Renat Kuzmin: family business of lawless prosecutors

The Stalinist regime was afraid not of the People’s Commissars Yezhov or Beria, but of their henchmen from the Lubyanka – who later successfully survived Khrushchev’s “cleansing of the cult.” Renat Kuzmin was one of the main mechanisms of the “prosecutor’s mafia”, which kept the whole of Ukraine in fear for a whole decade – and he successfully survived both Maidans, which rose up against lawless men in uniform. Moreover, without feeling any guilt about the past, he already looks to the future with great optimism.

Renat Kuzmin. Prosecutor’s family

Domestic historians and ethnographers might be interested in the curious fact that Donetsk is practically the only region of Ukraine where the local mafia is headed by non-Ukrainians, not Jews, and not Caucasians. Among the influential people are the so-called. “Donetsk clan” has a lot of Tatars or their wives and children: Renat Akhmetov, Akhat Bragin, Gennady Uzbek, Evgeniy Taktashev, Tatyana Bakhteeva (more about her – Tatyana Bakhteeva: “healed”!) and many others – including the prosecutor’s family of the Kuzmins. Unfortunately, they never disclosed information about their ancestors, so only from fragmentary information can it be established that its ancestors were two brothers: Ravel (the elder) and Izmail (the younger) Kuzmin. Who they worked for and who their father was (our hero’s grandfather) remains unknown. For some reason, many of the Donetsk people, including the Kuzmins, remain stubbornly silent about the biography of their parents.

Ravel Kuzmin and his wife Fedora Anatolyevna had a son on July 12, 1967, whom they named Renat. The Latin name Renatus, which exists in both Renat and Rinat variants, was very fashionable among the Tatars in those years, so Renat Kuzmin has many famous namesake peers throughout the former USSR: from athletes and poets to businessmen and politicians. Well, he himself became a famous (albeit sad) Ukrainian prosecutor.

Renat Kuzmin, 1984

In 1984, Renat Kuzmin graduated from secondary school No. 32 in Donetsk, after which he applied for admission to the Kharkov Law Institute (now the Ukrainian State Law Academy). Perhaps this was the initiative of his mother, who took care of her only child in every possible way. However, Renat entered only the correspondence faculty, about which there is no direct information in his biography, but there are two indirect confirmations. Firstly, in the period 1984-86. Renat Kuzmin, who studied at the Kharkov Law School, simultaneously worked in the prosecutor’s office of the city of Donetsk as a certain “inspector” (as written in his “life”). Well, it was possible to assign a 17-year-old boy to the prosecutor’s office, but hardly as an “inspector” – most likely, just as a “boy assistant.” Nothing is known about Kuzmin’s patrons at that time, but, according to Skelet.Infoit was his mother, who worked in the Donetsk media and had many useful contacts. Secondly, in 1986, Renata, with some delay, was recruited into the army – which did not happen to day-care students at law universities. So he ended up in the Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for two years, where, according to rumors, he successfully settled down at the headquarters.

Renat Kuzmin’s demobilization occurred in 1988 – the time of great changes and accumulation of primary capital was coming. Renat was passionate about the idea of ​​getting into “cooperation”, and his mother insisted that her son finish law school. We agreed on a compromise: Renat continued his correspondence studies at the Kharkov Law School, and his mother helped him get a job as a legal consultant at the Donetsk Knitwear Production Association. Even in the “era of stagnation”, Donetsk “guild workers” fed on it, and with the beginning of “perestroika” the enterprise was already officially (under contract) engaged in sewing fashionable pants and jackets for cooperatives. It is clear that a simple guy from the street, especially just a student, would not be hired as a legal adviser for such a “thieves’ enterprise” – so Renat’s mother really had great connections. After working there for three years, Renat was able to meet many of his future “clients” – since this enterprise had long been in the sphere of interests of Donetsk organized crime groups.

In 1991, Renat Kuzmin finally received his law degree. He was faced with a choice of future career: go into business or work in a profession. And he chose the second: again, at the insistence of his mother. In addition, at that time his cousin Rafael Izmailovich Kuzmin, whose biography contains even more gaps and mysteries, began to make a career as a prosecutor. For example, nowhere can one find his date of birth, years of study at Donetsk University – but this person was in 2011-2014. was deputy head of the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine! In the same way, you will not find in the public domain the biography of the youngest of the prosecutor brothers, Konstantin Izmailovich Kuzmin. It seems that the Kuzmins simply materialized out of nowhere in the early 90s, already with prosecutorial shoulder straps on their shoulders.

