Speaker A
You short-legged little creep. Have you ever seen as many bandits in prison as you have in the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine?
Yuriy Lutsenko discusses Ukrainian politics, corruption, and key events like the Gongadze murder and oligarchy formation under Kuchma.
Key Takeaways
- Ukrainian politics has been deeply affected by corruption and oligarchic control since Kuchma's presidency.
- The Gongadze murder was a politically motivated operation linked to Russian interference and Ukrainian officials.
- Efforts to reform and democratize Ukraine face entrenched interests and systemic challenges.
- Yuriy Lutsenko's experience highlights the risks and complexities of opposing powerful political figures.
- Understanding Ukraine's recent history requires acknowledging both internal and external influences on its political system.
What the video covers
- Yuriy Lutsenko shares insider perspectives on Ukrainian politics over 25 years, including his roles as MP, Prosecutor General, and Minister of Internal Affairs.
- He criticizes the Verkhovna Rada as full of bandits and discusses confrontations with former President Leonid Kuchma.
- Lutsenko recounts the 'Ukraine Without Kuchma' campaign and the political atmosphere during the Gongadze journalist murder.
- He explains the creation of the oligarchy under Kuchma and the failure to protect Ukrainian industries from Russian influence.
- The Gongadze murder is described as a Russian special operation executed by Medvedchuk, with complicity from Kuchma's ministers.
- Lutsenko reflects on corruption, political repression, and the challenges of reforming Ukraine's law enforcement and political systems.
- He discusses the poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko with dioxin (Agent Orange) and the involvement of Russian agents.
- The interview touches on the broader implications of political crimes and the struggle for democracy in Ukraine.
- Lutsenko shares personal anecdotes illustrating the complexity and dangers of Ukrainian politics.
- The video provides a critical historical overview of Ukraine's political evolution and ongoing challenges.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Political Criticism
- 05:06Meeting with Leonid Kuchma and Political Campaigns
- 10:24Discussion on Political Corruption and Oligarchy
- 15:37Gongadze Murder and Russian Involvement
- 20:37Poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko
- 24:53Reflections on Political Challenges and Reforms
- 32:11Personal Anecdotes and Political Risks
- 38:11Conclusion and Future Outlook
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
Are we not allowed to curse here? Yes, you are. I say, Leonid Danylovych, nobody in this country curses as masterfully as you do.
Speaker A
There were actual showdowns right in the offices. Don't appoint him. Then he walks out, and Pavlo Ivanovych is already on his knees with a broom. I am your janitor. I will sweep everything away before you. So Leonid Danylovych was convinced that he would
Speaker A
be his janitor. He would serve him. Yes. I take the phone from Yulia and call Yushchenko.
Speaker A
He says: "Yulia, good morning." I say: "The morning is shitty, Viktor Andriyovych, it's Yura. This is not Yulia." This was unexpected even for Yulia Tymoshenko herself.
Speaker A
I climbed into a closet in the president's office and sat there for an hour, heard about terrible corruption, and decided to record it.
Speaker A
What an interesting story. And what have you sons of done? You didn't realize who you were dealing with or what you were getting into.
Speaker A
That was the day of Gongadze's murder. From my point of view, it was done behind Kravchenko's back, meaning the whole special operation was carried out through Medvedchuk.
Speaker A
Kravchenko, as everyone tells me, was a man of the Vysotsky type. If we're going to party, let's party; if we're going to shoot, let's shoot.
Speaker A
Well, those two shots, that's really possible. He took an assistant who helped. What kind of person could agree to help in that, loving and respecting him?
Speaker A
Pikhovshek knew where he was. Pikhovshek, well, is an obvious agent of the Russian Federation. Who, in our opinion, poisoned Yushchenko? Back then, I want to remind you, he was poisoned with dioxin. And what is dioxin called?
Speaker A
As a military poison? What? Agent Orange. Agent Orange. Uh-huh. The American army used it in Vietnam.
Speaker A
Moroz, of course, committed terrible sins at the end of his life. I'm not even talking about my personal relationship with him there.
Speaker A
Which of your mistakes do you regret the most, since you've apparently been through everything? Well, look, I just took on a certain mission, but I ended up eating more than I should have.
Speaker A
Greetings, I am Olena Dumai. This is the Dumai YouTube channel. And today we are thinking with a person who knows the ins and outs of Ukrainian politics over the last 25 years. He saw how clans were born and collapsed and knows
Speaker A
exactly why the law is not the same for everyone in this country. We are thinking with Yuriy Lutsenko. Greetings to you, Yuriy Vitaliyovych.
Speaker A
Greetings. Thank you for your time. Yuriy Lutsenko, Member of Parliament of Ukraine for four convocations, Prosecutor General of Ukraine, twice Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, head of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc faction, field commander of the Orange Revolution,
Speaker A
commander of a strike UAV platoon of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Your quote is that you haven't seen as many bandits in prison as you have in the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. There was a president to whom you spoke
Speaker A
face-to-face, accusing him of wanting to create—and effectively creating—an oligarchy. What did you say to Leonid Danilovich Kuchma? I didn't say it to just one, but more. But let's start with Kuchma. Specifically, what did you say to Kuchma?
Speaker A
I didn't talk much with Leonid Danilovich. Uh, he saw me once in Rivne, where I was deputy governor. Then, the second time I came to him with a delegation from the "Ukraine Without Kuchma" movement.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. So we met, and he listened to my demands. This was during the period of Gongadze's murder, the journalist's severed head, and police involvement, which wasn't proven then, but everyone understood everything. And we demanded the removal of the Minister of Internal Affairs,
Speaker A
for starters, and also allowing the opposition on television. Kravchenko at the time. Kravchenko back then. Leonid Danilovich endured my speech for a long time. Then he says: "I watched the TV today, and over there in London, they use fire
Speaker A
hoses on people like you. I’ll tell them to disperse you with fire hoses so you’ll have less nonsense in your heads." I say: "I got it, thank you for the fire hose idea. I'll go and tell them you promised to use fire hoses on
Speaker A
us." Well, they tried to calm us down somehow, but in principle, no dialogue came of it. All of this continued, well, and it ended very badly for Danilovich. Uh, and the next meetings happened after the Maidan and, I think,
Speaker A
yes, this was after my prison time; I think I wasn't Prosecutor General yet, I was a faction leader. So that’s around 2014-2015. I met him at a state reception at the House with Chimaeras.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. And there everyone was giving toasts at this state reception. And the host says: "Here is a student of Leonid Danilovich, so-and-so." A student of Leonid Danilovich, so-and-so. Then he got to me and stumbled, and I said: "I
Speaker A
am Leonid Danilovich's partner in the 'Ukraine Without Kuchma' campaign." I say, I say, Leonid Danilovich, I say, we are currently in the House with Chimaeras, right across from the House with Monsters. The monsters keep changing, but the chimaeras remain. You
Speaker A
renovated them, and that, in principle, is your great achievement. Yes. He perked up, and then Was that irony or sarcasm, Mr. Yuriy?
Speaker A
I love doing that. There. And then we sat in a corner together after everything ended. This was the first time I was with him. Well, you know, not in passing, but seriously, for about 40 minutes we sat together.
Speaker A
And I say: "I believe that Kuchma was actually not a bad president. He, of course, pulled the Ukrainian economy out of stasis, or rather, out of a heart attack state, let's say." But Kuchma-2 was a harmful president, and I
Speaker A
ask, "Why?" I say, "Well, look, you have several sins." Sin number one: the oligarchy.
Speaker A
You gave birth to it. What did he say to you in response? He says, "I had no other option, otherwise the Russians would have bought everything." I say, "Couldn't you have put them up for auction for Europeans?" "But they didn't want to." I
Speaker A
say, "Did you ask them?" "Yes, that's what they told me." I say, "Did you try at least one factory?" Well, at least one.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. You didn't try to stand your ground? I say, "Why were cement plants bought, but not metallurgical ones?" No, the cement plants were bought by the French and other Western companies. So why not try to put the metallurgy sector up for
Speaker A
sale after that? Uh-huh. Well, they didn't have such a desire. I say, "Did your son-in-law and his friends have that desire?" Yes. Kandyba, in short.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. We love that word of his. Uh-huh. So. And the second sin, I say. The second sin is that you created a system where dissatisfaction with a journalist led to a socialist competition. As to who would suppress him first, or
Speaker A
perhaps even kill him. Uh, indeed, nowhere in the case files is there a direct order from Kuchma to kill Gongadze, but his constant grumbling that "he’s gotten to me," that "the Chechens should kidnap him and take him to the Caucasus." That led to the
Speaker A
tragedy it ended in. This could not have been done in a normal democratic country. To imagine that the police would carry out an order, uh, for example, in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which I led from 2005, is completely impossible.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. And even in the Ministry of Internal Affairs during Avakov's time, it was impossible. But in the Ministry of Internal Affairs during Kuchma's time with his respective ministers—well, in this case, Kravchenko, and actually the two subsequent ones,
Speaker A
Smirnov and Khozhy—it was possible. And that is your fault. You created an atmosphere where illegal criminal acts were carried out at the president's request. The Gongadze special operation and murder was a Russian special operation, but Medvedchuk carried it
Speaker A
out. You understand, here in Kyiv. This was when we were investigating; I had already read it. I returned from prison, went to the prosecutor's office, and read the file.
Speaker A
What I missed while sitting there in that case, uh, because the killers o
Speaker A
Uh-huh. All four of them. The prosecutors took the mastermind and released Pukach. Uh-huh. Then they searched for a long time, found him, and put him in jail again.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. But, I mean, well, in prison I missed, well, many nuances, and they were very important. Uh, in Kyiv, in Podil, there is the Mayak plant, which used to produce the famous reel-to-reel tape recorders back in the Soviet days. For
Speaker A
those who still remember, the youth don't even know what this is. It’s that round gadget where the tape runs across the head of the tape recorder and winds onto another reel. So, this enterprise serviced the Mayak tape recorders installed in special niches
Speaker A
at the Administration of the President of Ukraine. Let me remind you that this building previously housed the Kiev Military District. And before that, rather, and then the Central Committee of the CPU.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. Moscow was always recording this facility, when the military commanders sat there, when the communists sat there, and when post-communist presidents arrived.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. Officially, security explained to the presidents that it was necessary to monitor the silence at night when they went home. Meaning the tape recorder is spinning, a guy is sitting there in headphones, and as soon as something creaks, it means someone came in. "It's
Speaker A
another form of protection," they told him. Uh-huh. But Ukraine is a country of possibilities. Therefore, the Kuchma administration downsized security, and as a result, the person listening in the headphones ended up entering that room himself. Major Melnichenko.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. As a result, he eventually realized that when Kuchma left the premises, they would seal it and press the recorder button.
Speaker A
And when he came to work, they would unseal it and turn the button off.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. He simply didn't turn it off and that was it. But the tapes weren't really controlled by Mykola on his Toshiba, which he was copying them onto .
