SBU Officer Reveals Insurrection Plans

by Peter Byrne
Kyiv Post, 20 December 2004

Hryhoriy Omelchenko, a ranking State Secret Services (SBU) officer and a deputy belonging to Yulia Tymoshenko's eponymous parliament faction on Dec. 19 asked the presidents of Russia and Ukraine to stop supplying weapons to gangs supporting Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych.

Omelchenko spoke in Russian during the Dec. 19 address, which was aired live on the pro-opposition TV station Era, so that Russian President Vladimir Putin and the commander of the Russian forces based in Sevastopol understood him without translation. They will receive the footage of his address on Dec. 20.

Omelchenko alleged that weapons belonging to the Russian Black Sea Fleet based in Sevastopol have been transferred to Donetsk in order to arm groups of men who are to arrive in Kyiv Dec. 27 or 28 to incite violence.

Kuchma would then declare a state of emergency, the election results would be cancelled, and the new election would be postponed for as long as half a year, thus allowing Kuchma to stay in power until the recently adopted constitutional amendments come into force.

Omelchenko went on to say that top Russian and Ukrainian officials know about the group's plans, and added that Putin and Kuchma have personally approved of the plan, but Yanukovych remains reluctant to proceed. Donetsk-based businessman Rinat Akhmetov and Deputy Prime Minister Andriy Klyuev, who support the prime minister financially, are forcing him to go along, he said.

According to Omelchenko, 30 groups of 30 men have already been formed and an unnamed Berkut (elite police force) officer will command the group of 900 men, which has been formed using former convicts, sportsmen and other irregulars. They will be armed with 100 rifles, 90 hand grenades and 25 kilograms of the explosive trotyl, Omelchenko said.

The sensational announcement came as SBU deputy chief Volodymyr Satsyuk announced on ICTV, a pro-government channel, that he should not be blamed for poisoning Yanukovych's rival, Viktor Yushchenko, in September.

In a rare interview published on Dec. 19 by the Stolichenye Novosti tabloid, Satsyuk made the statement and confirmed his intention to leave the SBU and reclaim his status as a parliament deputy. Satsyuk was elected to parliament in March 2002 from Zhytomyr and belonged the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine (united) faction, headed by Presidential Administration chief Viktor Medvedchuk.

Satsyuk said Yushchenko and David Zhvanya, an influential businessman and parliament deputy managing Yushchenko's campaign, ate fresh crayfish, a salad of tomatoes, cucumbers and corn, and drank beer, vodka and cognac during the meeting, which lasted from 9:45 p.m. on Sept. 5 to 2:45 a.m. on Sept. 6.

Yushchenko almost died after ingesting dioxin poisons in September during a dinner with SBU chief Ihor Smeshko and Satsyuk at the former's dacha outside of Kyiv.

Catherine Chumachenko, Yushchenko's wife, said she tasted "something metallic" on her husband's breath after he came home.

New tests ordered by the Austrian clinic that treated Yushchenko revealed on Dec. 11 that the opposition figure has more than 6,000 times the normal level of dioxin poison in his blood. That amount is the second-highest concentration ever recorded, according to the scientist who analyzed the samples.

Yushchenko, who fell ill on Sept. 6, was evacuated on Sept. 9 to the Vienna-based Rudolfinerhaus Clinic in Austria where he spent weeks recovering. Dr. Mykola Korpan, one of the dozen physicians who treated him said that the candidate was not of ordinary food poisoning but that "certain special agents" - not normally found in food or beverages - were to blame for the decline in Yushchenko's health.

Zhvanya, interviewed for a 2,000-word article about the poisoning case which appeared in the Dec. 20 edition of the New York Times, said it was premature to conclude that Yushchenko had been poisoned at the dinner.

"The poisoning could have happened at any moment. He was always touring," Zhvanya told the New York Times. "He met hundreds of people in hundreds of places. To link it to that evening can be called only paranoia."