The Murder of Doroshenko

Original: Colonel Cassad
Translation by @arktinentuuli / Edited by @GBabeuf

The Ukrainian political scientist Andrey Doroshenko was killed in Kiev yesterday [on April 25 –ed.]. He was quite simply thrown out of a window from the ninth floor. Someone perhaps tried to present it as a suicide as had already happened with previous “Ukrainian political suicides” from Kravchenko and Kirpa up to Buzina and Kalashnikov. Now, for unspecified reasons, somebody has got rid of Doroshenko.

Yesterday, Ukrainian political scientist and employee of Legal Advanced Initiatives Fund, Andrey Doroshenko, died after falling from the ninth floor of an apartment house. He had worked previously as an assistant to the Verkhovna Rada deputy, Taras Chornovil, and in Vadim Karasev’s Institute of Global Strategy. The police have opened a criminal case under the article “premeditated murder”: the deceased was not a resident of the building and fell from the technical floor.

Andrey Doroshenko was 40 years old. He appeared frequently on Ukrainian television. The expert’s opinion cannot be described as pro-Russian, yet he was a consistent critic of the “oligarchical arrangement”, which, in his opinion, was responsible for “entrenching the political crisis” in the country. He believed that the Dayton Accords, which helped end the war in Yugoslavia, could provide a model for solving the problems of south-east Ukraine. He considered the granting of special status to the war-torn regions—as required by the Minsk agreements—improbable because of electoral risks. “Let us assume that the deputies will vote in favour of this reform. But will this end the war?” Andrey Doroshenko questioned on the air on Ukrlife.tv in January, “Who is able to guarantee it? What if the parliament suddenly dissolves for early elections? How will we look in the eyes of the voters then?”

The deceased was found by Kiev resident, Andrey Nazarenko. “I called an ambulance at 13:52, I didn’t see the fall, but on the ninth floor on a window sill in a corridor, police officers found Doroshenko’s footprints.” “There were no signs of a struggle,” the police reported to Ukrainian media. The police, who arrived after the ambulance, questioned Andrey Nazarenko as a witness. According to Nazarenko, the police found the wallet of the deceased, containing 500 hryvnias (1,311 roubles at the rate for April 25).

According to the Ukrainian website, strana.ua, the Legal Advanced Initiatives Fund, where the deceased had previously worked, was connected with the leader of the movement “Ukrainian Choice” and former Head of Administration of the [former] President Leonid Kuchma, Victor Medvedchuk. Mr. Medvedchuk’s movement advocated the use of instruments of “direct democracy” in Ukraine (and in particular, referendums), and also—according to the former chairman of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine, Andriy Parubiy—“had financed the creation of extremist groups, which led to the conflict in the Donbass.” However, Victor Medvedchuk’s team denied any cooperation with Andrey Doroshenko. From 2009 to 2011 the deceased had worked with the famous Ukrainian political scientist, Vadim Karasyov at the Institute of Global Strategy. Prior to that he had worked as an assistant to the former People’s Deputy, Taras Chornovil, a member of the Party of the Regions. Mr. Chornovil has already expressed his condolences to the family of the deceased on his facebook page. “Andrey was a good man, very tolerant, sensitive and talented, he constantly generated new ideas. One of them united us for many years—the idea of Ukrainian-Arab contacts.”

PS: In principle, Doroshenko’s public statements did not constitute any serious danger to the junta. However, his connections with former ‘Regionals’ may have been used for the purpose of giving a signal to Medvedchuk and to the “Committee for the Salvation of the Ukraine” that agents of influence in the Ukraine will be subject to concrete interference in their activities, not excluding the harsh scenario of simply eliminating such persons. Federalization of the Ukraine, under any guise, is flatly rejected by the Kiev junta and it will be extremely difficult to promote this idea in the formal political arena. It is obviously clear that the Russian Federation is trying to exert an influence on the internal situation in the Ukraine, through “Ukrainian Choice”, but it would appear that the idea to stake a bet on Medvedchuk’s project and on related groups, was stillborn from the very beginning—even before the coup and the civil war. This project only managed to provide communication with groups of the Ukrainian élite that had been ousted from power. However, these groups have no influence on either the foreign or the domestic policies of the Ukraine; any such influence had already been lost due to the collapse of the Party of Regions.

As concerns Doroshenko, and as in other cases of strange deaths, I do not think the real paymasters of this murder will be ever found. It is even unlikely that the immediate perpetrators of the murder will be found. As concerns justice, one cannot even talk, in light of the farce of the investigation into the murder of Buzina. Under the current Ukrainian authorities, political murders will remain unsolved.