze was three months later.“I was walking down Lviv Square in Kyiv. At 10:30 p.m. there stopped a Hyundai Sonata. Inside were Pukach and two officers from the Interior Ministry’s Criminal Investigation Department – Major Oleh Marynyak and Colonel Mykola Naumets – [convicted on May 8, 2007, by the Kyiv City Appellate Court].” Podolsky said. “When I got into the car, I was immediately hit. They took away my wallet, my passport and my glasses so that I could not see where we were going.”What later happened to Gongadze, Podolsky charged, was almost exactly what Pukach and his team had done to him.Podolsky said his kidnappers took him 130 kilometers from Kyiv to the woods of Petrivka village in Chernihiv Oblast. They beat him and threatened to kill if he continued writing articles against the Kuchma regime.The police ordered him to dig his own grave.“Marynyak showed me a spade and a gasoline can to burn my body. He told I would be digging my own grave if I would do anything against Kuchma and the Interior Ministry.” Podolsky said. “But when he was taking a can out of the car, I heard it was empty. That is when I understood it was all a theatrical performance going on. Unfortunately, with Gongadze it was not.”Even though Podolsky still is involved in human rights work for the same organization, he no longer is afraid of being kidnapped or killed for his work. He is simply not a threat to anyone in power, he said.“The Melnychenko tapes prove that Kuchma ordered then Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko” to murder Gongadze, Podolsky said. “On the tapes we may also hear Kravchenko’s report on the Podolsky beating.”Pukach may still be tried with Podolsky’s kidnapping now.Podolsky said his kidnapping – and its resemblance to Gongadze’s murder -- has made it more difficult for him to get jobs. “First I was taken in by employers and the next day they changed their minds. It means they are afraid themselves. It means it is not safe to express political views in Ukraine,” he said.Over the years, journalists outside of Ukraine have taken a much greater interest in Podolsky’s story than journalists inside the nation.“They do not invite me because they know what I will say and whom I will blame, such as Kuchma and the late Kravchenko. That is a sign there is no freedom of press in Ukraine. They just do not want to hear me,” Podolsky said. “But while Ukrainian media were keeping quiet, many of my colleagues from My (We) human rights organization had been warned or killed. First Serhiy Odarych, the mayor of Cherkasy, was warned, then he was shot in the back. Luckily he lived. Then Oleksandr Yakymenko, my friend and deputy of the local Donetsk board, the head of the representative office of “My,” was killed. The flat of the other “My” representative, Serhiy Kudryashov, set on fire. Nobody cared. There is no political will to care in Ukraine.”
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