Identifier
Created
Classification
Origin
07KYIV283
2007-02-02 15:20:00
CONFIDENTIAL
Embassy Kyiv
Cable title:  

UKRAINE: OLD FACES, PRACTICES RETURN TO MINISTRY

Tags:  PGOV UP 
pdf how-to read a cable
VZCZCXRO6649
PP RUEHDBU
DE RUEHKV #0283/01 0331520
ZNY CCCCC ZZH
P 021520Z FEB 07
FM AMEMBASSY KYIV
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC PRIORITY 1111
INFO RUCNCIS/CIS COLLECTIVE
RUEHZG/NATO EU COLLECTIVE
C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 KYIV 000283 

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SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 01/26/2017
TAGS: PGOV UP
SUBJECT: UKRAINE: OLD FACES, PRACTICES RETURN TO MINISTRY
OF INTERIOR/POLICE

REF: A. KYIV 135

B. 06 KYIV 4433

C. 05 KIEV 3144

D. 05 KIEV 1794

Classified By: Ambassador, reason 1.4 (b,d)

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 KYIV 000283

SIPDIS

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 01/26/2017
TAGS: PGOV UP
SUBJECT: UKRAINE: OLD FACES, PRACTICES RETURN TO MINISTRY
OF INTERIOR/POLICE

REF: A. KYIV 135

B. 06 KYIV 4433

C. 05 KIEV 3144

D. 05 KIEV 1794

Classified By: Ambassador, reason 1.4 (b,d)


1. (C) Summary. Since the ouster of outspoken "orange"
Interior Minister Yuri Lutsenko December 1 and the
appointment of compliant Vasyl Tsushko in his place, some old
faces and practices from the pre-Orange Revolution era have
returned to the Ministry and police. Of note were the
appointments, as deputy Interior Ministers, of Serhiy Popkov,
the Commander of Interior Forces in November 2004, who
mobilized troops in the middle of the night for a potential
crackdown on Maidan demonstrators, and Mykola Plekhanov, the
ex-Sumy police chief who ordered police to beat up student
activists in August 2004, an event which sparked civic
outrage and fueled the movement leading into the Orange
Revolution. Past practices which were largely in abeyance
during Lutsenko's tenure but appear to have returned in the
past two months include mandatory payments to serve in high
police posts, regular payments to superiors, and a proposal
to resume on-the-spot payment of traffic fines. Still
unclear--and important--is the role newly appointed deputy PM
Volodymr Radchenko will play in overseeing law enforcement
and security structures.


2. (C) Comment: Radchenko told the Ambassador January 31 that
one of his top priorities in law enforcement would be
promoting anti-corruption activities, but it is too early to
know what kind of impact he might have. His appointment,
personnel shifts at the Ministry of Interior, and recent
comments made to us by the Border Guards make clear that the
PM/Cabinet now influence the Ministry/police more than the
President, as had been the case as long as Lutsenko was in
place. Personnel changes were inevitable; still unclear is
the overall direction of Ministry policy under the new
leadership and the commitment of the PM's team to law
enforcement reform. End Summary and Comment.

Changing of the guard: first at the Ministry...
-------------- --


3. (C) The turnover in Interior Ministry management from the
team which arrived in February 2005 after the Orange
Revolution and remained after Yanukovych's August 2006
appointment as PM started in Lutsenko's waning weeks.

Lutsenko told Ambassador in November that Yanukovych and
chief Regions' financier Rinat Akhmetov had pressured him to
allow them to propose candidates for provincial police
chiefs, particularly in eastern Ukraine. Lutsenko said that
he had refused but had offered Regions the First Deputy
Minister slot as a compromise (note: the former First Deputy
Minister, Oleksandr Bondarenko, a perceived ally of Our
Ukraine heavyweight Petro Poroshenko, died unexpectedly
September 2). Named to replace Bondarenko in early October
was Major General Ihor Bilozub, most recently chief of
security services for Akhmetov's Systems Capital Management
(SCM) empire, and prior to the Orange Revolution the longtime
First Deputy Chief of the Donetsk provincial police in charge
of combating organized crime (2000-2004).


