Student Dies in Police Custody

Ihor Indylo died one night shy of his 20th anniversary.



He and a friend had a little drink at the dorm in the evening. As the two parted, Ihor had an argument with an on-campus police officer and ended up escorted to the Shevchenko rayon police precinct.

Later in the evening, the faculty pleaded with the officer to let him out for the night. The officer declined, saying Ihor was misbehaving at the precinct and would be detained for three days.

As Channel 1+1 found out, ambulances had rushed to the precinct four times during the night but had refused to hospitalize Ihor. In the morning, the faculty called Ihor’s parents to tell them they could take their son’s body home.

The police side of the story: Dead-drunk and unruly, Ihor fell and hurt himself. Three times.



However, the autopsy report somewhat contradicts that account, Channel 1+1 says.

Shockingly, the autopsy had been performed before the parents learned of their son’s death. The pathologist wouldn’t allow them to fully examine his body.

Ihor’s relatives thought he had choked. “All this time we had this version that he choked,” says Ihor's mother as she fights back tears. She then reads from the autopsy report: “Brain hemorrhage, skull fracture, damage done as a result of impact with a blunt object.”

Police are now putting pressure on students to testify that Ihor had started a brawl and arrived at the precinct with his skull already fractured. (That’s what the students told Channel 1+1 in phone calls.)

The faculty says Ihor didn’t have drinking problems. An eye witness says Ihor looked fine as he stepped into the police car.

Yanukovych says he wants to know what happened as Shevchenko rayon police chiefs have been suspended in the ongoing probe.

I’ll tell you what happened, Mr. President. It’s “Ukraine for the People,” remember?

As long as the people of Ukraine don’t act like the people of France, Greece and Romania, you can sleep well.

A few more facts and figures. Ukraine employs a police force of 302,000 for a population of 45,905,300 (2010). By comparison, the U.S. employs a police force of 883,600 for a population of 305,529,237 (2009).

The SBU, our security service, totals 33,000. That’s the size of the FBI.

Size means security? Wrong. It means corruption, mismanagement and brutality.

This law enforcement culture had flourished under Kuchma and Yushchenko. (Anatoliy Mohyliov, the current minister of the interior, served as the Crimean police chief under Yushchenko. And boy did he police those Crimean Tatars.)



Upholding the law of the jungle requires a lot of people skills.

Some people get their palms blown away.



Some get beaten silly.







Some get tortured.









And some only have months to live.

Yanukovych Struggles With Words, Events

The wages of being President Yanukovych come in all sorts of gaffes and glitches.

President Yanukovych: I do understand that today we’re falling behind on [Euro 2012] preparations, and today we should take extraordinal...[pauses for a spell check]...measures...[adds emphasis to blunt his awkward pause]...to kick-start...[nods]...this construction of these stadiums, roads and infrastructure.

Acts of sabotage followed President Yanukovych to an SBU gala event. No sooner had he started singing Ukraine’s anthem than the recording malfunctioned (“Ще не вме...”).

A few minutes later, he ended up awarding the wrong guy.



“Normalnaya vlast” (Rus. normal government), as one SBU officer put it, obviously means Valeriy Khoroshkovsky, the Ken-faced billionaire who now runs the SBU. Among other things, Khoroshkovsky owns 3.5 Disneylands worth of land, 32,171 sq m worth of real estate and millions worth of Ukraine’s #1 TV channel. (He got his first job at the SBU as a RosUkrEnergo-friendly deputy director appointed by Yushchenko.)

Witness Tina Karol perform at a Yanukovych gala. Yes, that's the same Tina who toured Ukraine with a bunch of other celebs who endorsed Tymoshenko.





Tina...

Russian singer Valery Meladze’s did “Вопреки,” a soundtrack song from Адмиралъ, a Russian biopic on Aleksandr Kolchak. (In the Russian Civil War, both the Whites and the Reds fought against Ukraine’s independence.)

Director Khoroshkovsky did not respond to questions about the cost of the event. Asked about who pays, an unnamed SBU officer said the SBU does, but he wasn’t sure.

Videos embedded from:
http://censor.net.ua/go/offer/ResourceID/153703.html
http://censor.net.ua/go/offer/ResourceID/153857.html
Original sources:
http://5.ua
http://stb.ua

Russian Imperialist Ads Appear and Disappear in Kyiv

“The potential of a Great country — the Power of a Great bank,” says VTB, Russia’s second-biggest bank, on a billboard in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.

VTB, formerly known as Vneshtorgbank (Foreign Trade Bank), has been struggling in Russia amid the world financial crisis. That hasn’t prevented it from running a bombastic ad campaign in Ukraine. For a few months, Ukrainian television has shown ads whose inherent drama links the size of VTB’s business to the size of Russia.

