Yuri Kravchenko

Yuri Kravchenko in 2000

Jurij Fedorovyč Kravchenko ( Ukrainian Юрій Федорович Кравченко , scientific transliteration Jurij Fedorovyč Kravčenko ; born March 5, 1951 in Oleksandrija , Kirovohrad Oblast ; † March 4, 2005 in Kiev ) was a politician and the former interior minister of Ukraine . He was found dead shortly before an interrogation on the murder of the journalist Heorhiy Gongadze .

Life

Kravchenko was born in 1951 into a working-class family in central Soviet Ukraine and graduated from technical college in 1970 before completing two years of military service. After its completion he worked from 1972 to 1974 as an electrician in a Kirovohrad typewriter factory. At that time he was already married and had two daughters.

In 1974 Kravchenko left his work in industry behind and began to study law at the Police Academy of the Interior Ministry of the Russian Soviet Republic in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod ) . After graduating in 1976, he began his career as an inspector and in the following years rose to the position of chief of the Kirovohrad Oblast Police Department. Since the 1980s he has specialized in the fight against drug crime . When Ukraine gained independence in 1991 , his regional, purely Ukrainian career benefited him; he initially remained in his position and rose in December 1992 to head of the national criminal police department. In December 1995 he became head of the nationwide Customs Commission.

In 1998 Kravchenko published his candidacy dissertation at the University of the Interior Ministry with the title Current Problems in the Reform of the Organs of the Interior Ministry (Organizational and Legal Issues) ( Актуальні проблеми реформування органання органанів внутрів -прананів ).

After Leonid Kuchma was elected President of Ukraine in July 1994, Kravchenko was appointed Minister of the Interior in the new government in 1995. By the end of his term in office in March 2001, the crime rate decreased from year to year, although organized crime was still widespread across the country. Kravchenko was one of the few politicians to have full confidence in President Kuchma; Since 1997, critics from the opposition and the press have accused Kravchenko of using his police power unilaterally to the detriment of opponents of Kuchma and increasingly called for his resignation.

When the Georgian-Ukrainian journalist Heorhiy Gongadze disappeared in September 2000 and was found dead in November of the same year, Kravchenko was suspected of complicity: at the end of November 2000, socialist leader Oleksandr Moros published a tape recording of a conversation which emerged from the planning of the murder of Gongadze . President Leonid Kuchma, the head of the presidential administration Volodymyr Lyytvyn and Kravchenko were suspected to be participants in the conversation . Kuchma denied the allegations; the murder case was not solved until the end of Kuchma's term in 2005.

After leaving the Ministry of the Interior in 2001, Kravchenko switched to the leadership of the Oblast Administration in Kherson ; before and after this activity there were interludes of several months as director of a legal institute. From December 2002 he headed the national tax authority of Ukraine until he submitted his departure to President Kuchma on June 11, 2004 . In the same year he received his doctorate in law .

After Leonid Kuchma's presidency ended and Viktor Yushchenko took office in January 2005, the public prosecutor's office reopened the Gongadze case. In early March 2005 it was announced that the main perpetrators had been identified and two suspects were arrested. An interview with Yuri Kravchenko was scheduled for Friday, March 4, 2005. On the morning of the same day he was found dead with two gunshot wounds to the head in his dacha in the Kiev district of Konscha-Saspa. According to the interior minister, Yuriy Lutsenko , one bullet went through the chin and jaw, the second straight through the skull. The minister did not rule out suicide ; A brief farewell letter was found accusing Kravchenko of Kuchma:

“Dear ones, I am innocent. Forgive me. I have been the victim of political intrigues by President Kuchma and his entourage. I leave you with a clear conscience. Farewell."

Publications

• The Militia of Ukraine ( Міліція України , 1999)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Biography Yuri Kravchenko on "Official Ukraine Today"; last accessed on February 24, 2016 (Ukrainian)