On 25 February 2015, Aleksandr Velichko, an official in the Dnipropetrovsk municipal government, disappeared. Ten days later, a recording appeared on an anonymous YouTube channel in which Velichko exposed the alleged involvement of the city council and mayor in corruption schemes and claimed that he had fabricated his own disappearance. The alarm was soon raised by Opposition Bloc, a political party representing the former allies of deposed president Viktor Yanukovych: they maintained that the official had been kidnapped by people working for Ihor Kolomoisky, governor of Dnipropetrovsk at the time.
One week later, Velichko himself repeated the charges made by Opposition Bloc. Using this online testimony, Kolomoisky allegedly engineered the sacking of the mayor of Dnipropetrovsk on grounds of corruption. No one knows what actually happened and no one is too keen to find out. This gangland story wasn’t hidden from the public and, apart from a few opposition TV stations (such as Inter and Ukraine), the press did not report it.
For Ukraine’s Fourth Estate, covering this story made little sense: neither their investors, nor their political patrons were involved. The events of January and February 2014 may now be known as the ‘Revolution of Dignity’, but the latest economic crisis has made Ukrainian media even more dependent on handouts from individuals. And what’s more, they continue to operate in a less than dignified manner.