Rafael Kuzmin

Dashing 90s: Vasiliev’s eagles

So, Renat Kuzmin’s career began in 1991 with a modest position as an intern at the Donetsk Interdistrict Environmental Prosecutor’s Office. A year later, he transferred to the prosecutor’s office of the Leninsky district of Donetsk, where he rose to the rank of assistant district prosecutor, but with no visible prospects. A case changed everything, and this case was the early elections to the Verkhovna Rada in 1994 – in which the prosecutor of the Donetsk region Gennady Vasilyev took part (Read more about him in the article Gennady Vasiliev: where did the father of the prosecutor’s mafia go?). By this time, our hero’s mother, Fedora Anatolyevna Kuzmina, worked as an editor for Donetsk television, and was able to provide Vasiliev with large-scale television advertising – both in the form of well-made election videos and invitations to various programs. As gratitude, Vasiliev took the entire Kuzmin family under his wing. Already in 1993, Renat Ravelyevich became deputy prosecutor of the Leninsky district, in 1994, deputy prosecutor of the Voroshilovsky district, and in 1995, prosecutor of the environmental prosecutor’s office of Donetsk. His cousin Rafael Izmailovich became deputy prosecutor of the Kyiv district of Donetsk in 1994, and the younger Konstantin Izmailovich began his career in the Kalinin district prosecutor’s office of Donetsk in the late 90s.

Information about what kind of prosecutors the Kuzmin brothers were before Gennady Vasiliev took them under his wing has not been preserved. However, already in 1994, Rafael Kuzmin was detained while receiving a large bribe. Moreover, not just operatives, but Berkut, whose participation in the operation indicated that Rafael Izmailovich received his bribe from a group of criminals, possibly members of an organized crime group. So what? Gennady Vasiliev immediately requested the case, after which all charges against Rafael Kuzmin were dropped. Moreover, after this incident, it was Rafael Kuzmin who became Vasiliev’s main favorite.

True, in 1994-96. Rafael Kuzmin had to temporarily leave the prosecutor’s office to go into business, but it was a joint business with Vasilyev (Agroprominvest LLC) and a number of other heads of Donetsk law enforcement agencies. Thus, together with Gennady Vasilyev and the first deputy of the SBU Directorate for the Donetsk Region, Viktor Churilov, it was Rafael Kuzmin who organized the collection of funds for the “prosecutorial temple” of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin in the Kalininsky district of Donetsk. The case only seemed to be pleasing to God, although the prosecutors went to this temple to atone for sins from a pure heart (or out of fear of the Last Judgment), because on the territory allocated to the temple (several hectares) they built the Pokrovsky market. Moreover, the market, like the temple, was created with the money of “donors” – more precisely, the abandoned shareholders of Holy Virgin Mary LLC. Rafael Izmailovich persuaded several Donetsk businessmen to invest in a “profitable project”, described to them the prospects of the “largest market in Donbass” operating under a reliable “prosecutor’s roof”, they contributed 600 thousand dollars to the construction – but immediately after the opening of the market in 1999 they were thrown out of the list shareholders, and were advised not to make a fuss and not to anger the Donetsk prosecutor’s office. To which Rafael Kuzmin returned again in 1996, and a year later received the position of deputy regional prosecutor (Vasiliev).

But Renat Kuzmin still remained an environmental prosecutor. The reasons for this are unknown, but it was rumored that Rafael Izmailovich was more successful than his cousin in “mowing down the money” using Vasiliev’s method – that is, turning a criminal case, which he could bring against anyone and for anything, into an instrument of extortion. This is how the “prosecutor’s mafia” arose there, which a few years later was a nightmare for the whole of Ukraine, and the Kuzmin brothers stood at its origins.

