Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Euro 2012 will kick off in six weeks' time. But should the Ukraine be co-hosting the event?
No camera, please.
The first match of Euro 2012 between Poland and Greece will kick off on 8th June in this stadium
The pitch is getting plenty of TLC and the dressing rooms are ready.
There's a new whiteboard for the coach.
And special washbasins for cleaning the teams' football boots.
No expense has been spared.
This year the Ukraine is set to co-host the European Championships with Poland.
Many of the championship matches are to be held in
Kharkov, Ukraine's second biggest city.
Lenin shows the way, but someone else is boss here now.
Billionaire Oleksandr Yaroslavsky...
...also known as the King of Kharkov.
Yaroslavsky owns the airport, the five-star hotel, the football club...
...and the stadium where the teams will play.
We can't interview Yaroslavsky...
...but we get a guided tour by his spokesman, Sergey.
"So this is where the team walks when the game starts?"
"Yes through this tunnel here." "So how big is the stadium?"
"It's very big stadium, but not big in the stadium of Ukraine."
"For the Dutch team the grass has to be short." "Yes, I know, I know!"
Sergy also takes us up to his bosses sky box.
"You see, this is VIP area, this is President's skybox, only President."
"This is all for the President?" "Yes, this skybox is only for Presidents;
for Oleksander Yaroslavsky, Michel Platini, Mr Yanukovuch and other guests."
This skybox is only open to the biggest dignitaries, like UEFA boss Michel Platini.
And the most powerful man of all.
I, Viktor Yanukovych...
...chosen by the Ukrainian people as president of Ukraine.
The Ukrainian president will be attending several of the matches.
And this president is a controversial figure.
The president's biggest political opponent is held in this prison...
...after being convicted in a show trial.
The prison is located in Kharkov, just a ten-minute ride from the stadium.
Europe's biggest political prisoner is behind these walls:
Opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko.
"We are supporting Julia Tymoshenko, our leader of Ukraine."
"She not guilty, she is innocent." "If she is innocent, then why is she in prison?"
"Because she is real opponent of power; we believe our ruler is a criminal."
"When is the last time you saw her?" "Yesterday."
"How was she?" "Most of the day she is lying in the bed,
having no ability to stand up without any help, so the lady who sits with her in the
cell just helps her to move around inside the room. Today she also had the walking aids
and so she had the possibility to walk with the walking aid."
Her lawyer says Tymoshenko suffers from back pain...
...and does not receive the required medical help.
"The state doesn't want to treat Ms Tymoshenko."
"Why not?" "Because she is personal, political enemy
of the president Yanukovych."
The trial against Tymoshenko started in June last year.
It was a rowdy spectacle.
"We had no time to prepare; they gave me nine
days for revising 24 volumes of the case, which are three hundred pages each, so that's
nothing."
The trial is about a deal that Tymoshenko made with Russia in 2009. At the time she
was prime-minister of Ukraine...
...and she imported large amounts of Russian gas.
Tymoshenko is not accused of having kept the money for herself.
But the price Tymoshenko agreed on is far too high, according to the Public Prosecutor.
"She was convicted for a political decision.
The same is now being done by prime minister Azarov, who is negotiating with Russia about
gas issues. That's a normal political task for the prime minister - to negotiate. She
never abused her powers."
According to Amnesty International...
...Tymoshenko should never have been indicted.
"She made some decisions as a politician,
not because she killed somebody or she did something, you know, committed some other
crimes, so that's why we think she should be punished by voters, not by judges. And
she shouldn't be in a prison, she should be released immediately. And so we are calling
on her release."
The trial against Tymoshenko is politically motivated...
...aiming to silence the opposition.
Or so says Nico Lange, Head of a German think tank in Kiev.
Nico has lived in the Ukraine for years and knows Tymoshenko personally.
"When we took that Photo I had to wait for
her because she was at the General's Prosecutor's Office. This was the time when she was being
summoned everyday to the general prosecutor to give some statements or to familiarize
with the files of the case."
"The aim is to make the most important opponent disappear and so to preserve power
and to send a signal to those who want to really compete against Yanukovych."
"The chairman of the Constitutional Court presents the decoration....
...of the presidency to Viktor Yanukovych, as president of Ukraine."
"Judges are appointed in Ukraine, and the
mechanism of appointing judges is a very interesting one, because it's done by the High Council
of Justice. And the High Council of Justice is appointed by the president. ..."
