Contents 1. Preface 2. 1 “Evil has to be stopped” 3. 2 Marchuk, the arch-conspirator 4. 3 Kuchma fixes his re-election 5. 4 East & West celebrate Kuchma’s victory 6. 5 Kuchma and Putin share secrets 7. 6 Corruption 8. 7 Haunted by Lazarenko 9. 8 Bakai “the conman” 10. 9 “Yuliya must be destroyed” 11. 10 Prime minister’s wife “from the CIA”? 12. 11 Kidnapping Podolsky & killing Gongadze 13. 12 Covering up murder 14. 13 Marchuk’s “secret coordinating center” 15. 14 Kolchuga fails to oust Kuchma 16. 15 The Melnychenko-Kuchma pact 17. 16 “We can put anyone against the wall” 18. 17 Fixed election sparks Orange Revolution 19. 18 Yanukovych’s revenge 20. Bibliography 21. Acknowledgements 22. A note on the author 23. Books by JV Koshiw Artemia Press Ltd Published by Artemia Press Ltd, 2013 www.artemiabooks.com ISBN 978-0-9543764-3-7 Copyright © JV Koshiw, 2013 All rights reserved. Database right Artemia Press Ltd (maker) The photograph on the front cover It shows President Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yushchenko clasping hands, while his rival Viktor Yanukovych looks on. Yushchenko’s pot marked face bears witness to the Dioxin poisoning inflicted on him a few weeks earlier during the 2004 presidential election campaign. Photo taken by Valeri Soloviov on Nov. 26, 2004, during the negotiations to end the Orange Revolution (Photo UNIAN). System of transliterations The study uses the Library of Congress system of transliteration for Ukrainian, with exceptions in order to make Ukrainian words easier to read in English. The letter є will be transcribed as ye and not ie. For example, it will be Yevhen and not Ievhen. The letter ї will be transcribed as i and not ii, that is Ukraina and not Ukraiina. For ю, it will be yu and not iu: Yushchenko and not Iushchenko. For я, it will be ya, and not ia: Yuliya and not Iuliia. The soft sign ь will not be transliterated; hence it will be Lviv and not L’viv. Places and names from Ukraine will be transliterated from Ukrainian and not Russian. It will be Kyiv and not Kiev, Kharkiv and not Kharkov, Lviv and not Lvov, Odesa and not Odessa, Chornobyl and not Chernobyl, Mykola and not Nikolai, Volodymyr and not Vladimir. Chart and Tables Chapter 3 Chart 3.1 - Annual change in GDP 1992-2001 Chapter 7 Table 7.1 – List of companies giving kickbacks to Lazarenko Table 7.2 - Pavlo Lazarenko’s foreign bank deposits in 2005 Table 7.3 - Lazarenko’s distributors of natural gas for 1996 Chapter 8 Table 8.1 - Ukraine’s Natural Gas Debts to Russia’s Gazprom Table 8.2 - Bakai’s cost to Ukraine’s economy Chapter 16 Table 16.1 - Kushnir-Rabin gang killed during Yanukovych’s governorship Preface Since independence in 1991, Ukraine has ranked, as measured by Transparency International, in the top quarter of the world’s most corrupt states. This book focuses on corruption – “the abuse of entrusted power for private gain” – at the highest political level, the office of the president. The primary evidence presented in this book are the office conversations of President Leonid Kuchma, which took place in 1999 and 2000 with a cross-section of the elite, ranging from the head of his office to ministers, oblast (regional) governors and oligarchs. The conversations document how a president conducted a host of illegal activities, including giving and taking bribes, and condoning the stealing of millions of dollars from the state. To maintain this system of personal enrichment at state expense, the president and his cohort fixed elections, controlled the mass media, operated an illegal surveillance network, and instigated extra-judicial punishments of critics, including the murder of the journalist Georgi Gongadze. In the same corrupt vein, the president conducted Ukraine’s foreign relations. He and his oligarchs sold weapons to conflict zones in violation of UN and international agreements, skimmed the profits from imports and exports, especially gas and oil, and took international loans for the state while emptying its coffers for themselves. The final chapters focus on Kuchma’s chosen successor, Viktor Yanukovych, and the fixing of the 2004 presidential elections that sparked the October Revolution. From Yanukovych’s conversations in President Kuchma’s office, it could have been predicted that on becoming president in 2010, he would retaliate against those who had offended him, including his mentor Kuchma. President Yanukovych took revenge on Kuchma for betraying him during the Orange Revolution by having him prosecuted for the murder of the journalist Gongadze. However, Yanukovych crossed the political Rubicon when he imprisoned his presidential opponent, Yuliya Tymoshenko, who he only beat by 3% in the 2010 presidential elections. The study reveals that the presidential guard, Mykola Melnychenko, recorded President Kuchma for the political benefit of Ukraine’s first secret service chief, Yevhen Marchuk. Kuchma’s