Kuchma fires intelligence chief and presidential security official

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - President Leonid Kuchma fired his top intelligence and surveillance official and the head of the presidential security team on February 10 after meeting with the country's National Security and Defense Council (NSDC).

Mr. Kuchma announced that he had relieved Leonid Derkach as head of the Security Service of Ukraine and replaced him with Volodymyr Radchenko, Mr. Derkach's predecessor. Mr. Radchenko is a long-time protégé and associate of NSDC Secretary Yevhen Marchuk. Until his latest appointment he was the deputy secretary of the NSDC. Prior to his own first stint at the Security Service helm he was first assistant to Mr. Marchuk when he led the agency in the early 1990s.

Mr. Kuchma also dismissed Volodymyr Shepel, who had directed the president's personal security team. He was replaced with Valerii Strohov, who had headed the Lviv Oblast office of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Mr. Derkach's firing comes on the heels of a burgeoning movement in Kyiv calling for the dismissal of top Ukrainian law enforcement officials who many here believe have either grossly bumbled or badly covered up an investigation into the disappearance of journalist Heorhii Gongadze. The scandal seems to lead to the highest echelons of government power and the president himself.

Mr. Derkach's bureau holds responsibility for the personal security detachment that guards the president and his offices. It is from here that a former member of that detachment, Maj. Mykhailo Melnychenko, claims to secretly have recorded conversations between President Kuchma and his closest officials allegedly while they planned criminal actions and conspiracies.

Mr. Derkach also has received extensived criticism from lawmakers for the blatant lies he told while addressing Ukraine's Parliament during a hearing into the Melnychenko tapes.

At the time, Mr. Derkach told lawmakers his agency had not ordered or taken part in a search of three lawmakers as they returned from abroad with a videotape of Mr. Melnychenko explaining how he tape-recorded the president. He also asserted during his testimony in the Parliament that his agency does not bug the offices of Ukrainian officials - a statement that drew guffaws from national deputies.

But the final nail in Mr. Derkach's political coffin, other than the fact that President Kuchma needed a scapegoat to throw to a hungry opposition movement that is demanding major changes in the Presidential Administration, was an order the country's top secret agent gave to bar a German national who has considerable holdings in one of Ukraine's major national television stations from entering the country.

The ban, which caused outrage within the broadcast company, also brought much unneeded publicity Mr. Derkach's way, along with more accusations that his agency was the major force muffling freedom of speech in Ukraine. Studio 1+1 executives explained that the Security Service action came after the station had refused to succumb to pressure to subdue its news coverage of the anti-Kuchma movement.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, February 18, 2001, No. 7, Vol. LXIX

| Home Page |