Служба безпеки України or the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) has its own website. All those security services the world over have one. This website is in Ukrainian and English. Yes, of course, English is the lingua franca or common language of the global village as we are all aware, so no wonder. The website offers the kind of information about the SSU that one expects: what it does, how it recruits its staff, how it can be contacted, what its guiding principles are and the like. Pretty boring stuff. Yet, if you are patient enough, you will discover an interesting tab: the SSU has a wanted list! You will have recalled the Western movies with their iconic wanted posters, will you not?
As you survey the many pics of the wanted people, you come across men and women, many of them in military uniforms, and you begin to wonder what crime they have committed. With this in mind you click on the image or the name underneath in search of information. What you find are merely such data as – again – the person’s names and surname, date of birth, gender, date of disappearance and place of disappearance, form of deterrence and something that is titled precaution and that contains the article, part or paragraph of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. Thus, you need to consult the Code.
You skip from image to image and towards the end of the alphabetical list you encounter a familiar face. You look at the caption and there you have it: Yanukovich Victor Fedorovich! Ukraine’s former president who was chased away by the democratic pro-Western, pro-European, anti-Russian glorious revolution commonly known as the Maidan Uprising. Why is Yanukovich Victor Fedorovich (the typical Soviet-style word order: surname first, names second) wanted? Let us see… To know his guilt we are referenced to Article 115, Part 2, Paragraph 1 of the aforesaid Criminal Code of Ukraine. Our search of the web for the said Code yields the following result:
Article 115: Murder.
Part 2: Murder.
Paragraph 1: Of two or more persons.
Yanukovich Victor Fedorovich is guilty of the murder of two or more persons. We can learn further from the text that “murder, that is willful, unlawful, causing death of (…) two or more persons (…) shall be punishable by imprisonment for a term of ten to fifteen years, or life imprisonment with forfeiture of property.”
It is stated in plain language that Ukraine’s former president Victor Yanukovych willfully caused the death of a number of people. Surely, it was not the plotters who wanted to remove him, it was not those who did not wish to abide by the Minsk Accords who could be held responsible for those deaths. Come on: No!
So far so good. After a while we begin to feel ill at ease. There is something the matter with the list. What? Ah, yes! The wanted list misses two important things. One is the reward. There should be a caption naming the amount of money to be gained by bounty hunters, something like – shall we say? – a million dollars or euros. Why should anybody bother to hunt Yanukovych down if there is no award to be collected? The other thing that is missing from the list is the information whether the culprit is wanted dead or alive. If the Security Service of Ukraine does not care, then the bounty hunter might also be interested to know whether the amount of the reward for the living Yanukovych is larger, smaller or the same as the amount for the dead Yanukovych.
The FBI is for that matter far more business-like. They do offer a financial reward and a high one at that (see the insert below)! Why should the Security Service of Ukraine not follow suit? After all, Kiev copies everything and anything Western, and especially everything and anything American! The Security Service of Ukraine surely has American advisors. What an oversight! Ayayay…