On this particular billboard, however, the image of “big business” that VTB aims to project becomes big politics.

Highly symbolic, the billboard pictures St. Sophia Cathedral and the Bohdan Khmelnytsky Monument on the “Ukrainian side” and the Kremlin on the “Russian side.”

St. Sophia’s Cathedral symbolizes Christianity, being one of Kyiv’s best known landmarks and one of the oldest Orthodox shrines in Ukraine.

The Bohdan Khmelnytsky Monument symbolizes Ukraine’s alliance with Russia under the Treaty of Pereyaslav, concluded on condition of autonomy but gradually eroded by Russia.

The Kremlin symbolizes the government responsible for the erosion of Ukraine’s independence and for the death of millions of Ukrainians in wars and genocide.

For a financial institution accused of being the Kremlin’s “pocket bank,” the ensemble looks pretty natural.

Assuming the river pictured is the Dnipro River, then the ad either portrays Ukraine and Russia as one “great country” or hints at Russia’s occupation of left-bank Ukraine. How’s that for a banking ad? Would Deutsche Bank run ads in Jerusalem juxtaposing the Reichstag with the Wailing Wall?

Currently, lack of customer trust makes the top of the list of why Ukrainians stay out of banks. With the hryvnia losing more than 50% of its value against the dollar in September-November 2008, customers rushed to withdraw their devalued hryvnia deposits.

Not so fast, said the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU), ordering a freeze on cash withdrawals.

Equally distressed were the many thousands of customers whose dollar-denominated loans suddenly became impossible to pay off due to an exchange rate gone wild. Meanwhile, with a little help from the National Bank, many banks used the bailout money to bet against the hryvnia, further destroying customer trust.

In other words, bank size may not be that big of an issue. During the last couple of years, major Ukrainian banks have been acquired by big European ones. Yet, for some reason, instead of addressing the issue of customer trust, VTB decided to bank on Russian imperialistic imagery. What a way to set yourself apart from the competition.

The billboard’s proximity to the city’s only remaining Lenin Monument adds another ironic edge to the story. In February 1918, the Bolshevik army shelled and pillaged Kyiv, seeking to overthrow a Ukrainian government that had declared independence from Russia. In March 1918, Lenin moved the Bolshevik government headquarters from the Smolny Institute in Petrograd to the Kremlin in Moscow.

So what target market does VTB have in mind? Pro-Kremlin Ukrainians or Ukrainians with a short memory/poor knowledge of history?

Even more outrageous ads had mushroomed in downtown Kyiv last month: “Project Russia.”




The ads, complete with a map that displayed Ukraine as part of Russia, sprang up outside the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament. Behind these ads, it turned out, was Warriors of Creativity, a Russian movement that celebrates creativity in communications.

Their $9M anti-Ukrainian campaign had kicked off with “American salo,” a series of teaser-hate ads placed in the Moscow subway.



A book of the same title soon found its way to the Russian State Duma and the Verkhovna Rada. What makes salo “American” is obviously the Orange Revolution. Many Russians use the word salo as a gastro-ethnic slur for Ukrainians and widely believe the Orange Revolution to be an American plot.

Interestingly, some people in the Russian blogosphere totally missed the creative thrust of “American salo.”

Back in Kyiv, the SBU, the Ukrainian security service, soon ordered the “Project Russia” ads removed. Will the SBU respond creatively this time?

Note: I took the VTB billboard pictures on May 3.

Sources:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c3549190-f818-11db-baa1-000b5df10621.html?nclick_check=1
http://uk.reuters.com/article/rbssFinancialServicesAndRealEstateNews/idUKLD8357920090513
http://vovremya.info/news/1239105706.html
http://forum-msk.org/material/news/840172.html
http://www.liberty.ru/foto/Operaciya-Amerikanskoe-salo/Operaciya-Amerikanskoe-salo
http://nikolay-smeh.livejournal.com/114430.html

Tymonatrix: 'I Will Skin Every Minister Alive' (Updated)

She did it to Ohrzyko. Who’s next?

PM Tymoshenko: March is the deadline I set during which I will skin every minister alive, make no mistake. I don’t care what political powers you came from to the government. I don’t care what difficulties you have in connection with the crisis. The first thing I will do, in case of wage delays, is the entire ministry will go without pay. If that doesn’t help, then a letter will be forwarded to the Verkhovna Rada advising that the minister be dismissed.

Strangely, BYuT voted overwhelmingly Friday to confirm Valentyn Nalyvaichenko as SBU director, despite the Naftogaz standoff.

