Pinchuk comes to court instead of Kuchma

By Ivan KAPSAMUN, The Day

The Kuchma case has been adjourned for another two months. The last judicial instance the ex-president was to go through is the High Specialized Court of Ukraine for Criminal and Civil Cases. This court chose not to look into the Prosecutor General’s Office complaint about a lower-court’s ruling that it was illegal to institute proceedings against ex-president Kuchma. The ostensible reason is that some of the parties to the trial have not met certain organizational and procedural requirements. Therefore, the presiding judge Mykhailo Vilhushynsky adjourned the session until July 26.

“I agree to the court’s ruling,” [Kuchma’s former security guard Mykola] Melnychenko’s lawyer Pavlo Sychov comments. “These formal requirements of the law must be fulfilled. The problem is that, firstly, not all the appeals were timely delivered by mail and, secondly, not all the parties to the trial have received copies of the letters of appeal.” It turned out that the lawyer himself had also failed, for still unknown reasons, to receive the appeal copies. Incidentally, the appeals were filed not only by the Prosecutor General’s Office, but also by the other parties to the trial, namely, Melnychenko’s side; Valentyna Telychenko, representative of Myroslava Gongadze; and Oleksii Podolsky, the aggrieved party.

“The pretext for adjourning the session is the allegation that I formulated my appeal in a wrong way,” Podolsky comments, “but I had filed the same kind of complaint earlier to the Court of Appeal. I have only changed the headline now. In other words, my arguments remain the same. The Court of Appeal accepted and looked into my complaint, but the High Specialized Court did not. But, whatever the case, it is just a formal pretext. Of course, this has nothing to do with the essence of the matter and cannot be the grounds for delaying the hearing of the complaint for two months. In my view, the court had decided beforehand to find a pretext for adjourning the session.”

It was interesting to see which of the parties to the trial were for and against the adjournment. Those who favored this were the prosecutors, Melychenko’s lawyers, and Podolsky, the aggrieved party, while Kuchma’s defense attorneys and Myroslava Gongadze’s lawyer Telychenko opposed the move. As expected, isn’t it?

But the main thing happened before the session itself. It turned out that Viktor Pinchuk, Kuchma’s son-in-law, had visited the court between 9 and 10 a.m. “I had come to the court a little earlier to find out which of the doors I was to knock at,” Podolsky says, “Speaking with a security guard, I suddenly saw Pinchuk coming out of the doorway. I don’t know if he met somebody there shortly before the trial. But what was he doing there? Perhaps he came to, of all places, the court to have a morning cup of coffee?”

But, as the session result showed, they failed to resolve the “problem.” The Kuchma family was hardly interested in the adjournment because they have long been eager to bring this trial to an end. They are making tremendous efforts. Newspaper articles, TV documentaries, visits of Western guests at the invitation of the Pinchuk Foundation – all this is the same line aimed at clearing the ex-president of the charges. We have more than once written about this. But, as we can see, something has malfunctioned this time. Kuchma used to say that he did not rule out running for a parliamentary seat, but he failed to have this case closed at last and run for parliamentary membership with a clear conscience. Incidentally, it is telling that the trial was adjourned precisely to the time when Verkhovna Rada candidatures will begin to be nominated.

“From the very beginning, opening a case against Kuchma was the element of a political game,” Podolsky says. “Whether they will play it to the end is still a question. Firstly, there is such thing as presidential solidarity. No president wants to create a precedent and put his predecessors inside, all the more so that our presidents come from the same ‘beehive.’ Secondly, the Kuchma case is a sword of Damocles over all this team. In public terms, the latter is personified by Arsenii Yatseniuk. With such a trump card as the Kuchma case, the current leadership is in fact keeping the whole clan on a short leash. This is an element of deterrence. Should this case be properly tried to the end, this will mean the ‘death’ of not so much Kuchma himself as the entire team. For any morally unclean force is doomed to oblivion.”

And, in conclusion, a sensation. It will be recalled that the Prosecutor General’s Office instituted criminal proceedings against ex-president Kuchma last March. He is accused of the abuse of power and office, which led to the murder of the journalist Gongadze and a crime against the public figure Podolsky. The Day has at its disposal the appeal of the Prosecutor General’s Office to the High Specialized Court. It includes, among other things, the testimony of I.S. Pukhlikova, secretary of the late Yurii Kravchenko, ex-minister of internal affairs. According to Pukhlikova, Kravchenko said that Kuchma had personally instructed him to “get even with Gongadze.” Here follows an excerpt from the letter of appeal:

“Nor did the court take into account the testimony of the witness I.S. Pukhlikova, the former secretary of Yu.F. Kravchenko, who explained that Kravchenko had been repeatedly saying that L.D. Kuchma and E.V. Fere had set him up in the Gongadze case. The president of Ukraine personally instructed him to ‘get even with the journalist’ and ‘teach him a lesson.’ The witness did not say, however, whether Kuchma instructed Kravchenko to physically destroy H.R. Gongadze (Volume 83, pp. 71-77, 78-82, 83-88).

“On the eve of the 2004 presidential elections in Ukraine, Kravchenko was worried very much that the Gongadze case might be blamed on him. In private conversations, he never denied having been implicated in the disappearance of Gongadze. In October 2003, after the arrest of O.P. Pukach, Kravchenko confirmed the involvement of Pukach in the journalist’s disappearance and did not rule out the involvement of Fere in this because the latter was a role model for Pukach.

“After reading the transcripts of the recordings made by M.I. Melnychenko in the office room of President Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine, Pukhlikova explained that Kravchenko did not doubt that the recordings were authentic and that the journalist Gongadze had been spied on and persecuted by policemen on the instruction of the president of Ukraine.

“Kravchenko did not wish to speak on this subject, and it was clear that he found no pleasure in listening to the media-hyped recordings of the conversations about the journalist Gongadze.

“In March 2005, after receiving a summons to the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine, Kravchenko said he was convinced that prosecutors had proved his complicity in the murder of Gongadze and that he would be arrested. In her opinion, these conversations prompted Kravchenko to decide to commit suicide. After the MP O.O. Moroz had made public the Melnychenko tapes in 2000 and the burial place of Gongadze’s corpse had been found, Kravchenko did not rule out the possibility of his arrest.”

It looks like everything has long been clear to everybody in Ukraine and abroad. Yet the ex-president’s vast resources and the political advantage for his opponents are so far getting the upper hand. But this cannot last forever. Sooner or later, this will be finished.