The Supreme Court of Ukraine is currently examining Viktor Yushchenko’s complaint about the results of the second round of voting. But the court has not accepted the main evidence of falsification – the audio tapes of the telephone conversations of the leadership of Yanukovych’s staff on the eve of the elections and during them. From these conversations it becomes obvious: on the day of the vote Yanukovych’s staff knew all the passwords and logins to the electronic counting system, and was in control of it.
The recordings are of good quality. And although not all the media decided to make them public with the names of those who figure in them, those with ears to hear will have little difficulty in identifying the parties to the conversation. They include, among others: the head of Kuchma’s administration Viktor Medvedchuk, Ukraine’s vice premier, the head of Yanukovych’s staff Andrei Klyuev, the head of the Central Electoral Commission Kivalov, and one of the group’s principal financiers, Eduard Prutnik.
The opposition says that it has tapes of several hundred conversations involving hundreds of people who worked in Yanukovych’s staff. The tapes were apparently made available by a citizen of Ukraine who is currently in hiding, but is prepared to give evidence if the court is prepared to hear him. The first supposition that emerges in this connection: the special services.
In the present rather difficult situation the leadership of Ukraine’s security service is demonstrating its neutrality. On the eve of the second round of voting the head of the CEC, Sergei Kivalov, made a formal request to the SBU (Ukrainian Security Service) to ensure the security of the electronic system.
Indeed, it was already clear after the first round of voting that not the CEC’s computers were not as “clean” as they ought to be. The opposition claimed that all the data arriving at Kiev underwent preliminary processing at a secret centre under the control of the president’s administration. The data arrived late, and in chunks that were too large.
A month before the elections a new head of the CEC’s computer division was appointed – Sergei Katkov. Under the pretext of testing and checking the system, he obtained all the keys and codes from the computer personnel. At precisely this period, in the opinion of one of the experts, an additional communication channel was connected to the system.
A few days after the counting of the votes in the first round, the electronic system was disconnected, and Katkov was removed from his post. However, the opposition maintains that Yanukovych’s staff made new attempts to connect the secret server. It is quite possible that the SBU, who were investigating the situation, also bugged these attempts.
As a matter of fact, even completely private individuals could have done this. A scanner that allows the recording of mobile phone conversations costs half a million dollars, and it can be bought on the open market. Yanukovych’s staff are convinced that the opposition did the bugging. If that is so, then their legitimacy is sharply reduced. Wiretapping is a criminal act, for which the Ukrainian criminal code prescribes four years of imprisonment.
It is most likely that no one is prepared to vouch for the tapes’ authenticity, and the recordings will meet the fate of the Melnichenko* tapes: the law enforcement agencies will not recognize their validity, while the opposition press will consider them to be a historic fact and will quote them widely.
*There's some background on the Melnichenko case here.
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