Police have arrested five suspects in the 2016 murder of journalist Pavel Sheremet, authorities announced at a briefing on Dec. 12.
The arrests come as a major breakthrough in an investigation that has languished for more than three years.
All of the arrested suspects are either veterans of Ukraine’s military resistance against Russian aggression or volunteers who have been helping the Ukrainian army.
They are: Vladyslav Hryshchenko, a war veteran; Inna Hryshchenko, his wife and a war veteran; Yulia Kuzmenko, a children’s surgeon who has been helping the army; Andriy Antonenko, a military officer and musician; and Yana Dugar, a servicewoman.
Both the motive of the murder and its organizers remain unknown.
Top row, from left: Andriy Antonenko, Yana Dugar. Bottom row, from left: Vladylav Hryshchenko, Inna Hryshchenko, Yulia Kuzmenko.
Sheremet was a Belarus-born journalist who spent the last four years of his life working in Ukraine. He was killed by a car bomb in central Kyiv on July 20, 2016. Since then, his friends and former colleagues have demanded that the authorities bring his killers to justice.
After taking office, President Volodymyr Zelensky questioned the chief of Ukraine’s National Police on progress in the investigation and said he expected to see the crime solved.
“This is only the beginning. Next, we need to learn who ordered the murder,” said Prosecutor General Ruslan Riaboshapka at the briefing on Dec. 12.
Who are the suspects?
After Sheremet’s murder, security camera footage was released showing a man and a woman planting a bomb under his car during the night before the explosion. The two couldn’t be identified from the video.
According to police, the two were Kuzmenko and Antonenko. The police said that experts analyzed their gait and movements, and compared them to the people in the CCTV footage, and were able to confirm they were likely the same people.
Kuzmenko is a children’s surgeon at Okhmatdyt, a children’s hospital in Kyiv. She has been helping the army as a volunteer raising money for supplies.
Antonenko, 48, is a military officer and a musician who leads a band called Riffmaster. He is known as an author of patriotic songs popular among the military. According to police, at the time of the murder he lived on the same street as Sheremet, Olesya Honchara Street in central Kyiv. The police alleged that he and Kuzmenko went to his apartment after planting the bomb, which would explain why they couldn’t be traced on CCTV videos leaving the neighborhood.
As police were searching his house on Dec. 12, Antonenko told journalists that he had nothing to do with the murder and didn’t know Sheremet.
“It’s all a surprise for me,” he said.
The police said the phones of both Kuzmenko and Antonenko were off or unused for the whole night when they allegedly planted the bomb, which wasn’t typical for them.
Another suspect, Dugar, 26, was allegedly spotted taking photos of the security cameras around the site of the explosion two and five days before the crime.
The role of other suspects, Vladyslav and Inna Hryshchenko, is unclear. They were arrested earlier, in September and November, in a different case. They are suspected of attempting to murder a man in Kosiv, a city in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, in summer 2018. The murder failed because a bomb that was attached to the underside of the man’s car fell off. Police said that the bomb was identical to the one that killed Sheremet, and was attached in the same way: using magnets.
According to police, a week before the murder of Sheremet, Vladyslav Hryshchenko came to the police to inform them that he was offered money to murder a man in Dnipro, a city 500 kilometers south of Kyiv. Now, Hryshchenko is citing it as his alibi.
On the night when the bomb was planted under Sheremet’s car, both Hryshchenkos were in Dnipro, according to them. However, the police say that they weren’t using their phones for almost 24 hours. Law enforcement alleges that they left the phones in Dnipro and traveled to Kyiv and back.
Another man, Ivan Vakulenko, a friend of the Hryshchenkos, was allegedly involved in the 2018 murder attempt in Kosiv. In October, he was subpoenaed to testify in Sheremet’s case. He killed himself two days later, before he could testify.
Around the same time, the police wiretapped the phones of the Hryshchenkos and some people from their circle, including Kuzmenko. At the Dec. 12 briefing, the police released fragments from their phone calls. In some of them, Inna Hryshchenko talks about Vakulenko’s subpoena. Sounding concerned, she calls the man “our main headache” and says that “we must take good care of him so he doesn’t start talking.”
In another phone call, she tells her husband, Vladyslav Hryshchenko, that they will be fine.
“We will land on our feet,” she is heard telling him. “If need be, I will drown everyone for us to survive.”
Sheremet’s murder
Top officials, including then-President Petro Poroshenko and Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, promised a swift investigation and said the case was under their personal control. However, no progress was made in the case for three years and no suspects were identified.
It was never clear whether the investigation stalled because the case was too complicated or because it didn’t receive enough attention of the investigators. But a documentary released by Ukrainian journalists one year after the murder suggested that the official investigation wasn’t conducted thoroughly. The documentary’s authors found crucial witnesses who were never contacted and questioned by the authorities.
Investigators have been considering several possible motives behind the murder, including the possibility that the murder was ordered from Belarus or Russia. Sheremet ran an opposition news website, Belaruskiy Partizan, in Belarus. He also worked as a journalist in Russia for many years. In Kyiv, he hosted a morning show on Radio Vesti and worked at Ukrainska Pravda, one of the largest and oldest news websites in Ukraine.
One theory posited that the real target of the attack could have been Olena Prytula, Sheremet’s partner and the founding editor of Ukrainska Pravda, who was the owner of the car. However, Sheremet was killed when driving to his job at the radio station, where he hosted a show every morning, which the murderers likely should have known.
This is the second time a high-profile journalist from Ukrainska Pravda has been murdered. Georgiy Gongadze, who co-founded the website in 2000, was kidnapped and murdered by high-ranking police officers in September 2000. Years later, the perpetrators were arrested, but not the organizers of the murder. Then-President Leonid Kuchma’s possible involvement in the crime was investigated briefly in 2011, but to no avail.
The murders of Gongadze and Sheremet were among the most brazen attacks on the freedom of speech in Ukraine’s history.
