Arsen Avakov and the usage of uncontrolled arms

Arsen Avakov and the usage of uncontrolled arms

The demand that the Interior Minister of Ukraine, Arsen Avakov, has to go, is becoming louder. Kyiv Post in their editorial, for instance, claims that Avakov remains interior minister for six years for no objective reason.

However, Arsen Avakov, refuses to take responsibility for any of the accidents in which Ukrainian police either was engaged or failed to prevent the crimes.

On May 20, Interfax-Ukraine reported that President Zelensky demanded that Avakov accomplish the investigation of the murder of journalist Pavel Sheremet. ”The Sheremet case is his [Avakov’s] responsibility. If he launched this case, he must bring it to an end.”

On May 29 small Brovary town near Kiev woke up to shooting. The video taken by residents demonstrate more than hundred armed men exchanging volleys of fire.

112 TV channel told that the PR-chief of the Kyiv Police informed: ”Workers of the local police arrived on site just a minute after that. They detained 10 people with guns. They took them to a local police station. They occurred to be ”guests” from other regions of Ukraine. The site is now being investigated, other participants are being identified, circumstances and reasons of the incident are sorted out.” According to the preliminary inquiry, a conflict broke between the entrepreneurs in passanger services and illegal carriers.

UNIAN Agency confirms that a hundred men participated in the shoot-out on a bus parking lot in Brovary. At least three persons were wounded. 24 TV published a testimony of a local resident who woke up when a bullet came through the windowpane.

UNIAN states that the Interior Minister Arsen Avakov refuses to take responsibility and blames local authorities for corruption in distributing bus quotas between carriers. President Zelensky has summoned Avakov to a meeting demanding explanations.

The Brovary mayor Ihor Sapozhko explains the dispute by the fact that the regional authorities have approved intercity routes for a different company than the city council has done. 

The chief of the police department of Vynnitsa region has been fired , because a rival group from Vynnitsa had brought people to Brovary. This was arranged through a private security company; the fact was confirmed by Dubinsky, the deputy of the Ukrainian Parliament.

On May 22, seven people were killed near the village of Novoselytsia in Ukraine’s Zhytomyr region. Ukrainian Deputy Interior Minister Anton Gerashchenko announced this in Facebook. The killer, the owner of the pond where the victims were fishing, surrendered himself to the police. All the victims, according to Ukrainian media, were also heavily armed. Three of them were servicemen of the National Guard of Ukraine on vacation. The others were army volunteers, according to the Ukrainian News. The 62-year-old man killed his armed guests with his hunting rifle.

The reason of the murder, told by the police, was ”sudden rage”, while a number of Ukrainian journalists claim that the fishermen were threatening the life of the owner of the fishing pond.

UNIAN states that the reason why the armed guests attacked the pond owner was either his testimony against a local policeman accused in extorting bribes or the fact that he had prohibited his children from going to war in Eastern Ukraine.

On May 25 Ukraine was outraged with the news of a multiple rape and torture of a 26-year-old woman by two policemen in Kaharlyk, Kyiv region. The victim was allured to the police office to witness on thefts. The policemen locked her in the office, tortured and raped her. The culprits were Sergey Sulima, appointed from Lviv to Kyiv region after serving in the conflict area in Donbass, and Nikolay Kuziv, the chief of the criminal police of Kaharlyk region. The bureau to UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine called on the State Bureau of Investigation and the Office of the Prosecutor General to investigate all alleged police crimes, including the recent incident in Kaharlyk.