4.2.12 WC: 191694
Defending the Former President of the Ukraine Against Murder Charges
In T.S. Eliot’s famous play Murder In The Cathedral—which is loosely based on historical events—King Henry II is anxious to be rid of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Unwilling to bloody his own hands, the King hints of his wishes to several loyal knights by issuing a rhetorical challenge: “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” The knights, believing they are following the King’s command, then murder the Archbishop in the Cathedral.
Lawyers and historians have long debated whether the King was legally, morally or historically guilty of Becket’s murder. In 2011, I was asked to become involved in what prosecutors believed was a modern-day, real-life variation on murder in the Cathedral.
My client was the former President of the Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma. Ukrainian prosecutors were investigating him for ordering the murder of a journalist who was critical of the government. The journalist was murdered during President Kuchma’s term in office, and the resulting scandal contributed to the ending of Kuchma’s political career.
Over the next several years, there were investigations but they all exculpated the former president. But now, a decade later, the prosecutors claimed they had a smoking gun: a surreptitiously recorded conversation involving President Kuchma in his “oval office” making statements about the murdered journalist akin to those made by King Henry II about the Archbishop.
The conversations were allegedly recorded on a small Toshiba digital recorder that had been secreted beneath a couch in the president’s office. The voice on the recording was unmistakably that of President Kuchma and the words—f he had indeed uttered them—were damning and incriminating.
My brother and I were retained by a former student of mine, Doug Schoen, a brilliant political strategist who was counseling the President’s family. Our job was to advise the Ukrainian lawyers with regard to the recording and other legal and factual issues.
I flew to Kiev to meet my client. It was an emotionally wrenching trip for me, since my family—including many who were murdered during the Holocaust—came from areas not too far from Kiev. I wanted to visit Babi Yar, the site of one of the worst mass slaughters of Jewish residents of the area. I had been told that some members of my mother’s family were almost certainly among the tens of thousands of victims of the Babi Yar massacres. I asked to visit the memorial as soon as I got to Kiev. I was shocked to see that there was hardly any memorial to the murdered Jews. A current resident of Kiev who visited the area, which is just outside the center of town, wouldn’t even know that the Jewish residents of Kiev were gathered in the area and systematically shot and thrown into pits. The tiny memorial has a faded plaque that is extremely vague about what had happened. I knew that under the Soviet regime, there had been denial and silence. I knew that from the famous poem by the Soviet dissent poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko,
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