Speaker A
Then by whom? By the one who installed it. Whoever guards something, possesses it. That’s an old OBKHS principle.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. In this case, whoever did the recording was in control. That is why Moscow always possessed all those recordings through their agents, and not just those. This, well, I don't know who was filming, it hasn't been established, but by the way
Speaker A
, Melnichenko was not alone. I was told that these tapes were listened to at Dynamo on the eve of the events.
Speaker A
And where did they go? No, where did those three go? So Melnichenko stayed here, but three others left. And where did they go? I don't know. I assume to Moscow. Well, the point is that these tapes were always in Moscow. Uh-huh.
Speaker A
And when Kuchma, before the first Maidan, decided out of fear to shut Melnichenko's mouth, he, while on the international wanted list, suddenly arrived from London to Moscow and there on Red Square with a newspaper, you know, to show the date,
Speaker A
all these spy-like passions, he shows that he is here. The deputy head of the SBU and the head of the State Management of Affairs came to him . The FSB officers met them and took them to Mykola.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. They spoke, then there was another visit, then they arrived with money. That is why, uh, from my point of view, it is absolutely obvious that the recordings were not made to find out who killed the journalist, but the
Speaker A
journalist was killed under recording. And Kuchma understood this perfectly well. Under these conditions of this understanding, he makes a decision: Tigipko, Yushchenko, or Yanukovych.
Speaker A
Whose arguments will outweigh? Moscow's , or well, I don't even know how to say , or, or Plyushch's?
Speaker A
Yes, everything is clear. Moscow's outweighed. And that is why another Moscow FSB, or rather KGB, operation.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. About pulling into Ukraine. Back into the empire, which had escaped due to Plyushch's cunning and Yeltsin's stupidity. It repeats. The journalist is killed under this, uh, brutally.
Speaker A
Melnychenko, at least he constantly talks about it in all, all the years of all his interrogations.
Speaker A
One time he says: " I climbed, uh, into a closet in the president's office and sat there for an hour while Kuchma was talking to someone." Well, imagine, and I heard about terrible corruption. And I decided to record it. And I went to
Speaker A
Marchuk. He gave me—I'm shortening it , of course—he gave me a Toshiba tape recorder, well, this tiny voice recorder. Back then, it was, well, a very exotic piece of equipment. And I uh, started recording with it. I was
Speaker A
the representative of the parliamentary commission of inquiry that brought Melnychenko with his recording device to the FBI. There was a commission decision to hand it over to the FBI for examination. I, Taras Chornovil, the two of us arrived there. We met
Speaker A
Mykola Melnychenko, went into his home. His wife was very unfriendly toward us. Well, she thought there would be terrible wealth here, but here it was just, well, a small family unit.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. So, we talked about something with him. He shows the tape recorder—some famous rich people gave him this tape recorder—they were recording there in Sweden, which many people listen to now on YouTube. He was involved in that, and not only that. "Here is my tape
Speaker A
recorder, here are the headphones, here is the equalizer, here I clean up the noise, here is everything else." Well, we talked about something for a long time. And then I said: "Do you have many of these recordings?" And we had
Speaker A
those nine miserable episodes, which, well, everyone leaked, but there was more swearing than facts in them. And then, in the center of this small family unit of his, stands a huge Carpathian chest, well, beautiful, you know, in America, well,
Speaker A
in such a sterile room, the chest. And Mykola lifts that chest, and there, well, I don't know. Centimeters. Like that, for, how much? About 40, and a chest full of tape reels. I say: "Kolya , but this isn't digital, this is
Speaker A
analog." And he says with that lid: " That's all, goodbye, see you tomorrow." And that's the first thing that stuck in my head, that he had reel-to-reels, not a tape recorder.
Speaker A
This means he was simply copying from the reels onto a tape recorder for the public, and this is someone's side.
Speaker A
an authentic recording. And we were struggling back then, remember, with how to prove the digital format. They have reel-to-reels. And so we go to the FBI in New York, the headquarters, we go up, and there sit two FBI agents. Taras, myself, and
Speaker A
Mykola, we enter. He speaks, I say: "It is as it is, here are the papers, we are representatives of the Ukrainian parliament. Here is our hero, an intelligence officer, recording this nest of corrupt officials, those Anglo-Saxons were like. Uh-huh.
Speaker A
He asks:" What does Kolya have to do with being there? "He says:" The President, "he says:" Yes. "He says:" Aren't they checking the office? "He says:" We had staff cuts, and that's why, I say, I was checking. "I say:"
Speaker A
Cuts by the President. "He says:" Yes. "And how many of you were there? He says:" Well, there were eight, it became four. " He says:" Okay. "He says:" And how did you press the button? Batteries wouldn't last. "He says:" Oh, the
Speaker A
batteries lasted just fine. "Well, he says:" You couldn't have listened, "he says:" I only turned it on when there was an interesting topic. "And how did you hear from the reception room, well, or rather not the reception, but even
Speaker A
the small audio security office. Uh-huh. He says:" I connected it to, remember, they used to sell small plastic toy phones for kids, like mobiles. " Uh-huh.
Speaker A
Back then they were a novelty, and kids played with them. And he had that phone on his belt.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. tuned to the Toshiba and an earpiece from it. And he listens to what they are saying to the President. And those two FBI agents looked at each other and said:" This is all they handed over this whole comedy, they handed it over
Speaker A
by report. "So, I walked out of there and thought, I think I'm being played.
Speaker A
I say:" Wait, where are the reels in this scheme? "He says:" Forget it. " Well and I apologize, but it was a pure Kuchma setup, we could have exhaled. The man was carrying out a KGB mission. to record conversations in Kuchma's office
Speaker A
. Well, you are surprised today by how much Russian agency there is, but back then there was many times more.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. In the most unexpected places. He carried out this task, but at a certain point, he realized that if he recorded a little more for himself, he could play it for politics at the very least, or for money at most.
Speaker A
And that is why all this trading was going on. And that is why, when Bakai brought him 3 million, he said:" More from you, more, good God, how much did they want? "297 a fund for victims of Kuchmism for our suffering
Speaker A
297 million in total they wanted 300, they brought them three Oleksandr Moroz said this when he was on my show, and it, you know, it really struck a chord with me back then. He says: how could it have been like that?
Speaker A
Yulia Tymoshenko goes around the regions and says: this BYuT is the same as the Socialist Party, they just don't have money, and we do. Yes, Moroz, of course, committed terrible sins at the end of his life, not to mention my
Speaker A
personal relationship with him, but he simply sold out all the titanic work of those bright, idealistic people for his speakership in Yanukovych's service, just like that. But at that moment, I will never forget, we were going up for
Speaker A
the vote, the budget. We were going up to the faction room. Moroz was standing there, pale. He says:" Yura, you tell me. "He says:" On the right side of the hall, they're standing with a suitcase, ready to vote. "" On the left side of
Speaker A
the hall, they're standing with a suitcase, ready not to vote. "" What should I do? "I said:" Sanovych, look, "I said:" We don't have an office left, we don't have anything left. "And what's already gone?
Speaker A
Uh-huh. Well, I said, take neither and don't vote. I said:" The opposition isn't voting anyway. "Yeah, and you have to give him credit for that. He didn't take a single one, not one suitcase.
Speaker A
Well, he was like that until the very end, but at that moment, at the time of " Ukraine without Kuchma, "there were effectively two opposition newspapers in the country. One is to this day the standard of Ukrainian journalism,"
Speaker A
Dzerkalo Tyzhnia. " Uh-huh. And the second one, I was the editor of the" Grani "newspaper under the wing of the Socialist Party. The only thing I secured was that we wouldn't write about party affairs. It would be a hooligan political newspaper
Speaker A
, where Tetiana Chornovol wrote the article" Kuchma and to hell with him. " Right now, Dzerkalo Tyzhnia and this article regarding the fact that, again, the tapes, they turn out to be physically what they are on the tapes.
Speaker A
he listened for a long time, yes, because he thought it was a provocation to finish him off once and for all. And then that would be it, Kuchma would have become a full-fledged dictator. He wouldn't have even had any opposition
Speaker A
left. Nothing, everything was already under control. But then he realized that, well, it’s just impossible to stage everything he hears on TV in the evening, he hears on these tapes at lunch. And he calls me in then, I was his press secretary, and
Speaker A
says:" Organize a press conference for tomorrow. "And back then it was in the air that Yulia was to be removed as Yushchenko's deputy prime minister.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. I say, about Yulia’s resignation, well, just formulate it somewhat generally. No one in the party knew until the end, except for one person, his surname was Mendus, he was an advisor, uh, a former, well, let's say, uh, Ukrainian intelligence
Speaker A
officer, let's call him that, uh, an advisor to Moroz. And only the two of them knew, no one else. He says: " And bring a tape recorder. "I show up with some kind of primitive party tape recorder. Yeah. And he gives me a
Speaker A
cassette. A bunch of journalists. Nobody knew why, but, well, the parliamentary ones came. I insert the cassette, press the button, but it’s not right, the cassette is facing the wrong way. Everyone gets nervous, I switch it, it hisses. And the room is
Speaker A
huge, the acoustics are bad, the recording is very illegible. I only hear swearing and Kuchma's very characteristic voice. You can't confuse it with anyone else's.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. Later I listened to those tapes enough. So, to this day, I once met Kuchma at the prosecutor's office, I said, Leonid Danylovych, I said, I learned to swear at the factory, in the army, in prison, and where else, well, I say, no one in
Speaker A
this country swears as virtuously as you do. He doesn't just know how to swear; when he swears, he imagines it like, well, like a video, like a process. Well, for example, Derkach comes in to see him. It all
Speaker A
started with a huge article appearing in a Russian newspaper. Derkach comes in. Andriy Derkach, our Ukrainian Putin.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. Well, what can a godfather do in relation to...He calls his godson. Uh-huh. Derkach. Well, this is also logical.
Speaker A
The director of Yuzhmash became president. Who should become the head of the SBU? Clearly, the head of the Yuzhmash security guards. Well, that's fair. So, he calls him and says:" You short-legged bastard. "Oh, you! Well, I won't repeat all the swearing, he says:
Speaker A
" I'll rip your little crooked, well, I can't do it like him, I'll rip those little crooked legs of yours right off.
Speaker A
"" You know, damn it, remember after the war, there were these veterans without legs. "" They would ride around like that, remember, on those little carts with ball bearings, with their stumps? "I'll nail your testicles to that board and, you, drag you
Speaker A
down Hrushevskoho street to hell, hitting every cobblestone, and then smash your head into the Ukrainian House. He says, for you to write such articles. And he was picturing this scene. Poetry.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. Well, a factory worker, a missile engineer. So I truly imagined it all, when this happened, but laughter is laughter. And that's when they started to spin the idea that this article was written by some Gongadze. Kuchma could not remember the
Speaker A
name, but as a Soviet person, and all Soviet people knew the name Georgadze. Uh-huh.
Speaker A
That’s, I think, already the third generation of the same family signing decrees of the Presidium, well, governing bodies of the USSR, and now Russia. The KGB, which understood that under these tapes one could. So, it’s already visible that Kuchma is
Speaker A
interested in this Georgadze. He didn't say Gongadze. Georgadze. So he didn't even know the name at first, then he remembered it. He says:" Have you figured it out, Danylovych? I have figured it out. " That's it. Well, this is on the tapes, right?
