KIEV, UKRAINE — Sitting dazed in a wheelchair following a gruesome attack that left her face bloodied, bruised and swollen, Tetyana Chornovol, a prominent investigative journalist and civil activist in Ukraine, has become, in the words of another famous Ukrainian journalist, “the face of [President] Viktor Yanukovych and his entire regime.”
The image of 34-year-old Chornovol, taken as she entered a hospital shortly after three men allegedly ran her car off a road outside the Ukrainian capital of Kiev and then beat her on Dec. 25, has breathed new life into public protests in the former Soviet-bloc, where mass demonstrations called EuroMaidan are now in their second month.
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Chornovol, who suffered a concussion, a broken nose and tissue damage to her face that required reconstructive surgery to repair, remains hospitalized.
Image: AFP/Getty Images
Five suspects have been arrested and remanded in custody for two months for their alleged involvement in the attack on Chornovol. One of the five has confessed, Interior Ministry officials said in a statement Saturday.
But protesters say those arrests are not enough. On Sunday, thousands marched on Mezhyhirya, the president’s estate outside Kiev, to demand the arrests of high-level officials who are believed to have ordered the attack. An auto rally also made its way there, but was blocked by police. Despite the tense atmosphere, no clashes between protesters and police were reported.
The beating of Chornovol is only the latest in a string of violent attacks on journalists and civil activists that reignited EuroMaidan passions, which had begun to fade amid the holidays and bitter winter cold.
A civil activist in the western Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk was beaten, while another in the eastern city of Kharkiv was stabbed multiple times.
An activist with the group Road Control, which exposes corruption among traffic police, was shot with his own gun after being assaulted. The rubber bullet penetrated the skin just two inches above his heart after being fired at point-blank range.
Ukrainian media have reported more than a dozen additional incidences of violence and intimidation against activists and journalists in cities around the country.
But it is the image of a battered Chornovol and the dashcam video of her assailants that has resonated most with Ukrainians. Hundreds of protesters with photographs depicting her badly beaten face gathered on Dec. 25 and 26 in front of the Interior Ministry to demand the resignation of Interior Minister and top cop Vitaliy Zakhachenko, who activists allege ordered the attack on Chornovol.
Chornovol has investigated and exposed the lavish lifestyles of both Zakhachenko and President Yanukovych, among others, in recent years. She is most famous for climbing the walls of the president’s luxurious estate outside Kiev, and posting photographs of it online.
The former state residence, viewed as the symbol of corruption among Ukraine’s highest-level officials, was transferred to private hands through a web of offshore shell companies that journalists have linked to Yanukovych.
It was because of her work, she told Ukraine’s Channel 5, that she was targeted and beaten on Dec. 25.
In fact, just hours before the attack, Chornovol published images on opposition news site Ukrainska Pravda, where she blogs regularly, of what she asserts is Zakharchenko’s lavish country estate. Hundreds of protesters gathered at the gates there on Friday, as well.
Ironically, it is Zakharchenko who is heading the investigation into the attack on Chornovol.
“I personally control the investigation into an assault on Tetyana Chornovol. We have developed a strong investigative team made up of the best investigators and employees of operational units,” Interfax-Ukraine news agency quoted Zakharchenko as saying.
The protests in Kiev began in late November, after President Yanukovych and his government spurned a long-anticipated political and free trade deal with the European Union, and turned instead to Russia for assistance in saving the cash-strapped nation from looming economic disaster.
Demonstrators seized government buildings, and fought back occasionally violent attempts by riot police to break up their encampments in Independence Square.
While the impulse behind those rallies was the public’s desire for more economic ties with Europe, the latest protests are equally inspired by the violence against journalists and activists.
Opposition politicians have been particularly vocal in condemning the attack on Chornovol.
World boxing champion and leader of opposition party UDAR (Punch) Vitali Klitschko accused authorities in a video statement of “beating journalists and trying to make them shut their mouths.”
“Only cowards and moral freaks are capable of savagely beating a woman at night. Does anyone still have hopes that the authorities will change for the better and hear anyone?” he added.
Nationalist Svodoba (Freedom) party leader Oleh Tiahnybok alleged that the attack on Chornovol was part of a larger campaign to intimidate demonstrators and opposition leaders.
“The terror campaign launched by the authorities continues,” he said.
But Andriy Shevchenko, an opposition member of parliament from the Batkivshchyna party, wasn’t so quick to credit Yanukovych’s camp nor the Interior Ministry with orchestrating a grand campaign.
“From what I have learned it was indeed a demonstrative and very unprofessional attempt to scare the most active protestors. No other conspiracy,” he told Mashable. “It is simply the way Yanukovych, Zakharchenko and the closest Donetsk circle think.”
Yanukovych and Zakharchenko, along with much of the president’s cabinet and the government, hail from the eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk, the notoriously corrupt industrial center of the country.
If activists and opposition leaders are hoping for quick open-and-shut case in the beating of Chornovol, they got a glimpse into how the investigation may play out, when on Friday the Interior Ministry’s lead investigator Mykola Chynchyn released an official statement with new information about those involved in the attack.
Chynchyn linked Klitschko, his younger brother Wladimir and other opposition politicians to the suspects who allegedly beat Chornovol. Specifically, he said the Klitschko brothers were closely tied to a crime syndicate of which one of the suspects was allegedly a member.
Vitali Klitscho’s UDAR party in turn threatened the ministry with a libel suit.
“Instead of conducting an objective investigation and finding the real perpetrators of the crime, [including] those who gave the orders to beat Tetyana Chornovol, the office of Zakharchenko has resorted to the usual provocations and actually is covering up for the criminals,” Klitschko said in a statement. “Thus, we will speak in court with those who were entrusted to voice lies and nonsense.”
Protesters are also sticking with demands laid out previously by EuroMaidan: President Yanukovych and his government must resign; all activists arrested during clashes with police during demonstrations must be granted amnesty and released from jail; and new presidential and parliamentary elections must be scheduled.
Many of those who have spent these past weeks on Independence Square know that these things are easier said than done, but say they will remain there until they get what they want, even if it means facing further crackdowns.
“Unfortunately, right now everyone has to face a fact, that he or she might be the next victim of the regime,” Kateryna Kruk, an activist and former opposition party press secretary who quit her job on the first day of the protests in November to join the demonstration, told Mashable. “Those criminals [Ukrainian authorities] are capable of everything and seem to be irrational.”
Image: GENYA SAVILOV/AFP/Getty Images
Christopher J. Miller is an editor at English-language newspaper the Kyiv Post in Ukraine.