Taras Kuzio’s Blog

When will Justice be Served in Ukraine?

Two events this week focused my attention again on events in 2004 that remain unresolved as there is little political will to resolve them. As time goes by it will be more difficult to prosecute the crimes committed in the Leonid Kuchma era. Political compromises between Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych will serve to prevent the prosecution of these crimes.

On Monday, the UK accused a Russian citizen of being involved in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in November of last year in London. Andrei Lugovoi was undoubtedly not the only assassin as such an operation requires a team of individuals. He is unlikely to be extradited to the UK to stand trial.

There is no such thing as a “former” intelligence officer and although Lugovoi had left the KGB and FSB and operated his own private security firm his links to Russia’s intelligence services would have undoubtedly remained. Such private security firms run by former KGB and FSB officers are often hired by the Russian authorities to undertake ‘mokreye dela’, or ‘wet affairs’ as the KGB called assassinations undertaken abroad.

The Soviet secret services have a long record of undertaking foreign assassinations of Ukrainian and other diaspora leaders: Semon Petliura (1926, Paris), Yevhen Konovalets (1938, Rotterdam), Lev Rebet (1957, Munich) and Stepan Bandera (1959, Munich). There will never be evidence or a ‘paper trail’ of the Russian regime’s hiring of Lugovoi’s company to murder Litvinenko. But, the fact that the Russian puppet parliament adopted a law authorizing foreign assassinations of ‘enemies’ of the Russian state created the atmosphere that made such attacks permissible.

On Tuesday, 12 Serbs guilty of murdering Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic were sentenced by a Serb court to lengthy sentences. Djindjic was a leader of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia that came to power in the 2000 revolution. Those sentenced included former police officers and organized crime members.

Serbia remains a precarious democracy. The extreme right Radical Party, whose leader is on trial in The Hague for war crimes, won this years elections and the Radical Party leader briefly became parliamentary speaker. Nevertheless, Serbia’s fragile democracy has successfully sentenced those implicated in the assassination of democratic reformer Djindjic. In contrast to Serbia’s trial of Djindjic’s assassins, Lugovoi will never face trial in Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian Russia.

Ukraine’s fragile democracy is closer to Serbia’s democratising state than to Russia’s autocracy. The likelihood of the organizers of Georgi Gongadze’s murder in 2000 or the twice attempted murder of Yushchenko in 2004 to be put on trial and convicted are highly unlikely. Yushchenko’s poisoning was a heinous crime as was the attempt to blow up his election headquarters. If the bomb had gone ahead many would have been murdered in Yushchenko’s headquarters and in buildings close by, such as the US Ambassador’s official residence.

In post-Orange Revolution Ukraine its ruling elites continue to remain, as in the Kuchma era, above the law. Only one of them has ever been tried and convicted, but not by a Ukrainian court but by a US court. The irony is that if Pavlo Lazarenko had not fled to the USA but had stayed in Ukraine he would be now enjoying parliamentary immunity and walking a free man. Volodymyr Shcherban understood this and returned from US exile to Ukraine lat year where he received support from Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions.

Ukraine and Serbia have many other similarities which I wrote about these four years ago (http://www.taraskuzio.net/media/pdf/yugos_ukraine.pdf) when comparing the Slobodan Milosevic and Kuchma regime’s tactics against the opposition. Their favourite choice was to use Kamaz trucks to crash into cars carrying opposition leaders. An attempt to murder Djindjic using a Kamaz truck failed only weeks before a sniper assassinated him. A Kamaz truck killed Rukh leader Vyacheslav Chornovil in 1999.

Although countries which experienced democratic revolutions are often grouped together, Serbia and Ukraine are more similar and thereby different to Georgia. In Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili won the presidential elections by 96 percent of the vote whereas Vojislav Kostunica and Yushchenko only won with 52 percent each. In Georgia the old regime was thereby vanquished, never to return to power. In Ukraine and Serbia the old regime still maintained a large degree of support and in both countries the Party of Regions and Radical Party won their elections in 2006 and 2007 respectively.

Nevertheless, in Serbia there was found political will to investigate and convict the assassins of Djindjic. In Ukraine the prosecutor who covered up the Gongadze murder were awarded state medals for their ‘contributions to the rule of law’ (Mykhailo Potebenko) and were reinstated as Prosecutor in 2007 after they had provided protection for immunity deals for Kuchma and his ruling elites (Svytoslav Piskun).

Serbia’s pursuit of justice gives me optimism that one day it will join the EU. Ukraine’s lack of pursuit of justice gives me grounds to be pessimistic about the country joining the EU. A country whose president promised to investigate the Gongadze murder as a ‘matter of honour’ but is unwilling to convict the organizers has reduced its chances of joining the EU. A country unwilling to investigate the poisoning of the democratic opposition candidate will only send a signal to those who committed such a crime in Ukraine and in Russia that they can do it again with impunity. Yanukovych remains unwilling to accept his responsibility for Ukraine’s worst election fraud committed when he was head of the government. If he, and his allies, had been forced to take responsibility today Ukraine would not be in crisis.