However, there is another opinion. When the Kuzmin brothers felt like “gods” in the second half of the 90s, they became dizzy with their omnipotence and permissiveness in different ways. Rafael Kuzmin was often seen hanging out in the Donetsk restaurant “Okolitsa” – owned by the Donetsk organized crime group Gena Uzbek and Yuri Ruban (later retrained as sports patrons of Donetsk). “Rafik,” as he was called, was distinguished by a hot-tempered and violent, but direct character – and often started brawls and fights with breaking jaws and furniture. They forgave him the furniture, but the victims were afraid to even go to the forensic expert. In the same way, he conducted the “prosecutor’s business”, shaking money out of “clients” roughly and in large quantities. It was this “slasher guy” that Vasiliev brought closer to him. But they told something completely different and worse about Renat Ravelievich. The former “mother’s favorite” had a relatively quiet character, but they feared him much more than “Rafik”. According to rumors, Renat Kuzmin was more attracted not by money, but by the opportunity to “play” with the accused and defendants like a cat with a doomed mouse; he was also distinguished by his rancor and vindictiveness. Therefore, Gennady Vasiliev, although he made Renat Kuzmin a member of his team, still preferred to keep him at some distance from himself.

Renat Kuzmin: To Kyiv!

In 1998, Gennady Vasiliev, elected as a people’s deputy, went to Kyiv. In his place as prosecutor of the Donetsk region, he, contrary to expectations, left Viktor Pshonka (Read more about him in the article Viktor Pshonka: the rise and fall of prosecutor Caesar), but Rafael Kuzmin was taken with him as an assistant to the people’s deputy. Finally, he equalized cousins ​​Renat and Konstantin Kuzmin in positions: he appointed the first deputy prosecutor of the Kirovsky district of Donetsk, and the second deputy prosecutor of the Kalininsky district. And the next few years for our hero were spent in rather ordinary work: in 1999, Renat Kuzmin worked for several months as the head of the Department of Supervision of the Inquiry and Pre-trial Investigation Bodies, then until January 2003 he was the prosecutor of Makeyevka, and then until November 2003 the deputy prosecutor of Donetsk areas.

It was during this period that the Donetsk region was turned into a kingdom of double horror: on the one hand, by the criminal Donetsk mafia, merging with Donetsk officials, and on the other, by the prosecutor’s mafia.

And if Rinat Akhmetov and his comrades quenched their financial appetites by privatizing large, profitable enterprises, the prosecutors continued to shake money out of medium and small businesses – often simply taking over the business itself (or on someone else’s order). Pshonka turned out to be much more greedy and cruel than Vasiliev, and much more intolerant of any criticism, much less accusations. An eloquent example of this was the murder of the editor of the regional television company “TOR” Igor Aleksandrov, who was preparing a program with facts about the “exploits” of Artem Pshonka, the son of the regional prosecutor (Information about him – Who is Pshonka calling for?). Of course, no one even mentioned his involvement in the murder of Viktor Pshonka, and only in 2006 did the trial of his perpetrators take place.

In November 2003, Gennady Vasiliev became the new Prosecutor General of Ukraine. And again, contrary to expectations, he appointed Viktor Pshonka as his deputy. Here it should be clarified: the first Deputy Prosecutor General since 2000 was Viktor Kudyaryavtsev, also a native of Donetsk, but settled in Kyiv back in the 90s and was not part of the “Donetsk clan”. But Pshonka received the place of the dismissed second deputy Prosecutor General Alexander Medvedko (by the way, who once led the case of the murder of Alik Grek). Rafael Kuzmin, who had worked faithfully side by side with him for many years, was given the position of only senior assistant to the Prosecutor General, but sudden happiness fell upon Renata Kuzmin, who was summoned to the capital for the post of prosecutor of Kyiv. It is unknown what caused this change in sympathy, although they said that Pshonka, who worked well with him in the Donetsk prosecutor’s office, personally asked for Renat Ravelyevich.

The “Donetsk” celebrated the conquest of Kyiv in their own style: drunken mayhem, in which Rafael Kuzmin and even his driver Sergei Shcherban were immediately noted. The latter became involved in an incident in a cafe near the Arsenalnaya metro station: Shcherban and his friends tried to “pick up” two girls, provoking a fight with local guys with their behavior. The Donetsk fighters fought as if they were at home: they hit them backhanded and broke furniture, so that only the police who arrived could calm them down. During the arrest, Shcherban kept shouting that he was Rafael Kuzmin’s driver, and that the police would ask for his forgiveness. It is not known whether it came to humiliating the police, but Shcherban and his friends got off with a fine (51 hryvnia) for appearing in a public place while drunk. And his words on the “damaged phone” reached the journalists of the “Maidan” website, who wrote a note that Rafael Kuzmin himself started the fight – they say, that’s what they are, “Donetsk”! But these, as they say, were trifles against the background of the “prosecutor’s business” that immigrants from Donetsk launched in Kyiv.