Speaker A
He says:" Yes, there is such a Gongadze . "" He's writing all this filth. "And he still doesn't react, he says:" And he also writes obscene poems about Lyudmila Nikolaevna. "And Kuchma loves his wife terribly. Terribly. And for
Speaker A
him this is, well, an absolute, he was specifically winding him up. Uh-huh. And many people wound him up like that.
Speaker A
And they wound him up to the point that he says a lot on the tapes. There is no order to kill, but there is, he says, how he’s gotten to me, for him to disappear somewhere, so that he, and he
Speaker A
starts winding him up to have the cops pressure him, just like they pressured all the opposition. Well, burned the car, well, kicked in the doors there.
Speaker A
Well, that is, back then it was acceptable for his country. And in this is his guilt, politically he is guilty of this politically. But legally, behind this stands the FSB, which, under these recordings, leading them, kills a journalist, with the hands of the
Speaker A
police intelligence. So, politically his guilt is that he allowed himself a system that responded to any wishes of the leader, including those of a criminal nature, even with exaggeration.
Speaker A
And there could have been another name. On the tapes, there is a place where it was discussed that these hacks need to be taught a lesson. Actually, Gongadze was not some very famous journalist.
Speaker A
There was Ukrayinska Pravda. They had 3,000 subscribers at that time. All of this was, Gongadze worked in my newspaper Hrani for 70 UAH a month.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. Eh, as a fee. He came and said:" Can I open a site, it will be called Ukrayinska Pravda, and reprint your articles there? For me, it was still a mystery back then, what a site was.
Speaker A
Well, Ukraine. Well, the internet. Well, the internet world. Uh, I mean, but in the country, the internet back then was, I think, for hundreds Uh-huh.
Speaker A
of people, no more, mostly in embassies . He says, "This is for the West." I say, "God, well take my articles." He says, "It won't cost anything." Cost, I say, "Of course, nothing." Well, distribute it and distribute it.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. And as a result, yes, but other names were being discussed. And Korabova, who Tanya is already, uh, over 80. Uh, I still maintain tender relations with her. I love her very much, I appreciate her. Uh, she taught me many things,
Speaker A
including that the word "general" is no worse than the word "dick." It's all about how you relate to it. And the main thing is not to be a prick, you understand? Well, Tanya had such a peculiar hooligan style, which
Speaker A
complemented my...we found each other. Yes, we found each other, but our newspaper at its peak, well, more on that later, became the main tool.
Speaker A
Kuchma hated it terribly because she wrote, first of all, insights from parliament, and everyone flocked to her . Well, they told on others, on each other, and it was a real pleasure. So on the last day, Gongadze stopped by me
Speaker A
, borrowed 5 UAH. 5 or 50? 50 UAH. He bought a watermelon and a bottle of red wine and went on a date to his, uh, girlfriend in the building literally next door. I was on Lesya Ukrainka, and he went to Lesya Ukrainka
Speaker A
. From there, the head of police intelligence Pukach came out and pulled the car up. Well, like a hot pursuit.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. He waved his hand, it pulled up, he says: "Sit in the back," because the front seat is broken. He sat in the back with two big, burly men on either side. They beat him half to death, came
Speaker A
to Pukach's relatives, took a canister of gasoline, a belt, and brought him to the forest. He came to from the fresh air. They beat him again, started strangling him. In the end, uh, one of them stepped on his throat, crushed his
Speaker A
larynx, uh, and that's how they killed him. Then, later, Pukach arrived there with his driver. They cut off his head.
Speaker A
Well, these are cop stories. No head, no final decision on identification. They threw them into a nearby lake, the jewelry there, and so on.
Speaker A
Uh, and the recordings were working under all of this. Now the question is: who gave Pukach these instructions? And when I became Minister of Internal Affairs, in 2005, I arrived in Kharkiv at the beginning of the first months,
Speaker A
maybe March. Uh-huh. I arrive at the Kharkiv academy. The rector there was Bandurka, a lieutenant general, a deputy, well, a very well-known Oleksandr Oleksandrovych.
Speaker A
And he, well, probably wanted to please the new minister. He says: "When Kravchenko arrived here, well, and we had already gone through everything, all the procedures, and naturally, they set the table, he says, we went in." And then he got a call, he went into a
Speaker A
separate room, but he was shouting so loud that we all heard: "What have you done, you, you don't understand who you've dealt with, what you've gotten yourselves into." This was the day of Gongadze's murder, or rather, the day the grave was found.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. Without sitting down at the table, he calls for a person created in Kyiv, the right-hand man of the UBZ chief, Mykola Dryha. He asks: "Kolya: Who?" Well, the Interior Ministry always knows what kind of intelligence that is.
Speaker A
Who? That is, the administration, I say . Well, at that moment, there was a kind of semi-dual power. There is a minister, and there is a state secretary. Kravchenko was the minister, and the state secretary was Fere.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. He was from Dahaiev. Dahaiev was the State Management of Affairs. And he was, uh, well, let's say, politically in Medvedchuk's circle.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. So-called footballers versus cops. One must understand that Kravchenko was seriously considered as a candidate for prime minister at that time.
Speaker A
Is that why there was a murder later? No, the murder was because of this whole Gongadze story. And so, he, uh, starts pressuring Pukach, and he says: "I was given the order directly from the president." That is, those who gave
Speaker A
him the order cited that he was an American spy. Uh-huh. To this day, even though we offered him , well, many options so it wouldn't be life imprisonment, 15 years, even 12 and others. An American spy, I killed
Speaker A
him because, uh, he was a threat to Ukraine and so on. That is, well, an absolutely sick person, a very...kind of person.
Speaker A
Well, I understand it as him being an agent, or maybe some recruitment took place.
Speaker A
I think he is from the cohort of old people sick in the head with Soviet mentality, who believed it, and now he can't even admit to himself that he was simply used. And plus, I think, his brain wasn't all right by the end.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. And so, the threads lead further to Lytvyn. There are versions that Lytvyn came to the Interior Ministry, that he had it out with Kravchenko. I don't believe it, because it doesn't align with the hierarchy of ranks. Back then,
Speaker A
Lytvyn couldn't have come to the Interior Ministry. Moreover, well, I saw the face-to-face confrontations and everything else. It doesn't look like it, it doesn't look like it. But the point is that the KGB, through Medvedchuk, whom they made head of the
Speaker A
administration after Kuchma in Ukraine, carried all this out, and the old agents were actually making the tapes, and Medvedchuk passed the order down the chain to organize, well, such a vivid, vivid murder.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. Let me remind those who don't know or haven't forgotten that both Ifr and Dogayev did not die natural deaths; they were poisoned. Or rather, one was in a coma for many years, I don't remember, maybe 10 years, and only
Speaker A
recently died, while the other was poisoned. Traces of poison were found during the exhumation. Uh, if you compare, well, the KGB's habits of poisoning, both here, yes, and in Britain, then it all paints the picture exactly as it should be.
Speaker A
I, well, don't want to dwell on this for long, but from my point of view, this was done behind Kravchenko's back.
Speaker A
Uh, meaning through Medvedchuk they implemented the whole oper- to his deputies, to the deputies, to the deputies who were not under his control. But Kravchenko was, again, a Soviet man who lied in parliament, tried to whitewash things, but in the
Speaker A
end, he was the one who became the scapegoat. And when he was summoned for questioning to the PGO, back then by Yushchenko's Piskun.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. He started calling everyone, but no one picked up the phone. Neither Lytvyn, nor the kind old man Potebenko, the former Prosecutor General, so to speak, exactly. So. And Kravchenko, as everyone tells me, was a man of the
Speaker A
Vysotsky type. If you're going to party , party; if you're going to shoot, shoot. But he couldn't imagine himself in prison for even a second. And that is why he made the decision to take his own life. He gathered his inner circle,
Speaker A
well, his very close comrades. And when they finished on Trukhaniv Island with tennis, and drinks, and the sauna, he started talking to them in the past tense: "I loved you. I respected you.
Speaker A
They understood, got scared, and didn't let him stay there overnight, but took him home. Well, that didn't change the situation.
Speaker A
Well, and these two shots, is it, well, really possible? Look, I was, I read the criminal case on his murder. It is anomalous.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. Any murder, uh, well, is 30 volumes, sometimes 200. Here, if I'm not mistaken, there are seven. Of these, two are background documents. Uh-huh.
Speaker A
Well, that is, who he was, how he is characterized, a few of them, maybe even five, I don't remember. And one is my statement that there could not have been two shots without blood in the lungs. I draw your
Speaker A
attention, there are cases where a person shoots twice, even into the heart. It just, well, happens.
Speaker A
But if he had fired the first time, half the jaw would fly out from bottom to top. Blood, you understand, blood would be gushing. In such shock, a person can't help but gasp for air, meaning blood. And there is no blood in
Speaker A
the lungs. That's what serious experts told me. I made that statement, by the way, in that same political context.
Speaker A
After that, they opened a case, questioned me, and I asked:" Why question me? "Well, you need to appoint a proper expert. Your examination was conducted at the level of a district hospital.
Speaker A
Well, yeah. The Minister of Internal Affairs, you know. Now I will tell you, well, what I think. I think the shots need to be rearranged. One fatal, the second a finisher.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. Then everything is logical. So, I don't think anyone killed him. He has a note and all that nonsense about there being no pen. That is, that is his handwriting.
Speaker A
It contains accusations regarding...I know. My dear ones, I am not guilty of anything. I became a victim of Kuchma and his entourage.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. Of the political games of Kuchma and his entourage. And then there are some personal words.
Speaker A
So, do you think he wrote it himself? Yes, he wrote it himself. That was established by the examination. It’s all confirmed by the fact that he said goodbye to everyone the previous evening. But that’s not the point. Eh
Speaker A
, there was obviously a person who helped him, because about half a year before that, I think, in the Cherkasy region, one cop, a general, shot himself.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. And he survived. He says," A real cop shoots himself in the temple, and you ... "Well, and so on, it's epic. So how could he have repeated that?
Speaker A
He brought in an assistant who helped him, because it is a very difficult moment to shoot yourself, and I know that one of those who was with him at that last, well, party, left Ukraine forever the next day.
Speaker A
What kind of person would agree to help with... A loving, respectful one, who doesn't allow a beloved boss and chief to sit in prison. That happens. A dignified death is better than being disgraced and so on. Well, this is, look, this is
Speaker A
the philosophy of the post-Soviet or even Soviet police caste. Uh-huh. of policemen. We won't understand it, but I have seen it.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. That's why it's not about that anymore. Now it's about how it happened. This became a trigger. for the arrival, that is, the accusations against Kuchma. And in connection with this, we are talking for so long about one thing, why I
Speaker A
reached out to Yanukovych. That is why, because Moscow pointed the finger at Yanukovych. Uh-huh.
Speaker A
And he couldn't refuse, because behind his back hung a concrete slab of the Gongadze case with recordings not from Major Melnychenko, but from the KGB of the Russian Federation. I have information that Pikhovshek knew where the body was located. It seems that if
Speaker A
it hadn't been found, he would have been the first one at that site. What do you know about this?