"judges are not independent. This special judge in the Tymoshenko trail is very interesting,
because he has been appointed just before this trial. He was a judge who was still on
probation, on his trial period. It's like having an intern trying the former prime minister
in the most important case the country has ever seen."
In October 2011 Yulia Tymoshenko was sentenced to seven years in jail.
The former Ukrainian prime minister disappeared in a police van.
The conviction was strongly condemned by the EU and the US.
Other members of the opposition were also arrested for 'corruption'.
In recent weeks Tymoshenko has gone on a hunger strike...
...in protest over her treatment.
While her condition deteriorates new charges are being prepared...
...including even incitement to ***.
"with the situation as it is in Ukraine at
the moment, the prosecutor could take an absolutely blank piece of paper and write on it that
she killed president Kennedy and present it to the court and she will be convicted for
that. And there will be two, or three people who will say: we are the witnesses, we saw that."
Platini -- Euro 2012.
The hosting of Euro 2012... ...has been awarded to...
...Poland and Ukraine.
UEFA boss Michael Platini announced his choice in 2007.
Five years later he refuses to speak out publicly about Yulia Tymoshenko...
...and the other opposition members who have been convicted.
The UEFA is a football association, says Platini...
...not a political organisation.
"If UEFA has values such as fairness for example,
and sticking to the rules of the game, then they should speak up if in the country there
is no fairness and the rules of the game are not followed.
Mr Platini says we're about football not about politics.
Yes but as I said even in football there are some basic values, without those basic values
it is not possible to play the game."
We're in the Kiev underground on our way to the Ukrainian parliament.
We're meeting this man: Roman Zabzaliuk.
Zabzaliuk is a member of parliament for Tymoshenko's party.
His speciality: corrupt politicians.
I know there is corruption in the world. In Europe too, among politicians.
But not to such an extent that it cripples everything.
His own party also contains some rotten apples.
Several colleagues have defected to the president's party.
The party leaders asked Zabzaliuk to investigate.
My task was to investigate political corruption,
...and the nature of the 'traitors', people who defected to another party...
...and also tried to tarnish our leader Yulia Tymoshenko.
Zabzaliuk goes undercover.
He pretends to defect and the government falls for it.
It leads to secret talks in backrooms.
Zabzaliuk is promised a large sum of money if he defects.
Zabzaliuk says he secretly recorded the conversations.
If I'm not happy about his voting behaviour...
...he won't get any money.
So I will say the same to you:
You must work for your money. - Don't worry.
Zabzaliuk could have made lot of money if he defected to the ruling party.
An advance of 450,000 dollars.
And after that a monthly payment of 25,000 dollars
for participating...
...in the work of that group.
And at the end of the legislative session...
...a premium of 500,000 dollars.
In return for Yanukovych's money I had to do what they are also doing:
Think of different stories, lies in effect...
...and contra-propaganda against Yulia Tymoshenko.
Zabzaliuk has to persuade other opposition members to also defect.
Can I tell them that they will get 500,000 straightaway?
Yes, you can. 500,000 dollars. They'll get that straightaway.
And the rest will come later.
The sums of money involved are enormous, says Zabzaliuk.
But where does all that money come from?
"The money is to a large extent extracted
from the Ukrainian state budget; there are a lot of schemes to extract money from the
budget. The money is extracted from the energy business, from intermediary positions in gas
trading for example."
Support for the government is bought with big money.
Does president Yanukovych know about these bribery practices?
He has been silent, but the recordings, if genuine, are clear.
The president asked me personally:
Give me as many votes as possible.
I make sure politics can function.
We work for the president.
Does Yanukovych know what is happening, about those bribes?
Personally, as a member of parliament...
...I believe Yanukovych not only knows...
...but also directly makes it possible.
One of the ways to destroy a democracy...
...is to expand corruption and bribery...
...to create the myth in parliament and society...
...that everything can be bought.
"Under Yanukovych the parliament has been
rendered completely without political influence, the parliament now is a rubber stamp institution,
that does what the president wants."
Zabzaliuk published his recordings earlier this year.
The government says they're fake.
What happened next? Nothing.
If such a scandal occurred in any other European country...
...the government and president would resign. Here everyone is silent.