4. (C) Once Lutsenko was ousted December 1 (ref B),more
extensive changes followed. Lutsenko's replacement, the
genial Socialist Vasyl Tsushko, known for his willingness to
take orders and not make waves (ref D),soon announced a
series of personnel changes which returned figures associated
with either Donetsk, Regions base, or other Kuchma-era
figures, to office. Most notable in the initial December
appointments was Mykola Plekhanov (deputy Minister for Human
Resources and Internal Security). Plekhanov, who had served
as a law enforcement adviser to PM Yanukovych since August
2006, is best known as a former Sumy oblast police chief and
close associate of former Sumy governor Volodymyr Shcherban
(ref C). In August 2004, at Shcherban's direction, Plekhanov
ordered Sumy police to use violence in breaking up a student
march on the road to Kyiv, an incident which sparked outrage,
helped fuel the PORA! student movement which acted as the
vanguard for the Orange Revolution, and was mentioned in the
2004 Human Rights Report. Plekhanov was also implicated,
though never charged, in using the Sumy police to commit
election fraud and pressure on election commissioners and
observers during the 2004 election.


5. (SBU) Two other deputy ministers appointed December 13
were: Mykola Krupiansky as Chief of the Criminal Police
(Krupiansky had worked for Bilozub from 2000-2004 in the
Donetsk division for combating organized crime); and Vasyl
Marmazov, in charge of legal issues (Marmazov is a former
Communist Rada MP and a close ally of communist leader Petro

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Symonenko).


6. (SBU) On January 11, Tsushko appointed General Serhiy
Popkov as deputy Interior Minister; Popkov served as
Commander of the Interior Ministry's ground forces from
2001-04 and, at the height of the Orange Revolution, issued
orders, subsequently rescinded, for Interior Troops to deploy
in the middle of the night of November 27, 2004 to clear the
Maidan of protesters (Popkov subsequently claimed the
deployment was a no-notice exercise; he issued the rescind
order after other security force commanders, including
Military Intelligence Chief Halaka, called to warn Popkov
they would counter the deployment).


7. (C) First Deputy Defense Minister Leonid Polyakov told us
January 12 that he considered Popkov's appointment to
contravene Yushchenko's decree on Ministry of Interior
appointments and that he would resign before being forced to
sit next to Popkov at a cabinet meeting, adding: "Having to
sit next to (recently appointed Emergencies Minister)
Shufrych in Cabinet meetings is bad enough." (Note: Shufrych
gained notoriety October 23, 2004 by running over several
Yushchenko supporters in his Mercedes SUV at an an election
rally and brawling with Yushchenko and his lieutenants later
that night inside the Central Election Commission after thugs
assaulted Yushchenko supporters outside. End note).
Polyakov characterized Shufrych and Popkov's appointments as
clear signals by Regions to government and police personnel
that Regions rewarded loyalty and would take care of those
who carried out their orders.

...then in the police...
--------------


8. (SBU) Tsushko next turned his attention to oblast police
chiefs, according to the press, summoning them all to a
January 18 meeting in which he suggested that most of them
should consider resigning. After none did so voluntarily,
Tsushko replaced 12 (of 26 nationwide) January 25. Of note

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was new Kyiv police chief Oleksiy Krykun, former
Dnipropetrovsk oblast chief and Chief of Police Supervision
in Kuchma's Presidential Administration. Media reports
linked Krykun not only to Kuchma but to former Interior
Minister Bilokon (in Moscow since the Orange Revolution
avoiding an arrest warrant),as well as Kuchma Chief of Staff
Medvedchuk. During the 2004 Presidential elections, Krykun
reportedly ordered the confiscation of a million copies of
the "Vecherniye vesti" newspaper owned by Tymoshenko which
contained Yushchenko campaign materials. Krykun has also
been linked in the press to Russian organized crime-linked
businessman Maksim Kurochkin, currently in Ukrainian
detention on extortion charges related to Crimean land deals;
in 2003, several media outlets accused Krykun of aiding
Kurochkin in an ownership dispute over Dnipropetrovsk's
"Ozerka" open-air market, one of Ukraine's largest and most
lucrative.


9. (SBU) Other notable provincial police chief appointments
made January 25 included: Vasyl Biryukov in Crimea (Biryukov
worked in the Donetsk Combating Organized Crime division in
the 1990s with Bilozub); Myhailo Tsymbalyuk in Lviv
(Tsymbalyuk was Kuchma's Ternopil governor in 2004, dismissed
after the Orange Revolution); and Valeriy Nonik in Chernihiv
(Nonik served as provincial police chief in Kirovohrad and
Zhytomyr in 2003-04).