Speaker A
I cannot say. The only thing I can say is that Pikhovshek, well, is an obvious agent of the Russian Federation, so such an agent, yes, meaning they could have acted in tandem with Medvedchuk.
Speaker A
Here, one must understand what I am explaining. I have publicly called Yermak an agent for a long time.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. There is an agent of influence, and there is a spy. Uh-huh, because for that you need specific evidence, but I, well, can see it in everything, and it is visible even to those who use only open sources, that these are two, and
Speaker A
there are many hundreds of them, agents of influence. For the sake of fairness, I cannot help but ask. Uh, Moroz, he talks a lot about this topic as well, and he, uh, you could say, accused you of not
Speaker A
bringing the investigation to an end. Uh, he spoke loudly at rallies and everything else, made a political name for himself, and then became a minister , and then became a prosecutor. While being a minister, he said:" We investigated everything and handed the
Speaker A
materials to the prosecutor's office. Let the prosecutor send it to court. " What can you say to that?
Speaker A
First of all, the investigation at that time was being conducted by the prosecutor's office.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. And he knows that perfectly well. So, all the perpetrators of the murder were detained, but note, they were detained, handcuffed, and the prosecutor was called— already deceased, truth be told— Shchotkin arrived there, took them, and continued the investigation. Then they
Speaker A
reached the person who ordered it— Pukach. Now the question is how to prove it; well, Moroz believes the one who ordered it was Kuchma. Well, show me from the luggage of his friend Melnychenko where Kuchma gives the order. Moreover, the Constitutional
Speaker A
Court of Ukraine recognizes recordings made without a court order as illegitimate, which cannot be taken into consideration. For what? Even if there were something there, they don't count. How else to prove it?
Speaker A
How did your conversation end back then ? I understand, you— And I said that he has one mitigating circumstance. Go on.
Speaker A
He refused to shed blood on the Maidan at Yanukovych's demand. On the first Maidan in 2005, he refused to bring in troops. So you understand, at that time a so-called crisis group was meeting in the Ministry of Internal Affairs
Speaker A
building. Uh-huh. In which, besides the commander of the internal troops, the minister of internal affairs, the SBU, and so on, Medvedchuk was included, who at that time was, if I am not mistaken, head of the— parliamentary group. No, the
Speaker A
presidential administration. Ah, the administration. Yes, that was indeed a Russian setup. The Gongadze murder weakened Kuchma, it halted his relations with the West, and thus halted the timid integration with NATO and the EU initiated by Kuchma.
Speaker A
That is the point. Uh-huh. And as a result, to overcome this crisis, they brought in a so-called crisis manager. His name was Medvedchuk .
Speaker A
Viktor Medvedchuk. And all the power, you know, it’s like when you hit a puck with a stick, the death of the innocent journalist was used to land the right shot in the right place. Meaning, the NATO-EU process stopped, Kuchma became
Speaker A
basically a figurehead, and Medvedchuk ran things. So, Medvedchuk is sitting in a meeting while the Maidan is happening.
Speaker A
Medvedchuk is sitting there demanding to send troops into the Maidan. And everyone is shouting this and that.
Speaker A
Yanukovych is sitting there, Medvedchuk is sitting there, and these others. And Medvedchuk stands up and says," Let me warn you right now: the ammunition must be live. " And after that, the internal troops refuse to follow the order
Speaker A
of their own minister. And then there’s an attempt to deploy regular army units. And here Kuchma forbids it, because he is the Commander-in-Chief. And this is exactly a mitigating circumstance. He refused to shed blood and allowed the third
Speaker A
round of elections to take place, which ultimately put an end to the falsifications. And in general, this crossroads of the first attempt to install a pro-Russian president, who was supposed to drag us back into the empire, was foiled. Therefore, Kuchma
Speaker A
has a very serious mitigating factor. The first oligarch under Kuchma was Lazarenko. No, he was not the first one.
Speaker A
And who was the first? Well, the first ones were those mainly from Donetsk and Dnipro, who grabbed the industry.
Speaker A
Well, two clans, essentially. When you accused Kuchma of spawning the oligarchy, who specifically did you have in mind?
Speaker A
Those who are them today? So, who are they? Rinat Akhmetov. Yes. Kolomoisky. Yes. The so-called Privat group. It’s not just Kolomoisky, it’s a whole group.
Speaker A
Just like it’s not just one person. There was also Shcherban, who was later murdered.
Speaker A
Yevhen. Yevhen. Obviously, there was Lazarenko in Dnipro, Yaroslavsky in Kharkiv. Well , Taruta was a bit separate, and then together with Akhmetov, and then later in Crimea. One could list about two dozen such people, I think. Pinchuk, undoubtedly.
Speaker A
Pinchuk. But would Pinchuk have become the Pinchuk he is if not for Leonid Danilovich? In his defense, I can say that he loves his wife very much. Very, very much. It's visible, it shows. And his wife is very close to him, they
Speaker A
both just hover around Kuchma like a father. In this case, it’s not about power or money anymore, but about human relationships.
Speaker A
And they have very good internal relations. But, well, that doesn't change the fact that the factories essentially went to those who agreed, uh, directly with Kuchma, on their right to, let's say, appropriate them.
Speaker A
I was just a kid back then. Uh-huh. I was 27 when I became the chief designer of a 6,000-worker plant, and at 29, I became, uh, a vice-governor.
Speaker A
Well, deputy head of the region for industry, transport, communications, finance, roads, and energy. In short, I was in charge of everything except the Ukrainian language and the Kyiv Patriarchate.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. Well, as deputy for the economy, they’d gather us for regional meetings here and there.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. And the situation was that there was simply no money in the country at all.
Speaker A
There were offsets, coupons, some kind of bartering going on. Money just didn't exist. And so, one day, they brought us all to Dnipro, then Dnipropetrovsk. Kuchma was there in person. And the first evening, well, they drank very heavily. I think about
Speaker A
a liter each. Danilovych, in the best or worst Kremlin traditions, personally watched over all of this. And the toasts could go by alphabet, and I’m from the Rivne region, at the end of the alphabet. It was very difficult.
Speaker A
That’s why an oppositional toast slipped out of me. And he was interested for a long time in who that was.
Speaker A
And what was the toast? I don’t remember exactly anymore. Well, something to the effect that we gave birth to the first president. We have the right to determine who the next one is. Something in that style.
Speaker A
Who is that? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, but the next day everyone understood that this was actually a presentation of the future prime minister, Lazarenko.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. At that moment, the governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region walked into the hall, gave us a speech for about three hours, and then, well, he just turned around and left, you know, in such a lordly, condescending way, and
Speaker A
left. I say," Well, what was I supposed to do? I was 29, or maybe 30 by that time. "Uh, I even say, I say," Wow, what a jerk to look at me like that. " They say," That’s not a jerk,
Speaker A
that’s the prime minister. "And a week later, he became the prime minister. Back then, the only thing I remembered was that he seemed like an innovator to me, because everyone else was grabbing factories.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. Everywhere across all of Ukraine. But Lazarenko, well, he's famous for the fact that, uh, he really wanted to be an economist, and his father was a collective farm head—by the way, in his village there were nearly 10 Heroes
Speaker A
of Socialist Labor. Yulia Tymoshenko said that she didn't think Lazarenko didn't know how to count money. And that is precisely why he wanted his village, his village was a forge of agrarian barons with Hero of Socialist Labor stars.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. And his father, of course, sent him into agriculture, but as soon as he became an agronomist, he immediately started, well, unconventional things.
Speaker A
Well, for example, inviting Moldovans there to weave brooms to sell on the side. Uh-huh.
Speaker A
There, meaning he was immediately interested in cash. He had this instinct, yes, he had the instinct.
Speaker A
And he was the first who figured out there is no sense in privatizing factories. You need to privatize the pipe that all the factories are sitting on. If you have the pipe, you have everything sitting on it in your pocket
Speaker A
. He gave us this speech, and I see now that the man saw this tangle of the economy very clearly; as a strategist, he was very strong.
Speaker A
As a result, as soon as he—he already had the ESU in Dnipropetrovsk at that moment.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. And Yulia Tymoshenko was already there. Kuchma was yelled at directly back then , there were showdowns in the offices." Don't appoint him, "why didn't he listen? They told him he would stuff his own pockets. But as Leonid
Speaker A
Danylovych said, he said," He has already stuffed his own pockets, now he will stuff the state's. " Leonid Danylovych was confident that, as a Dnipro native, he would clearly know the nomenclature. Meaning Dnipropetrovsk is a very disciplined, deference-to-authority region. It was
Speaker A
and even remains so partially. He was confident that the prime minister is a subordinate to the president and" I know how to manage him . "" I know. "Although, it wasn't without its moments; there were funny stories, when Kuchma
Speaker A
ran for office. In the first round, he was still campaigning, but in the second round, Tabachnyk and Chayka from *Kyivski Vedomosti*advised him not to say anything and hide altogether. They took him to a dacha and locked him behind a fence.
Speaker A
Seriously? They left everything he needed for leisure, just, well, the guitar and everything, and locked him up.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. That's it. And they opened it only when the second round was over. And so the second round is ending, there are no results yet. And Danylovych calls the governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region on a government phone. I say:" Pavlo
Speaker A
Ivanovych, get me a helicopter to fly to Kyiv, the results are tomorrow. "He says:" Who is this? "He says:" Don't you know? "" Well, it shows on the display. "Who is calling? He says:" It's me, Kuchma. "He says:" I don't
Speaker A
know anyone by that name. "And he hung up, because he was sure that he would win by a landslide. Well, and the next day the results are announced, and Danylovych goes outside, they found him another helicopter somewhere. He walks
Speaker A
out, and Pavlo Ivanovych is already on his knees right in front of that dacha, he is on his knees right outside with a broom." I am your janitor. "" I am your janitor. "" I am sweeping before you. "That is the Dnipropetrovsk
Speaker A
nomenclature. And Leonid Danylovych was sure that he would be his yardman. He would serve. Yes.
Speaker A
Yes. He would serve. Well, how should I put it, maybe not a yardman, he was still the Prime Minister after all.
Speaker A
Well, a hunting dog. Like," Sic 'em! " And it brought back a duck. Well, that's fine.
Speaker A
So he appointed him. And at that moment , Kuchma made a choice, because the exact same gas empire was already being built in the Donbas. In principle, Lazarenko was not the only one who understood that the key to the entire
Speaker A
economy was gas at that time, don't forget, incredibly cheap. Terrifyingly cheap. Accordingly, in the Donbas, Shcherban, who even created a Liberal Party, Yevhen Shcherban also strongly influenced the regional administration, the deputies of Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea in order to create the same empire. So, at
Speaker A
the moment of the appointment of Prime Minister Lazarenko, Kuchma made a choice. He bet on his own Dnipropetrovsk region with its methods of business and control, as opposed to the more criminal methods of the Donetsk group, who essentially wanted
Speaker A
the same thing Uh-huh. money and power. The only problem was that Lazarenko very quickly wanted to become president. Several bright clashes occurred between them, and as a result, Pavlo Ivanovych was removed from his post.