I wonder what tradeoffs the vote involved and whether it had something to do with Tymoshenko allegedly requesting 4.5 bcm of “technological gas” from the EU.


UPDATE
Enjoy the letters:


Didn't she reassure us that the deal she had signed with Russia would supply Ukraine with enough technological gas to facilitate gas transit to the EU?

Video uploaded from: http://censor.net.ua/go/offer/ResourceID/115177.html
Original source: http://5.ua
Sources:
http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2009/3/6/90915.htm
http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2009/3/6/90907.htm
http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2009/3/17/91497.htm

Judge Who 'Borrowed/Harvested' $2M+Hr. 2M Gets Away

Forget about Blagojevich. Forget about the penis pump judge.

Channel 1+1 presents a Ukrainian judge who claims to have borrowed — and harvested — the nearly $2M plus Hr. 2M that the SBU found in his office.

The Hon. Ihor Zvarych: I borrowed about 1,900,000 dollars from a colleague…via an I-O-U! Right on my desk, in my apartment, there was a ledger that clearly stated the types of construction works, the whos and whens, and the amounts of money allocated.

Ukrainians have this habit: to "sow" an offi...a new office — some with kopiykas, some with hryvnias, and some with dollars. [refers to the Ukrainian caroling tradition of tossing grain; panel explodes with laughter]

I appreciate your jokes and applause, but...

Here were these 10 to 20-kopiyka coins, hryvnias, dollars and all the rest that was in the package, known as “big sack one.”

Here I was falling. I’d ask them to let me use the bathroom. They mistreated me and told me they’d bring it over here and that I would relieve myself right here, on this spot. It was right here that they were throwing me around. It was from this window that I wanted to jump while suffering from this lawlessness being committed against me, and I’m not bluffing at this point. From there, I was hauled around the office by physical force.

Can you f*****g believe this? Not only does he excel in accounting, but, alas, he also dabbles in anthropology! This is the Chief Judge of Lviv Administrative Court of Appeals that deals with multimillion land and VAT rebate disputes!

After the SBU searched his office on December 3, The Hon. Ihor Zvarych checked into a private clinic, under oath not to leave town.

Dismissed from his position but not disbarred from judicial immunity yet, he then used that immunity to breach that oath. The SBU, which apparently had not placed him under surveillance, has now put out an APB on him.

One more thing: According to a bizarre article of Ukraine’s Constitution, a judge may be disbarred only after being convicted.

So, it’s “catch me if you can,” or “one law for all,” as Yushchenko put it.

Video embedded from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMqVsHYZUmk&e
Original sources:
http://www.1plus1.ua
http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2008/12/15/86080.htm
http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2008/12/12/86035.htm

Hate at Hoverla
Ukrainian National Emblem Vandalized by ‘Eurasian’ Extremists

At the top of Mt. Hoverla, Ukraine’s highest peak and President Yushchenko’s favorite mountaineering range, members of the Eurasian Youth Union have trashed the Ukrainian coat of arms, the trident, and its accompanying stone engravings.

Pictures of the trident being sawed off (the trident used to crown Hoverla) appeared online on Friday. The Eurasian Youth Union (known by its Russian acronym as ESM) claimed responsibility for the incident. The ESM is a cadet wing of the Eurasia Party, helmed by neo-imperial ideologist Aleksandr Dugin.

A statement issued by the Eurasians contains threats of more “preventive action” in the event of Tymoshenko’s premiership, Ukrayinska Pravda reports. It also reports that the SBU has identified three suspects, two of them nationals of the Russian Federation. The SBU has determined that the trident was dismantled, not sawed off, as simulated in the video below. (Perhaps the saw wasn't up to the task.)



The SBU claims to have gathered evidence that this act of vandalism was masterminded and coordinated by ESM leader Pavel Zarifullin and by his boss Aleksandr Dugin. More on ESM activities in Ukraine:



Commenting on the episode, Dugin revels in Slavic folklore and couches his rhetoric in a self-styled struggle between good and evil:

What happened at Hoverla was a castration of Ukrainian orangism. It was a symbolic castration of Yushchenko. Now what’s left is to get to Tymoshenko. But, because this surgery is not applicable to her, she, like a witch, has to be burned.

Bingo. As in the case of Kashchei, to defeat the orange serpent, it’s necessary to find an egg that’s in the woods, hanging on a tree branch, inside of which is a needle that has to be broken. That they sawed off the lousy neo-Nazi trident — that, I believe, was the breaking of the needle of Kashchei.

It’s necessary to demonstrate to the whole world the beastly, absolutely anti-people, anti-national neo-Nazi mug of the orange regime.

