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Vitvitsky on selection commission for Ukraine’s General Inspectorate

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KYIV – Bohdan Vitvitsky, a Ukrainian-born corruption expert from New Jersey, has joined a selection commission that will choose members of a newly created General Inspectorate at the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine. The move is part of an overall drive to fix the nation’s deeply flawed prosecutorial and justice system. Prosecutor General Yurii Lutsenko made the announcement live on television on August 8. Dr. Vitvitsky, who holds a juris doctor as well as a doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University, is a former U.S. federal prosecutor and assistant U.S. attorney. He served as resident legal advisor at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine in 2007-2009.

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Rehabilitation center funded by donations from Ukrainian diaspora opens in Lviv

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LVIV – After more than a year of careful planning, countless site visits and fund-raising in the United States, a modern rehabilitation center to help Ukraine’s wounded soldiers opened in western Ukraine’s largest city in August. The center showcased how far $40,000 can go towards ensuring a more dignified life for people who’ve lost their limbs. The amount was raised last year by the Ukrainian National Foundation and the New York-based Markian Paslawsky Fund. Entrusted to the Kyiv-based International Alliance for Fraternal Assistance (IAFA), the money was used to renovate some 3,000 square meters of space and install occupational and physical therapy equipment in five rooms that are situated at the Lviv State Enterprise for Mobility and Prosthetics. “I’m thrilled,” said Olena Paslawsky, a sister of Markian Paslawsky in whose honor the rehabilitation center was named and who was killed on August 19, 2014, during fierce fighting in the city of Ilovaisk in Donetsk Oblast.

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High-ranking Yanukovych associate is arrested

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Among charges: sponsoring terrorist organization and stoking separatism
KYIV – Ukraine’s authorities on July 30 detained Oleksandr Yefremov, an associate of Viktor Yanukovych. He is the highest ranking associate of the disgraced ex-president to have been arrested to date. Two days later, Kyiv’s Pechersk District Court ruled that the former leader of the Party of Regions parliamentary faction be held for 60 days He faces charges of sponsoring a terrorist organization in the Luhansk Oblast and stoking separatism. The 61-year-old former Luhansk Oblast governor also is accused of abuse of office in seizing the large state-owned Luhansk-vuhillia coal mine. Mr. Yefremov’s defense will appeal the court ruling about his pre-trial detention, one of his lawyers, Oleksandr Lysak, told the online news outlet Ukrayinska Pravda.

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Colleagues in Ukraine bid farewell to acclaimed journalist Pavel Sheremet

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KYIV – The method that assassins used to kill acclaimed journalist Pavel Sheremet on July 20 was at once unsettling and meant to intimidate journalists in Ukraine, his friends and colleagues said. A car bomb that remotely detonated underneath the driver’s seat in which the 44-year-old Minsk-born journalist and radio host was sitting became the nation’s most high-profile murder of a reporter since Heorhii Gongadze was slain in 2000. “Pavel Sheremet wasn’t simply an ordered hit. He was a sacred sacrifice,” said National Deputy Mustafa Nayyem who knew the deceased and had reported for Ukrayinska Pravda where the award-winning murdered journalist worked. “One can kill many ways – quietly, insidiously without… drawing attention to the process.”

The Subaru XV that Mr. Sheremet was driving – belonging to his partner and Ukrayinska Pravda manager Olena Prytula – exploded at a central Kyiv intersection, Mr. Nayyem said, “with such theatricality, …without a shot being fired… so that no one would doubt that it’s not just a murder, but a political assassination.”

Katya Gorchinskaya, CEO of independent Hromadske.tv and friend of the deceased, said Mr. Sheremet’s murder was part of a bigger “pattern that over the past year or more has unfolded against journalists.” In particular, she was referring to her colleague, Mykhailo Trach, who was attacked by officers of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) in October 2015 – an act that has gone unpunished.

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Ukrainian American radiologist tapped as Ukraine’s deputy minister of health

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KYIV – Dr. Ulana Suprun, a trained radiologist of Ukrainian descent from Michigan, is slated to be confirmed as Ukraine’s deputy health minister on July 22. According to the Detroit native, Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman offered her the job earlier this month, after which she held a publicized meeting with President Petro Poroshenko on July 12 who also supported the high-level appointment. After meeting with the physician, Mr. Poroshenko equated the “health care situation” with “national security” in a statement published on the presidential website. One reason is that Ukraine’s population declines by 82,000 to 110,000 each year, according to statistics cited by Dr. Suprun. If the trend continues, Ukraine’s population will shrink to 35 million by 2050 reverting to levels not seen since 1950.