office conversations are probably the most important source on the current political situation in Ukraine. This is the first study on contemporary Ukraine that makes extensive use of President Kuchma’s office conversations. Other studies have made minimal use of them, mainly because they didn’t have access to them. The Yale academic, Keith Darden only used a single conversation with which he illustrated the use of graft as a mechanism to enhance the authority of the president (Darden 2002). He argued that the president allowed stealing from the state as a way to bind his supporters’ loyalty, and punish the disloyal for the same crimes. The British academic Andrew Wilson used a few excerpts from the recordings to illustrate his thesis that Ukraine under Kuchma was a “virtual democracy,” where those in power pretend to be democratic (Wilson 2001). The academic Paul D’Anieri referred to the Melnychenko recordings to back his thesis that Ukraine’s politics can be described as “electoral authoritarianism,” whereby politicians seek legitimacy by fixing elections (D’Anieri 2007). The Washington DC based academic Anders Aslund, who made no use of the Melnychenko recordings, asserted that Kuchma secured democracy for Ukraine (Aslund 2008) “with relatively limited violations of democracy” (Aslund 2009). The abuse of power by a president has intensified since the coming to power of President Yanukovych in 2010. Repressive actions against opponents have been driven by vindictiveness, causing even deeper political divisions in society. 1 “Evil has to be stopped” In early 1999, candidates lined up for the October presidential elections to challenge the incumbent President Leonid Kuchma. Among them was Yevhen Marchuk, the former prime minister and Ukraine’s first head of state security, the SBU [Sluzhba Bezbeky Ukrayiny]. His chances of becoming president were small on account of not having a sizable electorate or even a political party. His core supporters were those who believed only a “strong” hand was able to get rid of Kuchma and his oligarchs. Among them was the presidential guard Mykola Melnychenko, who had the job of protecting President Kuchma from electronic eavesdropping. Apparently, he had began experiments on how to record the president’s conversations. As Marchuk began to gear up for the elections, Melnychenko approached him through a mutual acquaintance: Our meeting took place at the beginning of the spring 1999. I presented myself, showed him my identification that I was a captain with the position of senior security officer in the State Security of Ukraine. … We spoke for about 17 minutes. I gave him a few recordings to listen to proving that Kuchma had broken the law and the criminal code. I asked him for advice on what to do, what we would be doing and how. He replied that “evil has to be stopped, continue to record, and find a way to stop this evil”. (Melnychenko 2003). So began the systematic recording of the president’s conversations that lasted until the end of September 2000. The release of the president’s conversations on punishing extrajudicially the journalist Georgi Gongadze ignited one of Ukraine’s greatest political crises since independence. After Gongadze’s headless corpse was discovered, the conversations implied that the president was responsible for the murder. For the public, Melnychenko has repeatedly stated that he recorded Kuchma to expose him as a criminal, and denied working for anyone (Melnychenko 2005d). He claimed to have recorded the president solely for altruistic reasons: “there was the matter of conscience” and “my father raised me to fight for what is right – the rule of law” (Bihun 2002). He alone, he said, took the initiative to record the president in order to expose him as a criminal. But in private, he said he worked for the former head of state security, Yevhen Marchuk. During 1999, he had provided Marchuk with the president’s conversations so that the former head of state security could have an advantage over the other presidential candidates. He didn’t expose any crimes by the president, including the throwing of grenades at a presidential candidate. This contradicted his assertion that he recorded Kuchma to expose him as a criminal. In 2000, after Marchuk had failed in the elections to replace Kuchma, Melnychenko continued to record, as the two hoped Kuchma could be hounded out of office with a major scandal. Gongadze’s disappearance and killing provided that opportunity. In recording the president, the then 33-year presidential guard did take a life threatening risk. If discovered, he could have been jailed for espionage and may even have been assassinated. There was nothing in the guard’s past to suggest why he would take such chances. Before becoming a presidential guard, all his work experience was with the KGB, an organization which you followed any kind of orders, legal or illegal.