U.S. reports Ukrainian pattern of violence and intimidation towards activists

Police announced on Dec. 26 the arrest of a third suspect in the Dec. 24 vehicular assault and brutal beating of activist and journalist Tetiana Chornovol. Meanwhile, the Ukrayinska Pravda news site published video evidence that one of the arrested suspects was at a restaurant at the time of the attack. The second arrested suspect told Ukrayinska Pravda he was not involved at all, stating he was home at the time of the crime. News reports said the arrested suspects are acquaintances of another suspect placed under search, Serhiy Kotenko, who bought the Porsche Cayenne video-recorded on the highway assault of Chornovol’s vehicle. The third arrested suspect wasn’t identified by police.

Chornovol told journalists on Dec. 26 from her hospital bed that she thinks she could have been assaulted for her reports and photographs on the suburban Kyiv mansions of Internal Affairs Minister Vitaliy Zakharchenko and Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka. She also reported on a second suburban mansion built by Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, which she described as even more lavish than the Mezhyhiria estate that he is suspected of misappropriating from state ownership.

The U.S. State Department issued a Dec. 26 statement saying Chornovol’s beating was “particularly disturbing” and it will be monitoring the situation. “The U.S. expresses its grave concern over an emerging pattern of targeted violence and intimidation towards activists and journalists” who participated in or reported on the EuroMaidan protests, said the statement issued by State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki.

Former Internal Affairs Minister Yuriy Lutsenko said in a newspaper interview published on Dec. 26 that what stopped the Yanukovych administration from forcefully liquidating the EuroMaidan protests ahead of the president’s Dec. 17 visit to Moscow was the prospect of economic sanctions from the West. “It was a concession, but fulfilled at the West’s demand: ‘Stop violence, no repressions and arrests’,” he said. “That demand was enforced by a specific plan of economic sanctions that would have been implemented within five days.” Until then, Yanukovych was fulfilling a Kremlin scenario of liquidating the protests that included the Nov. 30 violent dispersal of protesting students and most recently, forbidding the entry of foreigners.

Zenon Zawada: With Western government observing “an emerging pattern of targeted violence and intimidation,” the Yanukovych administration is continuing to burn its bridges. It could still face economic sanctions, despite the concession of leaving alone the EuroMaidan protest, which is completing its fifth week today (and 27 days of occupation of Independence Square and the Kyiv City Council). It’s unclear how long the Yanukovych administration plans to heed Western demands to exercise restraint with regard to the EuroMaidan and we agree with Lutsenko’s observation that it would have otherwise been violently liquidated.