They already gave it a try once. For that, a Yushchenko adviser was deported from St. Petersburg. We’ve seen that Russia does not sell her own kind. Putin’s Russia does not sell her own kind.

Statement of the Eurasian Youth Union (translated from Russian):

The forces of a special mountain ESM unit at Mt. Hoverla have sawed off and desecrated the symbol of Ukraine’s occupation, the trident. Destroyed is the granite plate of the Ukrainian sectarian church. Shattered is the granite landmark devoted to the so-called Constitution of Ukraine.

In place of the Ukrainian collaborators’ blue-white banner, erected on top of the mountain is the flag of the Eurasian Youth Union.

Mt. Hoverla is hereby renamed to Stalin Peak.

With this unprecedented act of Eurasian enthusiasm, the ESM proclaims that the days of the so-called “independent Ukraine” are coming to an end. In place of the ugly limitrophe entity, we will build a Great Ukraine, as part of the Eurasian Empire.

Also, the ESM warns that in the event of orange ape Yulia Tymoshenko’s appointment to the post of Premier of the so-called Ukraine, we will not be able to stop our Ukrainian activists from taking preventive action of direct effect against the leadership of this pseudo-country.

Stanik’s Hubby Prefers to Change Subject in Interview on Wife’s Possessions

Vadym Dolganov, the local king of Big Brother reporting known as Dolganovism, ran state television during Kuchma's second term in a manner similar to that depicted in The Running Man, the action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Dolganovism was a time when the media’s dystopian grip on Ukrainian society reached its apogee. But there’s more to this person than his career. Dolganov also happens to be the husband of Constitutional Court Justice Susanna Stanik, whose septuagenarian mother, Oksana Antoshko, has been found by the SBU to be in possession of real estate worth $12 mn.

In a live interview on Channel 5 Tuesday, Mr. Dolganov tried to seize the night by alluding that he has been approached by opposition leaders who sought a favorable court opinion from his wife and were willing to pay for it. However, he refused to specify his claims. The ball was in his court when the host confronted him with documental proof — utility bills charged to Stanik’s mother seized as evidence from apartment mailboxes. From then on, Dolganov’s studio conduct became evasive, if not bizarre.

First, he emphatically denied any relationship whatsoever to the apartments under investigation. But then, as he grew irritated, he called the questioning an invasion of privacy, insisting that the host lacked the authority to ask such intrusive questions. Further efforts to extract comments from Mr. Dolganov failed.
Instead, Stanik’s hubby used the opportunity to polish his diversion technique. He started reading from a newspaper, highlighting events unrelated to the subject, such as celebrations of Hitler’s birthday by local neo-Nazis, whom he obviously tried to marry to the opposition. (On closer observation, however, many of these events turn out to have been organized by Russian supremacist cells operating on Ukrainian soil. )

Well done, Mr. Dolganov. This is SO you.

Rada Rejects Yushchenko’s MFA and SBU Picks

As expected, Volodymyr Ohryzko and Victor Korol, who vied for the position of Minister of Foreign Affairs and Director of the Security Service, respectively, failed to gather support from the Anticrisis Coalition.

It turns out acting MFA head Volodmyr Ohryzko has the nasty habit of speaking Ukrainian in conversations with Russian guests on Ukrainian soil.

And as for MP Viktor Korol, NSNU, the media link him to NSNU mogul Petro Poroshenko, Yushchenko’s chief campaign contributor and a de facto persona non grata in Russia.

The Kremlin can’t stomach these guys, and that’s not the kind of gas Yanukovych needs.

Eavesdropping Leak Features Moroz Debriefed by British Envoy

In a rare move, Moroz has already confirmed the authenticity of the conversation. According to popular opposition blog Obkom.net.ua, which offers a log of the conversation, the audio files were obtained from three recently stolen workstations that belonged to an SBU SIGINT unit. The blog claims that stored on the missing hard drives was a compilation of phone intercepts capturing the entire Ukrainian establishment.

Following the release of some of these sensitive records on the internet, the SBU denied role, firing a high-ranking operative who refused to sign off on the disclaimer.

In the intriguing James Bond-style dialogue, Moroz waxes eloquent on the mechanics of Orange Coalition building.

Even though Ukraine does have a replica of the Fourth Amendment in its Constitution, it has been rarely enforced. Eavesdropping — by whoever can afford the technical capability — has been normal practice in this country. Undoubtedly, the SBU enjoys a strong competitive advantage in this lucrative business. We are a wiretapped nation, aren't we?

Judging by the sheer cooperativeness of soon-to-be Speaker Moroz, one could get the impression that Moroz moonlighted in Her Majesty’s service. Still, it probably wasn’t too long before Mother Moscow seduced him with a higher price for his services.