10. (C) Note: Lutsenko told Ambassador November 18, in the
middle of the campaign to oust him, that four reasons kept
him battling to stay in place as long as possible. He
specifically cited success in foiling recent efforts by
Kurochkin to reseize control of the "Ozerka" market as an
example of preventing the police from overtly interfering in
business or being used as a tool in business disputes. His
other three rationales were to: prevent the wide-scale return
of criminal schemes within the police force itself, like car
smuggling rings; prevent the police from pressuring the
political process (as in 2004, absent in 2006); and protect
the police "and by extension the people" from a return to old
habits for as long as he could.

...and a reversion to old practices?
--------------


11. (SBU) Anecdotal evidence suggests some of those old
habits may have returned since Lutsenko's ouster. The family
friend of an embassy LE staffer claimed that he will soon
lose his relatively high-ranking police post because he could
not afford to pay the "price" assigned to the position. He
alleged that the new team had set mandatory payments for all
high and medium positions. He also said that the previous
practice of subordinates being forced to pass a certain sum

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of money to superiors had also resumed, after being in
abeyance since Lutsenko's appointment in February 2005.


12. (SBU) Oleksiy Kalinsky, the newly appointed Chief of the
Vehicle Inspection Department (DAI) lent some credence to
such claims in his comments to the press after his January 24
appointment. Kalinsky said that he favored the restoration
of the DAI structure which existed prior to recent reforms
(Lutsenko had combined the DAI with the foot patrol in an
effort to reduct corruption). He also proposed restoring the
previous DAI right to demand on-the-spot payment of traffic
fines, as well as an increase in the average amount of fines
for breaking traffic rules (note: "DAI" is an unintentionally
appropriate acronym, since it is also the imperative form of
the verb "to give," the gruff request of the traffic police
for roadside payments to avoid larger fines. Yushchenko
tried to abolish the DAI in August 2005 as a populist way of
reducing corruption, with plans to replace it with a more
modern highway patrol force but faced traffic safety issues
in the interim. DAI presence on Ukrainian roads gradually
increased throughout 2006. end note)

Will Radchenko Make a Differece?
--------------


13. (C) The January appointment of Volodymr Radchenko to a
newly-created Deputy Prime Minister position signals
increased attention from PM Yanukovych to law enforcement
structures and reforms, long a priority area for President
Yushchenko. Radchenko, who has held leadership roles in the
NSDC, SBU, and the Interior Ministry, has the experience and
authority to promote change and is getting cautiously
optimistic reviews from a number of reformers who work
closely with the Embassy on our assistance programs. At a
January 31 meeting with the Ambassador, Radchenko emphasized
the importance he places on modernizing law enforcement
organs and practices to bring them into line with European
norms. He told the Ambassador that he had ordered all key
law enforcement agencies, specifically naming the SBU,
Interior Ministry, Border Guards, and the Tax Administration,
to provide within one month their current anti-corruption
programs and policies. At that point, Radchenko said that he
will be in a better position to move forward. He also noted
that another priority would be to oversee the functioning of
UkrSpetsExport (state arms exporter) and the honoring of
Ukrainian obligations to enforce export controls.


14. (C) Radchenko said that he had great faith in younger,
western-oriented reformers leading the process of modernizing
Ukrainian law enforcement. In particular, he pointed to
Acting SBU head Naliyavachenko as an example of a
western-oriented, progressive thinker who is doing good work
in pushing ahead SBU reform. Radchenko noted that he would
work closely with NSDC Secretary Haiduk, and his presumed
deputy, former SBU head Drizchany, on reform. He also said
that he had talked to Presidential Administration Head Baloha
and even met with President Yushchenko to ensure that CabMin
and presidential team efforts were coordinated. In
Radchenko's view, the MCC Threshold program could do a great
deal to support the Government's anti-corruption work.


15. (C) Comment. Radchenko presented himself as a
professional, dedicated to solving problems and getting
results as he promotes reform in the law enforcement sector.
With one exception, a mini-tirade about the dangers of former
Interior Minister Lutsenko, whom he called corrupt and a
drunk, using his new civic movement to change the government
undemocratically, Radchenko focused on anti-corruption and
the importance of reform. What remains to be seen is whether
he and the CabMin will simply stay focused on high policy in
general or also wade in to reverse the trend at the Interior
Ministry described above. End Comment.


16. (U) Visit Embassy Kyiv's classified website:
www.state.sgov.gov/p/eur/kiev.
Taylor