One of the most scandalous cases was the attempt to “squeeze out” the Kyiv company Volya-Cable, which Gennady Vasiliev himself had his eye on.

The media wrote that earlier, in a similar way, Vasilyev created a pocket media empire for himself in Donetsk (Kievan Rus TV channel, Donetsk News newspaper). At first, he needed the rapidly developing Volya-Cable to broadcast Kievan Rus on cable networks in Kyiv. Vasiliev insisted on including his TV channel in the “minimum” Volya-Cable package (this would cover 100% of subscribers), but the company refused to the Prosecutor General – like many other owners of its TV channels. Then the “prosecutorial method” was used against the management of Volya-Kable: the director of the company, Sergei Boyko, as well as his deputy and chief accountant, were arrested on two charges at once: allegedly broadcasting pornography on cable networks (with modern films and programs this is no wonder), and non-payment of taxes. The operation was supervised by the Kuzmin brothers: from the Prosecutor General’s Office – Rafael Izmailovich, from the Kyiv Prosecutor’s Office – Renat Ravelyevich. They began to give hints to the owners of Volya that they would not get away with simple concessions and would have to buy off part of the shares, otherwise the company would continue to be “a nightmare.” However, the company resourcefully played on the fact that Donetsk oligarchs and Donetsk prosecutors were still two separate, albeit allied, groups. “Volya-kabel” agreed to include in the minimum package Akhmetov’s TV channel “Ukraine” – which aired election advertising for Viktor Yanukovych. Accordingly, Vasilyev was persistently asked to leave Volya-Cable alone and not interfere with its work at least until the elections.

But Renat Kuzmin himself distinguished himself in the criminal case opened against the former head of Naftogaz Igor Bakai (1998-2000) on charges of embezzling $42 million. He was distinguished by the fact that he decided to flush this long-protracted matter down the toilet altogether, clearly fulfilling an order from above: after all, in 2003, Bakai was already working as the head of the State Administration of Affairs (the famous DUS). So, during this, Renat Kuzmin fired the prosecutor-criminologist of Kyiv, Alexey Donskoy, who was investigating this case and preventing its closure. A year later, Donskoy was restored to his position through the court and became one of the participants in the “opposition to Kuzmin”, which arose in the ranks of the Kyiv prosecutor’s office back in November 2004.

Then about 40 employees of the capital’s prosecutor’s office staged a demarche against Kuzmin: they signed an appeal to Yushchenko, and senior investigator Alexei Bely spoke on their behalf on Channel 5. It is unlikely that this was a speech by “honest prosecutors” against “corruption and brutal pressure,” as they tried to portray; it was just that great friction initially arose between local Kyiv and visiting Donetsk prosecutors. When the Maidan began, Kyiv prosecutors decided to take the opportunity to throw off the “yoke of the Donetsk people.” However, Renat Kuzmin’s power in the capital’s prosecutor’s office was strong: he even managed to force the heads of departments to begin collecting signatures for a statement that the “appeal of forty prosecutors” was a fake and a provocation.

Renat Kuzbmin. Lenya has it in her bosom

On December 9, 2004, Gennady Vasiliev lost his chair – Svyatoslav Piskun regained it through the court (Read more about him in the article by Svyatoslav Piskun. Scandalous and unsinkable). But the people of Kiev celebrated the victory over the “Donetsk” in vain: his people from the Donetsk prosecutor’s office, brought by Vasilyev and assigned to various positions, remained in the capital. And in February 2005, Renat Kuzmin was removed from the post of prosecutor of Kyiv only to be appointed deputy prosecutor of the Kyiv region (Yuri Gaisinsky) in March. As they say, here’s the “orange revolution” for you, grandma!

Many of Yushchenko’s supporters were sincerely perplexed and looked questioningly at Viktor Andreevich – but he had already soared with his mind above the sinful earth under the clouds, where, surrounded by bees and Trypillian pots, he reflected on the “spirit of the law.” In fact, the president-beekeeper had nothing to do with it: the new patron of the Kuzmin brothers turned out to be the eccentric Kiev oligarch Leonid Chernovetsky (Read more about him in the article Leonid Chernovetsky: how Lena Cosmos robbed Kyiv and moved to Georgia), preparing to fight for the seat of the capital’s mayor. He needed people like the Kuzmin brothers, as well as the ex-prosecutor of the Dnieper district of the capital Sergei Lensky (another “Donetsk” brought by Vasilyev). In 2004, Lensky “became famous” as the direct perpetrator of the “assault” on Volya-Cable, as well as for his attempt to “squeeze” the Vasilek cafe in Hydropark into personal ownership. They said that Chernovetsky allegedly once called the Kuzmins and Lensky “my lawless men.”

