Life on the beat for Ukraine’s cops
Daily struggle with drunk, disorderly and drone strikes
KYIV, Ukraine — In another time, in another place, the call to the police in Kyiv might have been dismissed as a crank. A resident living along the river had spotted a suspicious red light in the distance and was worried.
In wartime Ukraine, the reason for the concern was obvious: It could be an agent of Moscow directing a Russian missile to its target.
So Officer Dmytro Subota and his partner, Officer Anatoliy Kochylo, raced to investigate.
“There is nothing really that can surprise us anymore,” Subota said as they sped along empty streets just after midnight. They decided the caller had mistaken a red light on a construction crane for something nefarious and continued their night patrol.
Such is the head-spinning nature of being a beat cop in a city of 3.3 million that is under bombardment, struggling with blackouts and gripped by uncertainty. Around Ukraine, the Patrol Police, a division of the National Police responsible for public order, now deals with the ordinary and the extraordinary.
In Kyiv, the capital, officers make a traffic stop in the morning and then rush to the site of a drone strike in the afternoon, where they perform first aid. They deal with drunks out after curfew, people trapped in elevators when the power fails, traumatized families and scofflaws.
Nearly a year ago, on the morning of the Russian invasion on Feb. 24, every officer was issued a rifle to help defend the country. They helped orchestrate the
exodus of millions of people, battled Russians outside the city of Chernihiv, hunted down Russian saboteurs in Kyiv and stood shoulder to shoulder with soldiers in the southern port city of Mariupol that ultimately fell.
Now, as the government seeks to root out corruption and abuse, Ukrainian officials, Western advisers and local activists hope the trust earned by the Patrol Police can prove enduring and serve as an example for other parts of a sprawling state security apparatus still mired by abuses.
Built from scratch with financial and technical assistance from the United States and Europe, the Patrol Police is seen as a visible example of Ukraine’s desire to embrace Western values and end a culture of corruption that was a legacy of Soviet rule. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine has increasingly focused
on the issue as he seeks to bolster Western alliances and set the country on a path to join the European Union.
Yevhen Krapyvin, an expert on criminal justice at the Center of Legal Policy and Reform in Ukraine, said the creation of the Patrol Police had been a success, with polls and research showing the force was trusted by the public.
“The only problem is that the area of responsibility of the Patrol Police — public safety — is only part of the work of the police,” he said. The problems are concentrated in the criminal divisions, and the public remains wary of turning to them given a pattern of abuse.
As the country united against a common enemy and fought for survival, issues related to corruption receded into the background. But graffiti on a wall by the banks of the Dnieper
River serves as a reminder of the depth of distrust of law enforcement and the broader criminal justice system: “Who do you call when the police kill you?”
It was a question the whole nation was asking in 2014, in the midst of the Maidan revolution that swept a Kremlin-loyal government out of power. Back then, a special branch of the police force, called the Berkut division, shot and killed around 100 protesters among the thousands gathered in central Kyiv demanding reform.
“The brutal actions of the police were the catalyst for people outraged by corruption, the rollback of European integration, and forced ‘Russification,’” wrote Halyna Kokhan, who worked for the European Anti-Corruption Initiative in Ukraine, which advised the country on the overhaul of its law enforcement.
The Berkut division was disbanded. The name of the national police force was changed from Militsiya, the same name as in Soviet times, to Politsiya. And the Patrol Police was formed, replacing two divisions that had the most day-to-day contact with the public but were rife with corruption.
But the group makes up just 25,000 of the roughly 150,000 members of the National Police, and as broader reforms have stalled, Ukrainians have expressed frustration that abuses have continued.
Roman Sinitsyn, who led some of the commissions set up in 2015 to root out police abuse, said the Patrol Police had been successful because it was created as a new force rather than just refashioned. It hired almost entirely from among educated young people who had not served in law enforcement.
The leaders of the Patrol
Police recognize that this period could define the force’s reputation. “The police have to be as close to the people as ever,” said Oleksiy Biloshytskiy, first deputy chief of the Patrol Police. “We need to be seen as their defenders. If we fail during this time, we will lose their trust forever.”
Svitlana Lukianenkova, 30, joined the force in 2016. Her training did not include lessons on drone strikes, she said. But the basics of neighborhood-based policing are useful in these trying times.
“We work without any holidays or weekends because we need to provide security,” she said.
Road accidents soared in the blackouts, and hundreds of pedestrians in Kyiv and other cities have been killed or injured. But even with the blackouts, Kyiv has recorded a remarkable drop in crime. Robbery, assaults and homicides have all plunged 50% to 60% from the same 10-month period a year ago.
Lukianenkova, who sent her daughter, Eva, out of the country at the start of the war, recalls every moment of a missile strike she responded to in Kyiv. The missile landed next to a school and as she arrived, another rocket hit an apartment building across the street. She heard someone screaming from an apartment on fire, but there was nothing she could do. It is a memory etched in her mind, she said, and one reason she finds officers abusing their positions intolerable.
Lukianenkova and her partner, Stanislav Skrypnyk, 28, said there are still incidents of police abuse, but their superiors are quick to take action.
“There are people who don’t like police because police give them fines. It is normal,” Skrypnyk said. “But after the 24th of February, people would bring us food, thank us, look at us as heroes.”