"there are many scandals where people just
react. They shrug, okay, one more of them. I mean in Ukraine you had a minister of justice
where you found out that his alleged Harvard diploma was not real, he has never been to
Harvard at all. But he continued to be minister.."
Zabzaliuk:
In Donetsk and Kiev during football matches...
...supporters show their contempt and dissatisfaction with this regime in chants:
Thank you, residents of Donbas for, basically, such a bad president.
"This building provides media facilities..."
This blue box is the central of live broadcasting in the Euros.
The championship matches will be viewed live worldwide.
And if you go to Kharkov you can watch the repeat in your hotel room.
But there's one thing you won't be able to see.
This is the editorial office of ATN.
The reports these journalists make can only be seen online.
ATN used to be a TV station, but was taken off the air last year...
...following an unusual complaint, says general editor Oleg Yukht.
"The Public Health Service
of this country...
...banned us from putting out a signal from our editorial office...
...to the TV tower where the broadcasting equipment is located...
...that broadcasts our signal into the ether.
Nika Kharkovchanka, leader of the youth branch...
...of the ruling party in our region, has complained that ...
...because we broadcast our signal through radio relay channels...
...she has a headache.
That's why we can't broadcast that signal.
Banned from TV, ATN decided to move to the internet.
Initially, they were again thwarted.
We'd signed contracts with providers...
...who would supply our internet services.
We anticipated problems and asked them:
Can you put our signal through? Yes, they said.
We signed a contract.
Then the provider called to cancel.
He was pressured by the authorities.
In this case, the authorities are in the city hall.
The mayor of Kharkov is involved: Gennady Kernes.
He's a member of the same party as president Yanukovych.
In 2010 he won the mayoral election in Kharkov.
But critics say he did so in 'the Ukrainian way'.
With fraud.
"So the wrong guy is mayor right now?"
"Well, it's not the guy who won the elections! It's somebody who stole the elections and
it's well documented, it's public and there is no doubt about it."
"According to our data
and that of all exit-polls...
...the current mayor would lose the elections.
According to exit-polls he was five to seven points...
...behind his biggest rival.
After the votes had been counted he had supposedly won.
That's why they didn't like what we did, that we reported everything.
So, the mayor of Kharkov allegedly came to power through fraud...
...and the TV station that reported it was taken off the air as punishment.
The man who lost the mayoral election is Arsen Avakov.
He's a member of Tymoshenko's party.
Last month he too was arrested on suspicion of fraud.
And that could have big consequences for the editors of ATN.
Avakov is one of the founders
of our TV station.
The exit-polls said he had won the elections, not Kernes.
But Kernes was appointed. That's the whole conflict.
And they're members of different parties.
Avakov is a member of the Batkivshchyna party...
...which is the target of a government witch hunt.
And companies in which he has even a small share...
...all suffer from the same witch hunt.
Yanukovych's government is seated in this building in Kiev.
Politics, journalism and business.
In Ukraine they're closely intertwined.
Most TV stations in this country are owned by several billionaires.
Rich businessmen, who are dependent on the president.
And the president uses that to his advantage...
...according to Nico Lange.
"the processes used are very simple: the administration
of the president says to them you'll get problems in your steel business, in your car factory,
in your chocolate factory if you report badly about the president and the government. So
it's very easy to put pressure on these media owners.
interestingly the only channel who is reporting freely at this time is TV-i, and
TV-i is a channel is owned by a person who is living in London and who has no other business
interest in Ukraine, so it's very difficult to put pressure on them."
"Without the support of some rich person...
...mass media just can't exist.
They can't get licenses, subsidy, nothing.
They have no chance to work...
...because the tax authorities keep checking on them, etc.
Until they're closed.
Nowadays independent mass media can only exist...
...if their owners are foreigners.
When we film a demonstration against the gay parade in Kiev...
...we meet a colleague from Ukrainian TV.
He works for a TV station that is owned by a billionaire.
First, we explain what the gay parade is.
Then we ask our colleague if he can do his work freely as a journalist.
We are completely free.
What they say about the lack of freedom in the Ukrainian press:
I don't know.
In the three years that I've worked at this TV station...
...nobody has ever come up to me and said: You can't do this.
If the president or prime-minister does something bad I can report it.
It has never happened that we've been silenced.
Should I believe him? No.
No? No.
Nico Lange knows several journalists personally.
He says they are pressured regularly.