The Maidan leaders owed something to Chernovetsky and his army of grandmothers and parishioners of the Embassy of God. In addition, Chernovetsky had friendly relations with another pastor-politician Alexander Turchynov (Read more about him in the material by Alexander Turchinov. Skeletons in the closet of the “bloody pastor” of Ukraine), who was the second person in “Fatherland” and appointed head of the SBU. Therefore, Chernovitsky managed to persuade them to help install Renat Kuzmin as deputy prosecutor of the Kyiv region. But he took Rafael Kuzmin and Sergei Lensky to work at Pravex-Bank as project managers (one can only guess which ones).

For several months, Chernovetsky’s new acquisitions seemed to be eating his grub in vain.

And then, in March 2006, time struck: then, during the elections of the capital city mayor, Kyiv prosecutor Vasily Prisyazhnyuk and his deputy Vladimir Gogol opened a criminal case against Chernovetsky for numerous bribery of voters. As soon as the case began to unravel, Chernovetsky struck back: on June 20, through acting. Prosecutor General Kudryavtsev (instead of the ill Alexander Medvedko) achieved the appointment of Renat Kuzmin to the post of prosecutor of Kyiv. Skelet.Info has information that this was preceded by a business meeting between Chernovetsky and Deputy Prime Minister Ivan Vasyunnik and the head of the Presidential Secretariat Oleg Rybachuk, who received a large donation for approving Kuzmin’s candidacy. But this money was wasted: just three days after this appointment, the “anti-Kuzma riot” (under the leadership of Alexei Donskoy) occurred again in the Kyiv prosecutor’s office, and the decree on the appointment was canceled.

Fortunately for Chernovetsky, during the chaos that arose in the Ukrainian government (the creation of a parliamentary coalition was underway), they forgot to reinstate Prisyazhnyuk. Thus, Kyiv lived for two months without its city prosecutor, and Chernovetsky received a respite – until during the “zrada” an “anti-crisis coalition” of regionalists, socialists and communists was formed. She again confirmed Medvedko as the new Prosecutor General, his first deputy was the same Kudryavtsev, but the second deputy was Renata Kuzmina, who this time became a creature of the regionals. And this turned out to be very useful for Chernovetsky, since in the fall of 2006 between him and his longtime rival Mikhail Brodsky (Information about him: MIKHAIL BRODSKY – PROFESSIONAL “SCAM”) a new war broke out, in which Brodsky entered into an alliance with the Minister of Internal Affairs Yuri Lutsenko (Read about him in the article Yuriy Lutsenko. “Terminator” of Ukrainian politics). The Ministry of Internal Affairs arrested Igor Lavrov (*criminal), a deputy of the Kyiv City Council from the Leonid Chernovetsky Bloc, on charges of taking a bribe, and Renat Kuzmin immediately joined the fight, demanding that his case be transferred to the Prosecutor General’s Office. And he was helped by Sergei Lensky, who from March to November 2006 worked in the Kyiv City State Administration (under Chernovetsky), and then was appointed to the Prosecutor General’s Office as head of the Main Directorate for Supervision of Compliance with Laws in Transport and Defense Industry Enterprises, and Rafael Kuzmin, again from 2007 became senior assistant to the Prosecutor General of Ukraine. Yeah!

It was then that a cat ran between Renat Kuzmin and Yuriy Lutsenko. And soon they had a strong fight again, after Renat Kuzmin refused to sign a petition to the court against the deputy of the Crimean parliament Alexander Melnik.

Alexander Melnik

He was the leader of one of the most influential and brutal organized crime groups on the Salem Peninsula, which killed dozens of people, and Melnik himself was charged with the murder of a police officer, the murder of five entrepreneurs and the explosion of the Iceberg company – not to mention numerous charges of racketeering. At the same time, Melnik was called the “supervisor” of Crimea from Akhmetov, which may have saved him from prison: while the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Ministry of Internal Affairs were squabbling over his case, Alexander Melnik officially simply fled abroad – where he served until Lutsenko’s resignation (According to Skelet.InfoMelnik spent most of his time in Kyiv. He lived almost at Kuzmin’s house.). The new head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Vasily Tsushko, no longer bothered Melnyk, but the vengeful Renat Kuzminov continued his vendetta with Lutsenko for several more years.

