Misha Glenny - The Murder of Gongadze: 20 Years of Searching for the Truth 2021 -
This case (winter 2000) was not a conventional gangland killing: higher powers were involved. In this instance, the mafia organisation was the Ukrainian state itself ... ‘It was a period in which the state was converted into criminal political mafia,’ said Omelchenko, the combative and impressively moustached MP, in a pithy summary of his statements in parliament ... the body belonged to Georgi Gongadze, a 31-year-old investigative journalist who had disappeared two months earlier. Misha Glenny, McMafia
Half Ukrainian and half-Georgian, Georgi Gongadze had begun to prise open the lid of Kuchma’s maggot-infested administration with his probing articles. Slowly it was becoming apparent the the Ukrainian Government had commandeered the judiciary, the police, the military, the Security Forces and industry – in short, the central mechanisms of state – as vital assistants in the amassing of wealth and power by a federation of regionally based cliques. Of course, just like any other cabal of ‘families’, there were frequent fallings out, and indeed the system eventually came crashing down in December 2004 when former allies of Kuchma, Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshekno, led the Orange Revolution that sought to replace venality with popular legitimacy as the guiding philosophy of the state. ibid.
For 20 years Ukraine can’t put a full stop in the investigation of Geordiy Gongadze’s murder. Ukrainian journalist Geordiy Gongadze disappeared on the evening of September 16th 2000. He was a renowned TV presenter and the founder of one of the first political internet resources … Kidnapped, taken to the forest and killed by Ukrainian police officers. Gongadze was killed on the request of then president of Ukraine Leonid Kuchma. The president demanded that law enforcement intimidate journalists, activists, and politicians who were in opposition to him. The Murder of Gongadze: 20 Years of Searching for the Truth, Youtube 50.09, 2021