Speaker A
So that was exactly the reason for his removal from the position of Prime Minister.
Speaker A
I had Stetskiv as a guest, also a field commander of the Maidan. And I asked him a question to which he gave such an unexpected answer. If he regrets anything or considers anything a fatal mistake? It was just when they were
Speaker A
talking about the" Ukraine Without Kuchma "campaign, and he recalled when they entered the office of Ivan Stepanovych Plyushch, how he expressed himself with such, uh, stern or strict, or rather unkind words, right? And Mr.
Speaker A
Taras then said:" If he had spoken to us differently, or had chosen other words, and we had such an acute sense of justice, because our friend Georgiy Gongadze had been killed, "right? And it was unclear to us, even now I
Speaker A
understand that it was a special operation by Russia, and then maybe we would have acted a little differently and history would have gone a bit differently, no, there were chances, we had a chance, and we fully used it to
Speaker A
show that Ukraine will not be silent. Uh-huh. Essentially," Ukraine Without Kuchma " was a super-successful rehearsal for the future Orange Revolution. This was the first instance. Just think, after how many years—that's almost 10 years of independence—the first rally where
Speaker A
there were red, yellow-and-blue, and red-and-black flags in one column. Uh-huh. So, the multicolored, multi-party opposition united and went out to demand from the authorities the punishment of those involved in such a socially resonant event.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. Why did Plyushch behave like that? He also couldn't do otherwise. From the first day to his last breath, Plyushch believed in a broad coalition of Yushchenko and the Donetsk group.
Speaker A
Therefore, he could not act differently because at that moment he believed that it was Yushchenko who would become Kuchma's successor. And even when that didn't happen, he still went along with it; he is a conformist, raised in the
Speaker A
Soviet ultraconservative system, where one had to think over every single breath. And what's more, let's not forget, Yushchenko's political father was murdered.
Speaker A
Vadym Hetman was silenced. And that was in '99. Plyushch understood perfectly well that if you start too early, discipline is enforced very easily.
Speaker A
Regarding Hetman, it should not be forgotten that he was essentially the engine of that" constitutional night. " When, against Kuchma's wishes, parliament voted for a democratic constitution, and then Kuchma was forced to join in, signed it, and so on
Speaker A
. But he never forgot who—well, who the deputies of the opposition and, let's say, the economic center looked up to.
Speaker A
As a result, uh, he was too actively moving into politics. He was a very wealthy man. official declaration.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. He was a very influential man and a very principled man. As a result, a female hitman shot him in the elevator.
Speaker A
Moreover, everything was done so— there were six shots in the back there. Well, my personal opinion is that it was the work of the FSB.
Speaker A
Not a single clue, not a single trace, nothing. Moreover, the entire law enforcement system of that time behaved very strangely, of course. And Hetman was removed. And Yushchenko remembered the risks for a long time after that.
Speaker A
At least when Chornovil was still alive and came to him, proposing to nominate him as a presidential candidate from the People's Movement.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. He said:" Is Hetman not enough for you? "Yes, I think that Yushchenko actually didn't appear in public for a month back then, as many witnesses and friends say. That's when he understood everything. It was actually scary. And
Speaker A
that is why I was young then, and I didn't understand. We couldn't understand why he continued. He had already been prime minister, he had already been kicked out of there, he was being tormented by the security forces, yet he called Kuchma his own father,
Speaker A
because that lesson hung over him like a Sword of Damocles, and he wasn't planning to go into a radical position —I think, besides me, everyone else called it an anti-people regime. Such was Kuchma, I said. Yes, but, but you see, he wasn't afraid for
Speaker A
nothing, because in reality, he was hit with, uh, poisoning. Yes. Moreover, if I understand correctly, at least that is my version, the goal from the very beginning was not to kill him, to maim, to make him incapacitated and, most
Speaker A
importantly, very indifferent to politics, so he would focus on himself. The idea was to make him look terrifying to people. Uh-huh.
Speaker A
First and foremost. Uh-huh. I want to remind you, he was poisoned with dioxin. And what is dioxin called as a military poison?
Speaker A
What? Agent Orange. Agent Orange. Uh-huh. The American army used it in Vietnam. Uh-huh. Doesn't it remind you of anything?
Speaker A
It does. This is pure Russian psychedelia. Uh-huh. Proclaim Gorbachev had a mark on his forehead and ruined the country. Look here, Ukrainians, here's Agent Orange, all covered in spots on his face. This is a warning from God for you. This is
Speaker A
their kind of narrative. Uh-huh. And the second goal was to crush him, because by psychotype, Yushchenko was very proud of his appearance. Well, like Delon.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. Well, he writes in his own book. He even writes in his book that the first time he went on stage, it was, well, physically too.
Speaker A
Women in the front rows were simply sobbing when they saw him. that he, too —I mean, for him it was a disaster, well, a disfigured face, which he was incredibly proud of. He really was, well, a handsome man.
Speaker A
Look, at the very least, one could say these are the actions of a strong man, and it played a role.
Speaker A
Again, those Russians don't understand Ukrainians. Instead of feeling disgust for a maimed man, they provoked maximum support instead. Yes. Instead of him withdrawing into himself, thinking life was over without his looks, he actually became, well, let's say, stronger,
Speaker A
because a very significant source of pride was taken from him, and he couldn't just give up. He's just not that kind of person. And the third thing. They wanted him to be, at the very least, an incapacitated president
Speaker A
for a few years. Partially, that worked . For the first year, Yushchenko only worked a few hours a day. fully. The rest of the time he was in a very serious condition, but nonetheless, he never once backed away from the burden
Speaker A
that had fallen upon his shoulders and did his job. So who poisoned Yushchenko, in your opinion, then?
Speaker A
in this? Well, once again, the investigation wasn't mine, it was the prosecutor's. But from what I know, there are two main versions. On the day the poisoning took place, there were two key events. Everyone knows about the dinner at Satsyuk's.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. one of the leaders of the then-SBU. But it is less well-known that on the same day, Viktor Andriyovych was in the Chernihiv region at the home of one of the Foxtrot executives, a major businessman, I believe, who also met with him, held,
Speaker A
uh, well, political talks, and, er, considering that, well, Yushchenko was spending months in the car back then, you understand, he offered him a massage.
Speaker A
Yes. Interesting. A Foxtrot executive offered a massage. Well, he wasn't just a Foxtrot executive; he was a very pro-Ukrainian figure. Someone very well-known in national-democratic circles. He listened to a lecture there about patience, about, well, everything we later came to know from Viktor
Speaker A
Andriyovych, then they had lunch, but then there was the massage. So, this masseur vanished; no one saw him the next day. And as you understand, as you know, about things like dioxin? Well the history of it, it doesn't
Speaker A
necessarily have to be it's even more likely that it absorbs through the body. And those who watch documentaries from the Vietnam War era, it was called that, er, Agent Orange there.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. That is what was sprayed over Vietnam. Terrible blisters all over the body and so on. So it is something superficial.
Speaker A
But after that, he arrived in the evening to see Smeshko. Uh-huh. And that meeting was not provided for in Yushchenko's official schedule. And that meeting was suggested by Zhvania, who was on the staff, but, well, it was not on the official schedule. He simply
Speaker A
arranged it verbally and took him there and there. Uh-huh. Part Well, at first, Yushchenko's team didn't understand what had happened.
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there was an idea to not let on, because a sick presidential candidate means a drop in the ratings. A few days later, it became clear that it was a disaster. They scheduled a press conference; he was supposed to say that
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he was recovering. When Sasha Tretyakov , his aide, went in to see him, he was literally on his knees and couldn't get up from the pain. Well, in a panic, they canceled the press conference, and once again, Zhvania was against it. Ah
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the rest of the team was for taking him abroad urgently. They took him out, began treating him in Austria, and so on and so forth.
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After that, well, naturally, they started wondering who. Most of the team believed it was the result of Zhvania's actions, because he was the one who inserted those two meetings, after which all of this happened.
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Uh-huh. Doctors confirmed that it couldn't have been a week ago or a month ago. This was the result of the past twenty-four hours.
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Uh-huh. And who organized it? Zhvania organized it. That’s why people talk more about this meeting at Satsyuk's, about this pilaf, and about how everyone who served that pilaf also left, rather than about the Chernihiv meeting. Then, within the framework of
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...well, the Prosecutor's Office was conducting an investigation, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs tasked me with tracking the movements of certain figures. Everything was legal—court rulings, official orders, and so on. We tracked them, so I saw that about a
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week, maybe five days before the poisoning, a certain person arrived from Moscow—I don't remember the name anymore. Their phone pings on towers near Zhvania’s location, and then they all go their separate ways. So, there is a lot of circumstantial
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evidence pointing to the Russian version. Uh-huh. There is a lot of it. But on the other hand, Yushchenko......presents Satsyuk with a painting after his victory, inscribed" to a worthy officer. " Smeshko showed it to me himself. He...
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...eventually blesses Sivkovych for the temporary investigative commission. So, today, I cannot comment on anything here because the investigation was led by a very experienced—probably the most experienced prosecutor I’ve ever met—Halyna Klymovych, who had hundreds of people under her command.
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Effectively all the possible and impossible technical information; she could probably tell you more about politics than I can, because I only know what I saw, and she knows everything she heard. And the point is that she didn't finish that work. So,
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there is no direct, definitive evidence to point a finger at anyone. Dear viewers, you are on the Duma YouTube channel. I invite you to take a short quiz right now during our conversation, right here on your devices. And the question is as follows
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. In your opinion, what amount of confiscated funds from Viktor Yanukovych was returned to the state budget during the time of Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko? Answer options: a. 500 million dollars. b. 1.5 billion dollars. c. 5 billion dollars; d. more
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than 10 billion dollars. Test your knowledge, your intuition, and...... answer right now. Don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell icon. That is how Ukrainian YouTube grows. And be sure to ask Yuriy Lutsenko some tough questions. Tell me, please, is it true
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that you were forced to run around every day, either to Yulia to convince her not to fight, or to Viktor?
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I was like that text message, running between them...... and saying:" Yulia, look, whatever Yushchenko is like, in any case, the originals are breathing down our necks.
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We have a small...No, you don't understand, and then it's just' that jerk '. " Uh-huh.
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I run over there:" Viktor Andriiovych. "" Look, whatever Yulia is like, she doesn't want to manage the economy, let her manage it. If it works out, we'll all be winners regardless. If it doesn't work out, you'll just make
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someone else the scapegoat. "Viktor Andriyovich with his traditional gesture. I will explain it to you now, and I’ll explain it for about two hours. Uh.
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She is worse than Yanukovych. And I was running back and forth. Yes, she is worse than Yanukovych, a, Baloha, and everything else. And so I kept running and running, then it became impossible. Uh, the defeat, the fall. Ivan Stepanovych Plyushch
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immediately went for a broad coalition. Uh-huh. And said:" I am not voting for Yulia.
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Uh-huh. I am for an alliance with the Donetsk group. "Two votes were left. Uh-huh.