"Like calling people and tell them they could
lose their job, or calling their wife who is working in state employment telling her
that she could lose her job if the husband would not stop this or that kind of reporting.
But as I said, this is almost not necessary anymore because journalists they are now used
to their boundaries, and they do not want to, I think most of them, do not want to create
problems for themselves."
For 90% of Ukrainians TV is the most important source of information.
And because president Yanukovych has the remote control...
...many Ukrainians see only one side of the story.
"for example, when we are talking about the
case of Ms Tymoshenko, Rinat ... who is the first vice-deputy prosecutor general during
the last four months, four times he was invited on the biggest tv-show talking to 2-3 million
audience, each time, for two hours each time with no presence of any other position.
As for me, as defense lawyer I had no possibility to participate in such a shows
"When I got to the heart of the matter,
they understood...
...that their criminal behaviour was being exposed.
The president's staff gave the order...
...to stop the broadcast on the Fifth channel...
...and the other TV stations that are controlled by the regime.
But that did not work with NTV and TV-i. They picked it up.
And thanks to those TV stations, that are under huge pressure from the regime...
...society still found out about this.
The people we've spoken to say Ukraine is one step away from dictatorship.
The American human rights organisation Freedom House...
...calls Ukraine a 'partly free' country.
The constitutional state is falling apart, and freedoms are under pressure.
Football fans travelling to Kharkov will probably not notice much.
But there's one thing they'll have to watch out for:
The Ukrainian police....
That bare tree is the one they tied me to...
...where it all happened.
It started at 10 am and went on until 5 or 6 pm.
This is Yakov Strogan. He lives in Kharkov.
In the summer of 2010 he had a quarrel with a neighbour.
It came to blows.
The police take Strogan to the station and accuse him of attempted ***.
When he keeps denying four officers take him to a forest...
...just outside Kharkov.
First they tied my hands with a big piece of tape.
They also put handcuffs on.
They tied me to a tree and beat my head against it.
They broke my nose and lips.
They hung me from a tree by my feet.
And they just kept beating me. The whole day.
I passed out like eight or ten times. They revived me with water.
And that just continued.
Finally, when I'd regained consciousness they gave me electrical shocks.
They took all my clothes off.
I sat on the ground. One of them stood on one leg, another on the other leg.
My hands were tied behind my back.
One wire went to my ***, and one to my ***, and then ***.
Yakov Strogan's story is not unique.
According to Amnesty International, the Ukrainian police torture suspects regularly...
"We know about at least twenty other cases
in different parts of Ukraine, and we're receiving information about new cases, so it's happening
quite often. But we don't know about all cases, as I said, because sometimes people don't
believe in justice and they don't want to even summit a complaint.
"why do they beat people, why do they torture
people? First of all to make them confess, or to demand money from suspected people,
people suspected of crimes." "Why is it so important for these policemen
that people confess?" "They are still using the old criteria of
evaluation of police performance: they are keeping it from Soviet times."
"They have to solve a certain number of cases?" "Yes, exactly."
Yakov Strogan says he was tortured in the forest outside Kharkov.
He maintains he did not try to kill his neighbour.
The policemen took him back to the police station.
His wife called in a lawyer.
Did you have a medical examination? What was the result?
They found signs of torture.
Burns on the chest and genitals...
...where the electric charge was applied.
Bruises everywhere. A broken nose. Smashed lips.
It was all documented.
Strogan filed a complaint against the police...
...but is then arrested again.
And he says he was maltreated again.
When he was medically examined after his second beating...
...the local TV is present.
Now, two years later, the public prosecutor still hasn't started...
...to investigate what happened in the forest.
There is plenty of evidence in this case, my lawyer says...
...to start a trial.
But they hide everything, because they protect their own people.
"Prosecutors are not impartial enough, because
they do cooperate a lot with police when they investigate all other crimes; they don't want
to investigate complaints on police."
Yakov Strogan himself must now appear in court.
For the fight with his neighbour. The charge:
Attempted ***.
In Ukraine not many people are against hosting Euro 2012.
Quite the opposite: They see it as an opportunity.
To draw attention from the West to the problems in their country...
...that cannot shake off its nickname, 'the Wild East'.
"This is an excellent chance to attract attention, not only that Ukraine
is a really beautiful country,with beautiful cities, but also that this country has a lot of human rights problems."