Misha Glenny -
This case (winter 2000) was not a conventional gangland killing: higher powers were involved. In this instance, the mafia organisation was the Ukrainian state itself ... ‘It was a period in which the state was converted into criminal political mafia,’ said Omelchenko, the combative and impressively moustached MP, in a pithy summary of his statements in parliament ... the body belonged to Georgi Gongadze, a 31-year-old investigative journalist who had disappeared two months earlier. Misha Glenny, McMafia
Half Ukrainian and half-Georgian, Georgi Gongadze had begun to prise open the lid of Kuchma’s maggot-infested administration with his probing articles. Slowly it was becoming apparent the the Ukrainian Government had commandeered the judiciary, the police, the military, the Security Forces and industry – in short, the central mechanisms of state – as vital assistants in the amassing of wealth and power by a federation of regionally based cliques. Of course, just like any other cabal of ‘families’, there were frequent fallings out, and indeed the system eventually came crashing down in December 2004 when former allies of Kuchma, Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshekno, led the Orange Revolution that sought to replace venality with popular legitimacy as the guiding philosophy of the state. ibid.