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One of them was drugged with injections , my deputy, Hero of Ukraine Ivan Vasylovych Spodorenko, to...well, he couldn't be lifted in the hospital, his heart. That's it. So. And Yekhanurov refuses to vote for Yulia. Whoa. Uh, I make a call and realize that Baloha
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organized all of this. I call Yushchenko, pick up the phone. I take the phone from Yulia. I call Yushchenko . He says:" Yulia, good morning. "I say :" A shitty morning. "Viktor Andriyovich, this is Yura, not Yulia.
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He says:" Look, if there are no votes right now from at least someone in your faction, I will live for another eight months, I'll dismantle everything. "No, no, no. Who are you talking about? Well , I named the surname and then, with a
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gift, they wheel him in on a wheelchair . And back then everyone stood up by surname and said who they were voting for. As a result, we won by one vote.
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It was unexpected even for Yulia Tymoshenko herself. Uh-huh. And I had already polished my ostrich-skin shoes, already ready for power, and was left with nothing. As a result, on the third day, they started a war among themselves again. I ran around with
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this text message again, ran around, understood everything. And so I started preparing for prison. Somewhere around 2008, everything became clear. But that’s not the point. Uh, if we are talking now, uh, really at that moment, this is us a little bit, yes, uh, Yanik
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comes to power as a result of just this , uh, Orange confrontation. People were tired, and Yanik didn't win, essentially. He won by 2.5%. But the turnout of the Orange supporters was abnormally low. Why? A bunch of Orange
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people said:" A plague on both your houses, we gave you power twice. "As a result, the road for Yanik by just 2.5% was open. And he organized, well, a purely bandit system. He had a list of all businesses, all wealthy people,
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companies, and there were numbers indicating how much they owed him for the time since the first Maidan. And this money started being squeezed out little by little using known methods.
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Then they organized 500 enterprises, which, uh, into which different money was pumped. Well, data, data.
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Uh-huh. They dumped it into offshore accounts. There was this machine running, changing 10, 20, sometimes 200 accounts a day.
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Uh-huh. It was all being laundered. And with this money, nine, if I recall correctly , Cypriot jurisdictions were buying Ukrainian internal government bonds. 2 billion bucks and almost another 8 billion bucks in US external bonds.
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When I got to the Prosecutor General's Office, I realized those funds would soon flee the frozen accounts. So we decided on the first experiment: a plea bargain. At first, I tried to untangle the offshore web.
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Uh-huh. We go to Cyprus and say," Give us the flow of funds. "Need permission here, permission there.
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And Cyprus is slow to provide it. During that time. First off, it's difficult and slow. Secondly, while you're litigating, they've already moved the money.
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Uh-huh. Trying to untangle a web after the money has passed through 10, 20, or 200 offshore companies means traveling to Cyprus, the Seychelles, and the Maldives. In theory, it makes for a great cruise, but it yields no results.
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Absolutely no results. They manage to transfer it in a second, while you investigate for six months.
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In 2024, new opportunities emerged for us in Ukraine. I was somewhat involved because we included Ukraine in the Oscar-Gazy financial operation. And you know, with just one request from Ukraine, yes, 88 countries see it simultaneously and respond within three
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days. At the time I was working, it was visible. That made it possible to find 100 billion dollars in siphoned assets.
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Just for a second. At that time, the only ones who saw the whole chain were the US Department of the Treasury.
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Uh-huh. So, a decision was made to try a somewhat adventurous approach: a plea bargain. We found the accountant for this entire company, he was in Ukraine.
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Uh-huh. Kashkin. Kashkin. Kashkin. Uh-huh. So, the guy turned out to have a phenomenal memory. Well, truthfully, he had a computer where all those transactions were kept. He came to court and admitted he was a member of Yanukovych's criminal organization.
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Uh-huh. And personally acted as the accountant, and from memory, he described all 500 companies and could even recall any transaction.
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My God, what a memory. Well, the computer helped, of course, and so did we. The judge in the Donetsk region, by the way, the Kramatorsk court, treated this person with respect and confiscated everything he owned. A two-room apartment, a car, and however
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many thousands of dollars he had in his account as a member of a criminal organization.
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Uh-huh. But right in the court ruling, it stated that the entire array of criminal transactions reported by this low-level member of the criminal organization was to be confiscated. And as a result, this money amounting to 1.5 billion dollars in cash, 0.2, well,
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200 million in bonds. Uh-huh. And some other debt was also transferred to the state budget. The outcry was, well, simply incredible, dear viewers, and that is the correct answer. How much funds were confiscated into the budget of Ukraine? 1.5 billion
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dollars. This is probably the highest figure for the entire period. I think that at least at that moment in one of the cases, this was 100%the time, nowhere else in the world had so much been specially confiscated.
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We've sorted that out. Sorry, we haven't mentioned the very first one, Leonid Makarovych Kravchuk, who, again, it would seem, well, this is a unique Ukrainian story, uh, a Central Committee secretary for ideology becomes president, or rather first speaker.
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Uh-huh. And secures independence. But I dare say to you, from today's perspective, this was the only possible decision.
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Only such a high-ranking communist nomenklatura member as Kravchuk could —we aren't allowed to swear here. Yes , we can, we can, yes, we can. We can.
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Try to outsmart. Uh-huh. A drunk Yeltsin in the Belovezh Forest, because Yeltsin thought the CIS was a country. A new name for the USSR. And, and Kravchuk, never mind, already knew it was a" Union of bachelors "of 15 republics. And he came
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home, took a vote, you know this story, how we forgot, took a vote in parliament, and then reinforced it with a referendum and called Borya.
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He says:" Yes, and the union treaty there, the CIS, "he says:" Yes, the CIS is a club where we will drink whiskey and smoke. "He says:" What kind of club ? "He says:" Well, yeah, that's how it turned out. "Only Kravchuk could have
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outsmarted them like that. If Chornovil had been in his place, none of this would have happened. They would have crushed it all with tanks. Moreover, you don't believe in our Chornovil.
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Look, uh, everything is very simple. Belarus. Uh-huh. Is a bit more Soviet than Ukraine, because they have a smaller percentage of Western Belarus than Western Ukraine , but the processes are similar.
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Meaning people who lived under the USSR and all that man-eating cruelty less, they are, well, a bit freer. So, in Belarus it's literally, if I'm not mistaken, about 10 percent, while we have 25 at least. And Belarus chose
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Shushkevich, who was also a participant in this whole thing. And where is that Shushkevich?
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The population hated him after just a month, because objectively, after the collapse of the Union, the union economy began to fall apart. It was created for socialism, where money didn't mean anything. It only meant, well, the plans, gos, god, what were
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they called, that grew in the Kremlin. Who has to produce how much soap, rope, coffins, candy, and those scary rubber kittens we gave children.
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Gosplan. Gosplan, yes. So, as soon as Gosplan was gone, all of this fell apart to hell. And who was the fall guy there? Shushkevich, the cursed democrat.
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Uh-huh." Life was good under the Soviet Union, "and now extrapolate that. Ukraine had moved far away from that Belarusian society at that moment. Just imagine that by some miracle, by divine providence, Chornovil had become president of Ukraine. Do you realize
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that a year later, the whole country would have been removing him? They wouldn't have just removed him.
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Uh-huh. Just like with Shushkevich, the national idea would have died for another 15 years after that. That’s why the Soviet people, who were still 75%Soviet just yesterday, couldn't elect a person who thought completely differently, who told them:" We won’t
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give you anything, the state won’t give you anything. It will allow you to work freely on your own. "For the people of that time in Ukraine, that was absolutely unacceptable. They couldn't have elected him. If they had elected him, I’ll say it again,
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Ukraine would have become today's Belarus. Only instead of a Batka, we would have had, well, I don’t know, someone would have been found here, thank God there were plenty of such characters. Oh, Vitrenko.
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And we would be living with Natalia Mikhailivna on a broomstick to this very day. So look, uh, Kravchuk was the first one who managed, through his knowledge of the Kremlin nomenclature, to trick them and simply steal the decision to dissolve the Soviet Union
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from them. And Ukraine didn't just declare independence in parliament, they would have voted for that anyway.
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He also held a referendum and drove the last nail into the coffin of the USSR in Ukraine. That’s it.
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You know, I’ll come at this from a different angle. Clinton publicly admitted his mistake was fatal, that he pressured Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons and said that if it hadn't been for him—and this is the former president of the United States
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of America—he said, yes, Russia might not have attacked. There is no forgiveness, excuse me, recognizing this not as a mistake but as a tragedy is too late. But on the other hand, well, getting offended at foreign presidents—that’s looking
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for the problem within yourself. The question is, why, well, we were forced to give up strategic nuclear weapons and tactical ones in essence, they had already been taken out by the time of the Budapest signing . No one asked anyone.
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They were taken out, yes. Strategically, the question is why we gave them up; tactically and strategically, well, the talk about how they don't attack a nuclear country is untrue. India is nuclear, Pakistan is nuclear, and they fight just fine. When
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Kravchuk flew to the United States of America and just got off the plane, journalists swarmed him and said:" Is it true that you gave up the last tactical weapons? "He says:" No. "They say:" What do you mean, no? "
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I know, I know from all sources that there was no demand from the Americans to give up tactical [nukes].
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There was none, unfortunately, we gave them up. And that is the problem, because if we had, conditionally speaking, SS-20s, I doubt anyone would have launched them at Moscow. But if we had tactical nuclear shells, then I highly doubt that Russia
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would be doing what it is doing today. Unfortunately, it is not just about Clinton, but also about Kravchuk, Kuchma, and those who prepared the decisions for them. Therefore, it is very interesting to see who stood behind their backs and who prepared all
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this. If I am not mistaken, the same Oleksandr Chalyi was the head of the international agreements department of the presidential administration back then, then he appeared under Yanukovych when we adopted, well, they adopted for us the law on non-aligned status, and
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later he appeared in Istanbul during the attempted surrender, so Moscow's agents were, are, and will be there.
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Which of your mistakes do you regret the most? Because you have already been through everything, it seems. But is there something like that? Well, what makes your heart ache? Yes.
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Well, look, there are things you simply regret. For example, the fact that I agreed to become Prosecutor General, for which the legislation had to be changed. I felt terribly uncomfortable.
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Well, just uncomfortable, because there was a rule about mandatory legal education and it was replaced with rules about experience in law enforcement agencies. To this day, I am being hammered for this. Though, in truth, professional lawyers in the
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style of Pshonka and Potebenko are surely not the heroes of society. But it is unpleasant for me. I simply took on a certain mission, but I ended up eating more than I should have.
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Uh-huh. Okay. It pains me that I didn't finish, didn't have time to complete the investigation of the Maidan case. Yes, we did it entirely, yes, but in the final months the examination dragged on and the case was fully assembled a
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couple of months after my resignation. But who can you explain that to? Uh-huh. Although every action is spelled out second by second, all possible evidence and everything else. But these are all professional mistakes. What pains me?