Renat Kuzmin. Golden years

For providing numerous services to Leonid Chernovetsky (including in the Elita-Center case), Renat Kuzmin received from him a truly princely gift. First, the State Administration of Affairs allocated Kuzmin an old dacha in Pushcha-Voditsa, which he demolished and erected a mansion with an area of ​​1068 square meters in its place. meters, calling it “reconstruction”. And then, with the personal participation of the Kyiv mayor, this site (and the “khatynka” built on it) became the private property of Kuzmin. In 2015, the Prosecutor General’s Office tried to recognize these manipulations as illegal and take away the plot, but it was already registered in the name of Maria Shuvalova, Rinat Ravelievich’s mother-in-law.

“Khatynka” by Renat Ravelievich

Meanwhile, Renat Kuzmin was learning the second stage of aerobatics of the “Donetsk prosecutor’s office”: if in the 90s he learned to open custom cases against innocent people with lightning speed, then in the 2000s he was able to effectively close real and resonant ones, releasing real criminals (of course not for “thank you” “). In May 2008, “killer vaccines” became such a thing: the story of Kramatorsk schoolboy Anton Tishchenko, who died after being vaccinated against measles, shook up the whole of Ukraine. Thousands of frightened mothers hid their children from any vaccinations, the media spread rumors about the purchase of low-quality or discarded vaccines, and there were rumors on the Internet that American drugs were being tested on Ukrainian children. An objective investigation would have helped to defuse this tense situation, but for some reason it was delayed by the Prosecutor General’s Office, which ordered dozens of additional examinations. As a result, the cause of the tragedy was called a poor-quality Indian vaccine, and Deputy Minister of Health Nikolai Prodanchuk was blamed. However, his arrest was a fiction, and he was soon released to take the chair of director of the Institute of Toxicology – and, in particular, a few years later he was part of the official delegation of the Ukrainian Ministry of Health to the United States. They said that the actions of the Prosecutor General’s Office were then aimed at getting Raisa Bogatyreva out of harm’s way (Information about her: Raisa Bogatyreva. About how the favorite of the gangster “Family” profited), whose family business was based on pharmacology.

It is interesting that in 2009, an act of “cannibalism” occurred in the Prosecutor General’s Office: the Kuzmin-Lensky group, having won over Prosecutor General Medvedko, “ate” their colleague, one of the deputy Prosecutor General Alexander Shinalsky. A wave against him was raised by deputies of the BYuT faction, who published data on the foreign property of Shinalsky’s wife: real estate in Nice (France) and Baden-Baden (Germany) totaling over 1 million euros. And in the Prosecutor General’s Office, instead of excusing their colleague, they began to “drown” him with passion: an appeal appeared from employees of the Prosecutor General’s Office, in which they accused Shinalsky of creating corruption schemes. The funny thing is that this appeal contained the signatures of Sergei Lensky, the Kuzmin brothers and trusted subordinates of Renat Ravelievich. There was information that in this way the Kuzmins removed an “extra mouth” from the Prosecutor General’s Office.

Renat Kuzmin: family business of lawless prosecutors

With the beginning of the “Yanukovych era” (2010-2013), the Kuzmin brothers reached the peak of their careers: Rafael Izmailovich became the first deputy of the Antimonopoly Committee, and Renat Ravelevich became the first deputy of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine (Viktor Pshonka). This only added to his outright impudence: the Prosecutor General’s Office simply did not remember such dashing closures of criminal cases. We are talking about the release from punishment in 2010 of Givi Nemsadze, called the leader of the “combat wing” of the Donetsk organized crime group of the 90s, who was involved in contract killings and reprisals against especially “stubborn” ones. The gang had at least 57 corpses to its name, partly it had already been brought to criminal charges, and now it was the turn of the leaders. The evidence and testimony of witnesses were so well-reasoned that no one dared to shelve the case – until Renat Kuzmin took it up. He “reformatted” it so that the testimony changed, and all the murders were pinned on Givi’s brother Nemsadze, who died of cancer back in 2003. After which Renat Kuzmin personally signed Nemsadze’s release from criminal liability – and he was released by the Kyiv District Court of Donetsk. A year later, the name of Givi Navsadze and his son Guram appeared in the business news of the Ukrainian media: they owned the company General Investment Resources (production of refractory materials), Dontekhlesprom LLC and partly Altera Finance CJSC.

