Investigators immediately and definitely qualified the mysterious death of Transport Minister Georgiy Kirpa as a suicide. That is rather strange, considering the Ukrainian law enforcers’ usual practice of withholding concrete definitions. Moreover, Kirpa left no death note explaining the motive. Their assuredness is based on the fact that traces of gunpowder were found on Kirpa’s hand, but tricks like that are very easy for a professional killer. So if it is the only argument to back the suicide version, so much the worse for our investigators.

Hopefully, the Prosecutor General Office has very weighty reasons to maintain this version. One of such reasons could be recordings of Kirpa’s phone conversations with Rinat Akhmetov and Grigoriy Surkis on the eve of his death. If it is so, the recordings may help complete the investigation, which otherwise is likely to be very complicated.

This version, however, harbors some nuances, which must be noted. Those who know these men well enough say that their specific colloquial manners make even an innocent talk sound like threats of murder. Of course, this nuance could be considered if such recordings existed and if they were warranted, which is hardly probable. If not, they are sure to follow the thorny path of the Melnychenko tapes.

Besides, the numerous “last callers” hardly meant to congratulate Kirpa on the coming New Year. And if his phone was really tapped, this country is likely to hear very familiar voices again.

According to news reports, shortly before his death Kirpa had a talk with “a high-ranking official”. Considering his own rank, his interlocutor must have been the President, the Parliament Speaker, the Prime Minister, or the Vice Premier for Fuels and Transport Andriy Klyuyev (a member of parliament and the power broker in the Yanukovych election staff).

The controversial information leaking from the PGO makes the suicide version rather questionable. Christian norms denounce a suicide as a grave sin and forbid reading funeral prayers over self-murderers and burying them at cemeteries. The same norms “write off” many sins from the life record of anyone “slain in innocence”. But paradoxical as it may sound, it does not matter now whether Kirpa was killed or coerced to kill himself. In either case, the motives and the “coercers” were identical.

So what could have coerced Kirpa to commit a suicide? Probably, it was the awareness of the inevitable punishment for corruption and abuse of authority. Kirpa was also perfectly aware that his overdue advances to the orange revolution did not exempt him from liability for his direct involvement in the election process.

Kirpa had every reason to expect that his relationships with the new authorities would be far from cloudless. MP Volodymyr Stretovych, who chairs the standing committee on fighting organized crime and corruption, said in a TV interview that one should look for the cause of Kirpa’s death in the parliament. According to him, some smart guys in the pro-Kuchma majority, who were after Kirpa’s post, made advances to the new president. It is known that MP Alexander Yedin, who publicly stated his ambitions, had had a very long and interesting relationship with Kirpa. As his would-be successor, Yedin was no less competent. He knew enough about Intercontact, the notorious Express Bank that operated the Transport Ministry’s accounts, the insurance company Interpolis that received commission from every sold railway ticket, and many other schemes that worked for Kirpa.

And Kirpa, as the ex-minister, would have to answer dozens of questions. In particular, he would have to account for the budget funds that had been spent on Yanukovych’s pre-election campaign.

At the same time, Kirpa was logically supposed to be an easy target for the new leadership’s arrows. And he was the only source of detailed and documented information about practically all main players in Kuchma’s team. That information about their “fruitful activities” would be simply lethal for them.

It is obvious that the version of Kirpa’s death as a result of “cleansing” has the bleakest chances, because he was simply packed with “health-hazardous” information. It is not easy to find out now which specific field of his “knowledge” made him unwanted in this world. And if investigators made up a list of suspects who may have been “interested” in Kirpa’s death, it would be rather long and impressive.

MP Nestor Shufrych angrily denies “insinuations” about charging anyone in the Yanukovych team. “Yanukovych and Kirpa are men of the same team,” says Shufrych, but his phrase can hardly serve as a convincing alibi, because the prime suspects in this case are Yanukovych’s former “teammates”.

Kirpa was Kuchma’s man and always got help from him in hard times. He was even viewed as Kuchma’s likely successor. He had a lot of interesting things to tell about Kuchma, Surkis, Medvedchuk, Kuchma’s son-in-law Pinchuk, Akhmetov, and Yanukovych.

Besides, shortly before the election campaign, the former State Committee for Communications was incorporated in the Transport Ministry. According to available information, the investigation into the unauthorized access to the Central Election Commission’s server pointed to a number of Kirpa’s subordinates.

There is one more interesting aspect. It is rumored that Kirpa had very good connections in Italy and that some companies there regularly transferred money to Deutsche Bank - the one that credited Kirpa’s major construction projects so generously.

According to some sources, Kirpa once had an assistant - a certain Heim Bashich, an Israeli citizen. He may have signed the documents that Kirpa naturally could not sign. That could be an interesting riddle for investigators, particularly in the context of the question whether Kirpa took credits from himself…

Many embassies have been unusually reluctant of late to open visas to a number of top-notch Ukrainian officials and members of their families. It is rumored that the almighty minister of transport and communications vainly tried to get a Schengen visa for three months until he finally got one from the Italian Embassy.

Practically each step in Kirpa’s impressive career deserves an entry in criminal records: embezzlement during the construction of the Kyiv-Odessa autobahn; tight control over the freight forwarding market; manipulations with transport tariffs; the so-called “Donetsk economic wonder” - the transport company Lemtrans, which enjoys a fifty-percent tariff discount; the construction of the new bridge across the Dnipro in Kyiv; the enormously costly construction and repairs of the new Transport Ministry building; the special “cruise trains” that carried thousands of roving voters from the eastern to the western regions during the elections, and many others.

Investigators should also study allegations about 70 percent of transit cargoes having been managed by companies directly linked to Kirpa. And it would be interesting to trace links between the firms that belong to members of Kirpa’s family and passenger insurance, medical and banking services. What were the real backgrounds of Transforwarding Limited AG, the enterprise Fiacre, the insurance company InterTransPolis, and Real Estate AG?

Kirpa invested heavily in the construction of a church named after his guardian anger [St. George] and in renovation works in his native village. But could that charity write off or cover up at least a part of those embezzlements? The Criminal Code has a clearly negative answer to this question.

But this question has another aspect. The scale of Kirpa’s illegal activity was enormous. And yet, that energetic man also left behind many good memories and tangible monuments. Many passengers, railroad employees and retired workers remember his charitable activities and all the good things he did.

The organizers and managers of the Yanukovych campaign, who were led by Viktor Medvedchuk, ruled out any outcome but Yanukovych’s victory and so were never too scrupulous about means or methods. It simply never occurred to them that he could lose. As a result, the powers that be found themselves absolutely unprepared for a revision of their past dealings. In a way, Kirpa fell a victim to this circumstance.

Now the Yushchenko staff possesses a great number of the Transport Ministry’s documents, but there are certain doubts that the new authorities are principled and powerful enough in the imminent investigations. It is important to prevent new deaths, which the public may tie directly to the old authorities’ fears of a witch hunt. Too many people just happened to be at the crossroads of others’ secrets and so are “dangerous witnesses” today. The most important thing today is to prevent a wave of psychosis, which can already be felt in absurd rumors about a looming series of deaths.

Too many people found themselves in the epicenter of illegal affairs, and everyone must remember that life is dearer than responsibility.