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It pains me that I didn't have time for both my parents to say" I love you "one last time and I wasn't the one to close their eyes. There. And since we started talking about Lina Kostenko, I always
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thought and still think that she is absolutely right. The main thing in life is to spend time with your loved ones. But we too often gave our time and emotions to the country, society, and circumstances. And as for the final
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" goodbye, I love you, "I didn't make it. So who else? Of course, at the crossroads, it seems to me that I didn't make a mistake, because when Yulia Volodymyrivna told me," Flee the country, because you'll be first, and
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I'll be second, "I said," This is my country, I’m not going anywhere with it. "So I consciously prepared for prison, because I believed it was necessary to prove to those who believe in me that not everyone is afraid and
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not everything is for sale. On the other hand, did I do everything to punish...I refused to punish those who put me in jail. I categorically refused . There is this Buddhist thing. Hatred destroys the soul of a fool just as a
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diamond destroys the rock that birthed it. So I said that I wouldn't give a single second of my life, which they had already stolen over two years of, to personal revenge. But those who put the country in jail, I pursued as best
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I could. Probably not all of them. Sometimes I lacked the team, sometimes I lacked the knowledge. I had enough persistence, but it didn't always work out. My father taught me very simple things. My father was a leader, a city
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committee secretary, which was almost like being a mayor in those circumstances. He said," Look, every leadership position is temporary, remember that. "" There is nothing more permanent than the temporary. "" Second, there is no soft chair worth breaking your spine
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for. " Uh-huh. And third, you must empathize with people. A politician who doesn't empathize with people is defective. You have to feel responsible.
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We are undergoing a purification for our country, yet again, in every sense of the word. We have to go through it.
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Look, in reality, we are paying the price for old mistakes, and as always, some make the mistakes, while others pay the price. Unfortunately, that’s always the way in life.
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Uh-huh. This, this cannot be called purification. It is a terrible deformation of the life we were used to . I will tell you a seemingly funny story, but it is tragic. When I arrived in Bakhmut, we were already no longer
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part of Magyar’s unit, but part of the infantry. Under our control were the last two residential areas. Well, we arrived at night, there was shelling , all the rest. In the morning I went out, pardon, to the toilet, walking
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along the walls. Well, a classic residential neighborhood, Yuvileinyi. Uh-huh. Huge 12-story buildings, nine-story ones, heavy impacts every 3-5 minutes, inside everything is splintering, because there are no trees left, no playgrounds, well, everything is destroyed. So. And constant gunfire.
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And I’m covered in dirt, black, helmet, there, body armor, everything. And under these. And here comes another impact. And from this smoke, it’s such a yellow-orange smoke. Out of it comes a typical local madam. And so tall, beautiful, in a chintz dress. Uh,
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a hat like that, you're saying she's standing there with a braid now. No, a hat, so beautiful, uh, like the kind you wear on vacation, right? And she’s pulling some miserable pink poodle on a leash.
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And dogs, they hear these strikes especially well, they have different ultrasound sensitivities. And it’s resisting, squealing, but she’s dragging it along. I’m standing there , well, just, you know, it’s absolute surrealism. I apologize. Well, I’m saying it just as it was. I say, I say:
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" Lady, are you out of your mind walking your dog here? "She says:" Oh, Lutsenko in Bakhmut. "She says:" Why am I crazy? I’ve been walking Johnny on this path at this time for five years.
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Am I supposed to let him at home because of Putin? "And she headed off somewhere into this gunpowder smoke. I stood there, at first it was funny to me. I even tell the soldiers as a joke, but then it hits me that this is
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actually a tragic story. It’s not about her or Johnny. She’s clinging to him because she believes this will end and she will return to that life when she and Johnny walked calmly along this path. But in reality, there is no
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going back to that Ukraine. There isn't . Anyone who believes that tomorrow, the day after, or sometime later the war will end and we’ll return, some believe to '16, some to '19, some to '22, it’s gone. The Ukraine that was
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is totally destroyed, its energy sector , well, it’s still being finished off . There is no energy sector left, no industry, no agriculture, no transport communications. It’s terrifying. On the other hand, it provides a chance.
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And so the question arises, will we cope with this? Actually, all future policy is based on all of this. Because , again, in my little book, two soldiers are talking:" Well, that’s impossible. "He says:" That’s exactly why we will do it, because Ukrainians
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don’t know how to do ordinary tasks. We can only do what is impossible. We have a country, uh, which, well, by 2014 standards is non-viable. Don't forget that foreign aid, which makes up over half of our budget, will drop away
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. Well, you don't doubt that they will sympathize with us, toss us a little, but we will be forced to build something from scratch. This will be a new economy. And I forgot to say, don't forget that besides the destroyed
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economy, there is also the social sphere. We have 20 million here right now. Of those, 10 are pensioners. A country of old people.
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Of those, five are children. Of those, in the best case, four are the ones who drive the economy. And how many of them will be left after this winter, nobody knows yet either. There is your starting point. Now, what can we do
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with this? If we are to create a new economy and a new social system, then that will be the platform for a new policy.
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Do you see yourself as a candidate in the elections? Which ones? Parliamentary, presidential, any?
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Look, if I’m being honest, what I probably regret, is that at one time in politics, I didn't run for mayor. I really wanted to after the second Maidan, I wanted to run for mayor of Kyiv. When the barricades
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Uh-huh. were still smoking, I arrived, and well , where? I surveyed the scene. My rating was just a little bit lower than Klitschko's. Well, surely you’d agree that if I had started talking, I would have caught up to him. It was literally
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just a few percent. Uh-huh. But then Poroshenko met with Klitschko in Vienna and publicly announced that he supported him for the post of mayor of Kyiv. I turned off my phones because there had been a different conversation with me before
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that. I turned them on about three days later, and there was a wall of missed calls. So, well, I cursed a bit, then said: "I have never placed my own interests above the collective ones, because at that moment we needed to
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elect a president in the first round. Putin won't give us a second round. We had to elect Poroshenko in the first one. I remember how at polling stations in Donbas, two observers were watching the ballot boxes, while the third was
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looking at the horizon, at the smoke, meaning Russian tanks, to seal the boxes and flee. That’s how it was.
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That’s why we needed a first round. And for that, we needed the votes of those who wanted Klitschko, too. And so I put my own wishes in my pocket and walked away. I would like to be useful with all this baggage. Of victories and
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mistakes that I know perfectly well. I would like to help the new politicians who will inevitably come to Ukraine, because as I said, the old economy, the old social structure is dead, it cannot be brought back. And that means,
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so not the old politicians, but new faces. Yes, this is Yuriy Lutsenko's program. I advocate for a healthy mix of ideological parties. So that professionals are the ones handling state administration.
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I would be ready to be an advisor to anyone who dares to create a truly new, correct, better Ukraine. And once again , the experience of mistakes, there are plenty of them, and there are quite a few victories too. My experience and
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some ability to analyze, I think, would come in handy. Why do I say that? When I held positions that were unexpected for me, like Minister of Internal Affairs, Prosecutor General, or even head of a faction, I always kept
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deputies with 20-25 years of experience by my side. Their duty was to tell me what they thought about the situation, and my duty was to listen to them and make my own decision. So, I am now ready to be this twenty years of
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experience. has a little bit more in politics, that will help those who take on the terrible burden of becoming the next hetman, speaker, uh, I don't know, mayor, whoever.
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Yuriy Vitaliyovych, for some this is just ordinary water. Uh-huh. And for Mykhailo Fedorov, as it turned out, it was a weight-loss product and a sort of startup he launched in Zaporizhzhia. Could you please tell me what you know about this
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? Well, I think this information is already quite well known. Mykhailo started his first business project with two partners, and they really advertised and tried to push onto Zaporizhzhia women, uh, a so-called weight-loss product. Well, back then many people sold Herbalife, traded in
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pyramids, or some other nonsense. So, apparently, young Misha was doing the same thing. What year was that? I don't remember exactly, it was somewhere in the early 2000s. He, well, his two accomplices got jail time for financial fraud, but
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he got something much more important: a lesson. A lesson that, uh, schemes must , after all, end with a concrete product that one is trying to sell. And I think that since then he has seriously focused on what he knows how
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to do. People now somehow think he is an IT specialist. He has never been and is not an IT specialist. He is a SMM guy. And that means social media management, that is, managing social networks. Uh, he has developed this
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significantly since those days. He has worked very hard on himself in this direction. And now he is probably one of the most powerful players in this very SMM—not to be confused with MMM — movement in Ukraine. Actually, in that
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capacity. Well, he created a corporation, gave it a very loud name, and, well, was doing this SMM, including for Kvartal 95.
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Uh-huh. So it is not surprising that during the elections he came to the headquarters, brought by one of the prominent figures of Kvartal 95— honestly, I don't remember the name— uh, brought him to the headquarters, and he was responsible for this very
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SMM. Well, I will be honest that at that moment one of our intelligence agencies hacked all their Telegrams.
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Well, if that had become known, Telegram would probably have crashed on the stock exchange, but nonetheless.
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And they were watching whether how cash not declared in election documents was moving. So, Mykhailo's Telegram was the least protected, and he wrote most openly there.
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But that is all in the past. Immediately after Zelensky's enchanting victory, which, from my point of view, was, I would say, a sort of social media Maidan, that is, a Maidan without going to the Maidan, The puppeteers managed to construct a system where
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people wanted to believe in a regular guy from our street who had simple solutions for all their urgent problems . And so, after this spectacular victory, Mykhailo arrived at the Ministry of Digital Transformation, where he did the same thing daily:
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addressing information threats. Conducting focus groups every two weeks and producing sociological data once a month or more often. Well, truthfully, that’s what all political headquarters do, especially presidential ones. Uh, in parallel, he strongly developed a network of social
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media. He publicly boasted himself that during the elections, about 9 million volunteers were working for them on social networks. Well, meaning people who just by You know, he is perceived today as the face of such digitalization, right? But
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you are telling a detailed story. And I wanted to ask here, but he even publicly admitted that in 2019 he actually ensured this victory by recruiting such a number of volunteers.
Speaker A
Look, that’s—well, everyone, of course, victory always has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan.
Speaker A
That’s—that’s great. No, an orphan. An orphan. Uh, actually, no. Well, if it’s already an evening of memories, the story was like this: when I once again met with Kolomoisky, I had a grievance against him regarding his media support
Speaker A
for Saakashvili, who was destabilizing Ukraine and heading straight toward an attempted coup. Uh-huh. People didn't want to hear about that back then, but, well, time has put everything in its place. Saakashvili was communicating with a fugitive Yanukovych-era oligarch, God, help my
Speaker A
memory. What difference does it make which one? He was giving him money. We recorded that money and wrote down the serial numbers. Well, there was an opportunity. We were recording their conversation from Moscow.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. Right from Kurchenko’s office. Uh, we were also able to mark Kurchenko’s money. They were recorded at the border . Next the organizers of this scheme brought them to the protest tents near the Verkhovna Rada, where we also
Speaker A
documented them. Thus, we showed that this entire so-called protest was financed by a fugitive Yanukovych-era oligarch who had robbed Ukraine.
Speaker A
Moreover, under the agreement to later close his cases. At that moment, the television stations influenced by Kolomoisky were, well, lying quite heavily about this and blowing up the, I don't know, poor 100 people in those tents.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. Accordingly, I acted without any official directive. It's just that Kolomoisky and I have known each other for a long time; not as an official, but as two people, two Ukrainians, very different Ukrainians, but Ukrainians nonetheless.