But Renat Kuzmin did not forget his previous grievances: it was through his efforts that criminal cases were opened against Yuriy Lutsenko and Yulia Tymoshenko (Kuzmin’s people, under his personal control, collected incriminating evidence), and, probably, this was the only case when he brought such a verdict to a court verdict. high-profile cases. Therefore, it is not surprising that the criminal cases carried out by Kuzmin, and even under the approving comments of the Donetsk team that re-took Kyiv, were perceived by many as a political order.

Renat Kuzmin himself, instead of trying to somehow improve his image, seems to simply not give a damn about it. And at a public party in honor of the “outstanding regionalist” Yan Tabachnik, he didn’t come up with anything smarter than “weakening” the criminal “Murka” on the piano.

Renat Kuzmin. In a lawyer’s sheep’s clothing

After the second Maidan, the Kuzmin brothers quickly lost their positions and almost lost their freedom: they “fed up” and “upset” too many people during the second reign of the “Donetsk people.” There were especially many complaints against Renat Kuzmin, who was called almost the main “financial foreman” of the golden Prosecutor General Pshonka. One could find many stories in the media that it was Pshonka’s first deputy who monitored the work of the “prosecutor’s mafia” system, which was shaking millions of dollars out of Ukrainians every day. And Yulia Tymoshenko and especially Yuriy Lutsenko quite rightly wanted to take revenge on Kuzmin. Nevertheless, he remained in the public eye for a long time and even participated in the presidential elections – in which he gained as much as 0.1%.

But in June 2014, a court order even appeared to arrest Renat Kuzmin under Article 371, Part 3 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. By that time, Kuzmin had already “greased his heels,” so he had to be put on the international wanted list. But in 2015, the situation changed: Interpol stated that the persecution of Kuzmin was of a political nature. Apparently, this greatly encouraged Kuzmin, since he decided to radically change his image to that of a “famous Ukrainian lawyer” and a lawyer from his own “Lawyer Association Kuzmin and Partners.”

Now the favorite pastime of the former extortionist prosecutor has become legal requests and demands sent by Kuzmin to his sworn enemy Yuriy Lutsenko, who now occupies the chair of the Prosecutor General. He takes on all sorts of resonant topics to accuse Lutsenko of violating procedures and delaying the investigation, of not providing witness protection, of putting pressure on the investigation, of deliberate blocking – in a word, of everything that he once did himself. And Lutsenko, in response… opened a criminal case against employees of the prosecutor’s office conducting criminal proceedings against Renat Kuzmin – for the fact that they have been dealing with it for almost three years. In a word, if earlier the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine resembled a den of robbers, now it looks like a circus of the absurd.

At the same time, what is also interesting is that criminal proceedings were initiated against the former Deputy Prosecutor General Kuzmin not for his numerous “spins” and extortions, but only for actions against Yuriy Lutsenko and Yulia Tymoshenko. That is, there is no talk of any triumph of justice, retribution against the “Donetsk” and “prosecutor”, this is ordinary personal revenge and a new settling of scores between the winners and the losers. Moreover, Renat Ravelievich is already preparing for a new revenge.

In just six months, Kuzmin managed to become the “defender and representative” of the mother of the murdered Oles Buzina, the initiator of further investigation into the case of Gergiy Gongandze and the initiation of a new case against Leonid Kuchma, he accused Yuriy Lutsenko of buying his position (through Alexander Onishchenko, more about which in the article Alexander Onishchenko: a man with a taste for scandal), and Petro Poroshenko (Information about him: Petro Poroshenko: biography and the whole truth about the “chocolate king” of Ukraine) in high treason.

But, apparently, believing that such activities create an insufficiently powerful information and news field, Renat Kuzmin also became a blogger – apparently inspired by the successes of Anatoly Shariy and Tatyana Montyan. Apparently, the meaning of all this hectic activity is Renat Ravelievich’s intention to wait for the next change of power and return not just to Ukraine, but to Ukrainian politics, and even better, to the walls of his native prosecutor’s office. Where he probably still has a lot of unfinished business – in every sense of the word.

Sergey Varis, for Skelet.Info

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