Speaker A
I explained to him in simple terms what this was leading to. There is a fantastic writer in Dnipropetrovsk named Yan Valetov. He wrote a book called 1917. It is about how the Ukrainian oligarch Tereshchenko became the Minister of Finance and later
Speaker A
Foreign Affairs in the provisional government. He was the first oligarch. At that time , it was about the UPR. I know this story.
Speaker A
He pledged all his family wealth to this cause. There were sugar refineries. And later, he ended up in the Peter and Paul Fortress during the Bolshevik coup . Then he fled across the ice of the Gulf of Finland and so on, and so on.
Speaker A
But you read this book and you see how power lies on the floor, and only a brutal, cynical Bolshevik can pick it up, because everyone else is busy with demagogic squabbles among themselves.
Speaker A
Mr. Yuriy, thank you very much for now, because his descendant, Mr. Tereshchenko, was our guest, and there is a separate interview dedicated to this on the Duma YouTube channel, where this whole story is told. Then there was the evening,
Speaker A
and we started discussing what's next? There were about six months left until the presidential election. I explained to them:" Look, there's the EU association, there's the visa-free regime, there's, uh, well, a stable hryvnia after all, despite the catastrophic situation with PrivatBank,
Speaker A
we made it through. "Uh, there are 200 new factories that have opened, meaning investments had started, well, and so on, and so on, and so on. If this process continues for another 5 years, then it won't matter who the president
Speaker A
is. If you stop it now, the unfinished war will explode and wipe all of this out. And we started sorting through who could be a transitional prime minister, in order to, well, let's say, ensure the process of continuing reforms,
Speaker A
because at that moment Yatsenyuk was no longer prime minister, and Groysman, well, had obviously moved away from Poroshenko's team and, well, I would say, even often sabotaged joint decisions. Uh, many names were brought up there, from Avakov to Yulia, and
Speaker A
Bogdan, sitting nearby, says:" Yeah, but what about Vova, Vova? "Well, and Kolomoisky, in his style, sort of brutally shut him down. Well, and we had some more coffee. He says:" Yeah, but Vova, Vova, "and Zelensky says:" Get out of here, "he says. And I
Speaker A
realized that he had given away that secret, that stash they had. Therefore, in reality, the Zelensky project was being built by Bogdan back from the time when the largest election campaign in European history called" Servant of the People "began.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. Nowhere else, in not a single country, at least in Europe, has an election campaign run for years, for hours on the country's most popular channel with zero investment from the candidate. It was Bogdan who came up with the name,
Speaker A
it was he who formulated the strategy to say nothing specific and capture the entire electorate from the so-called" vata "to the same to the so-called patriots. So the entire staging, the entire strategy, there you go, one clear father of the project.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. Then there is Fedorov, who really did create an absolutely innovative headquarters during the election process itself. All previous models about needing to recruit ideological activists, finding and paying, well, let's say, hired activists, mercenaries to put it bluntly, and so on. All of that flew
Speaker A
out the window because they were able to give—Bohdan came up with the impulse. Uh-huh.
Speaker A
Zelenskyy, being the best performer. provided the, well, image, and Fedorov was able to convey it to everyone; as a result, they effectively abandoned mass media, volunteers, hired hands, recording activists, or stimulating election commission members. 9 million people were working for them. Yes,
Speaker A
Fedorov was one of the serious participants, or I would say, the blacksmiths of Zelenskyy's victory.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. After that, he ended up where he was supposed to be according to his specialty, in the Ministry of Digital Transformation. And he continued to develop those same technologies there.
Speaker A
When the Russians entered the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, they were shocked by the sight of huge halls packed with mobile phones on shelves, vibrating in sync. Bot farms, thousands of phones sending out requested likes, comments, hate, and hosannas on command
Speaker A
. And, well, right next door was an even bigger hall where they were mining Bitcoin.
Speaker A
A question is begging to be asked right now. This is still working today, isn't it? So, in this way only now it's being used on them, yes, they are being manipulated. And isn't this a consequence of these cardboard protests? Do you connect this
Speaker A
or not? No. Therefore, when you ask about the" cardboard Maidan, "it, like all other forms of political life, is linked to social networks. All politicians in modern Ukraine, well, at least since '19, first and foremost look at social
Speaker A
media, and only then television, radio, I don't know, maybe someone still looks at newspapers, or even more so, face-to-face personal contact. which was once the most important thing.
Speaker A
Therefore, the" cardboard Maidan, "from my point of view, is not organized by anyone. It's not even gathered for Fedorov. Yes, his name is mentioned there often, yes, they chant it, but in reality, these are the first tectonic tremors of the fact that people want to
Speaker A
live in a democratic country. And that is why Fedorov is a tool for them. The war has imposed its own problems. It has effectively banned political life on the streets. And what do we have as of today? We have an empty political
Speaker A
stage, where there is only Zelenskyy. There is no Servant of the People party . They are discredited, well, almost completely. The old parties seem like contemporaries of the Hundred Years' War between England and France, whenever that was, in the 10th century.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. there are no new ones. As a result, the stage is effectively waiting for new, new politicians. And Mykhailo Fedorov here, and Zaluzhnyi, and Budanov, and Biletskyi—these are already the first markers of future political forces. Liberals will be
Speaker A
inevitable. Uh-huh. How will Fedorov’s supporters position themselves, with or without him? There will still be liberals.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. Who will be against the old forms, the old big state. There will be center-rightists, call them conservatives if you want.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. Well, something similar to Poroshenko’s current European Solidarity. Uh-huh. There will be the right,,probably more, like, similar to communists in vyshyvankas.
Speaker A
Uh-huh. No land sales, no privatization , no...well, that whole story. And there will be the classical military far-right, which will, well, demand a strong hand, a single-handed rule. So, this spectrum is already taking shape. Add to this what is in
Speaker A
the shadows. Well, this is the so-called social democracy, which will most likely be like the Georgian, the current Georgian government. No need for an army, no need to fight Russia.
Speaker A
It is better to increase pensions. Under the guise of social protection, there will be a disarmament of Ukraine, effectively surrendering sovereignty without a war.
Speaker A
So, let's talk about a new country. I propose our traditional blitz. I will name two potential candidates for the post of President of Ukraine. Let's imagine it is peacetime. Yeah.
Speaker A
There will be about 50 of them. Yeah, there will be about 50 of them.
Speaker A
Which two? We are now talking about the names that are in the political field today. Let it be updated, we will only be happy.
Speaker A
Let's go. Well, well, Fedorov, Khmara. There won't be such a duo. Well, no, maybe there won't be. You say against both.
Speaker A
Definitely not. Kuleba, Zerkal, no. Malyuk, Razumkov, no. Zaluzhnyi, Biletskyi, Zaluzhnyi. Zaluzhnyi, Poroshenko, plus. Both.
Speaker A
They will reach an agreement. So a 50/50 pair is possible because they will reach an agreement.
Speaker A
Zaluzhnyi, Zelenskyy, with me. Well, Zaluzhnyi, I already told you. Look, when they write 50 names for you, including the ones you said, I respect all of them. For example, I am impressed by Zerkal’s intellect. I am interested in whom else
Speaker A
you named, well, for example, innovation, Khmara, and so on. Fedorov will also take his niche in a liberal young team. That’s all clear. But look, I would really like Ukrainians to finally learn very simple things that have long been mastered in the West.
Speaker A
Well, democracies there have existed for about 100 years, that means, how much does it add up to, well, about 800 years, and we don't even have 40. So, the President of Ukraine has three constitutional tasks: defense. How to
Speaker A
ensure that a new war does not start? Second, international relations, how to ensure we join the EU, because that is the only chance to live prosperously.
Speaker A
Everything else is just vegetation as a colony. Third, how to ensure the punishment of those who led to this war and engaged in looting during it. This is an SBU appointment. These are the three constitutional functions of the
Speaker A
president. For everyone you name, just look at them. Who among them will better perform these functions, who is competent for them. And there is one more non-constitutional function: a signal of unity. Do not divide society into" us "and" them, "but unite it as
Speaker A
much as possible around these three tasks. And when you ask a president— for example, Zaluzhnyi, Poroshenko, Zerkal, or whoever else was mentioned, Fedorov—what the pension will be, they must honestly say," That is not my issue. "I know people won't like that,
Speaker A
but that is a matter for those you elect to the Verkhovna Rada, who will then form the government. The president must honestly say," I will not be dealing with that. "I will deal exclusively with defense, EU accession, preventing war, punishing looters and
Speaker A
state traitors, as well as societal unity. Period. All other questions, dear friends, vote in the parliamentary elections for the party that will give you answers about pensions, electricity tariffs, land, jobs, deposits, and, well, many other things. Do you not
Speaker A
think that after the war ends, the country's recovery will require a critical manager, an economist?
Speaker A
100%, but I repeat, the president has nothing to do with that. He must honestly tell people this. If we again elect a president, a populist who promises you pensions, management, Martian factories, and whatever else— speaking of Yulia Volodymyrivna. Why
Speaker A
didn't Tymoshenko become president? Yulia Volodymyrivna didn't become president because she wanted it too much at the price of any compromise, including signing an agreement for a new constitution with Yanukovych. As soon as society heard about this, they didn't forget it, on Trinity
Speaker A
Sunday, I remember she invited me to look at the draft of the constitution, and I have always treated this...Uh-huh." Look, well, it's already a win. "" Well , we wrote up such a new constitution, where he keeps these medals, because he
Speaker A
really wants to, but everything else goes to the prime minister, to me. "I say," Yulia, I know you proposed to Yushchenko in 2005 to appoint...to recognize Yanukovych as president, and ... "" Yushchenko as prime minister. " Then, [Yushchenko] says:" Well, go, "he
Speaker A
says:" Go out to the Maidan and tell this to the people: 'Go', "he says:" Just give me 10 minutes to drive away.
Speaker A
" Uh-huh. I say," Are you playing this game again? "" No, well, we'll put everything on the prime minister in the constitution. "I told the Prime Minister:" Yulia, dear Prime Minister, any president who wins a national election will throw all your
Speaker A
constitutions and all your papers into the trash because they just won a national election, forget it. "But she signed every single page. And when Yanukovych went out on Trinity Sunday against the backdrop of the Lavra and said that he would never go along with
Speaker A
such schemes, and that he was going into a fair election—Yanukovych, fair . Yeah. Well, everything, everything just fell apart. She wanted to become president too much, at the cost of any compromise. She is an unhappy woman.
Speaker A
She subordinated her whole life to that goal. And that's why, well, right now she is reaping these bitter fruits, although as a person, well, I feel great sympathy for her, but one cannot make such compromises with such people.
Speaker A
This was Yuriy Lutsenko and the Dumay channel. Subscribe, hit the like button . Thank you for this direct and honest conversation.
Speaker A
Recharge your batteries.
Topics:Yuriy LutsenkoUkrainian politicsLeonid KuchmaGongadze murderUkraine Without KuchmacorruptionoligarchyMedvedchukViktor Yushchenko poisoningOrange Revolution
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