Cassette Scandal

The Cassette Scandal (Ukrainian: Касетний скандал [kɐˈsɛtnɪj skɐnˈdɑl]; Russian: Кассетный скандал), also known as Tapegate or Kuchmagate, was a Ukrainian political scandal in November 2000 in which Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma was caught on tape ordering the months-earlier kidnapping of journalist Georgiy Gongadze, whose decapitated corpse had recently been found. The scandal was one of the main political events in Ukraine's post-independence history, dramatically affecting the country's domestic and foreign policy. The scandal, triggering the Ukraine without Kuchma protests, also began a slow and gradual shift of Ukraine's political and cultural orientation from Russia towards the West, although this only became more pronounced after Euromaidan in 2013–2014. The scandal also damaged Kuchma's political career.

Georgiy Gongadze, the editor of a Ukrainian internet newspaper which focused on corruption, disappeared on 16 September 2000. This produced growing pressure on Ukraine's president Kuchma, who promised to personally oversee the investigation into Gongadze's disappearance. On 3 November a decapitated corpse was discovered not far from Kyiv. As the body had been doused with acid, it was impossible to establish the persona of the deceased through fingerprint analysis, however friends and relatives identified the body as belonging to Gongadze.

The scandal started on 28 November 2000, in Kyiv, when Oleksandr Moroz, head of the opposition Socialist Party of Ukraine, publicly accused Kuchma of involvement in the abduction of Georgiy Gongadze and numerous other crimes, presenting records of the president's conversations with senior officials as evidence. Moroz named Kuchma's former bodyguard, Mykola Melnychenko, as the source of the records. He played selected recordings of Kuchma's secret conversations for journalists, supposedly confirming the president's order to kidnap Gongadze. That and hundreds of other conversations were later published worldwide by Melnychenko.

Melnychenko, a former security service officer, claimed that the recordings had been made by him in order to stop "abuses of power" by the government. According to him, the records were made by hiding the recording device under a sofa in the president's office. After creating the recordings, Melnychenko fled abroad.

Journalists nicknamed the case after the compact audio cassette used by Moroz. Melnychenko himself was supposedly using digital equipment, not cassettes, for recording in the president's office.

On the recording, a person with a voice similar to president Kuchma can be heard discussing ways of getting rid of Gongadze, using crude language. No mention of possible murder is present in the tapes, but the speakers talk about kidnapping the journalist or transporting him to Chechnya.

President Kuchma denied that his voice could be heard in the recordings and accused his opponents of provocation, slander and attempt to trigger a political crisis. Mass protests took place in Kyiv from 15 December 2000 to 9 March 2001. Opposition started a campaign of non-violent resistance called UBK ("Ukraine without Kuchma"), demanding Kuchma's resignation. Despite economic growth in the country, President Kuchma's public approval ratings fell below 9%.

In 2002, the governments of the United States and other countries became more deeply involved after one of the recordings revealed the alleged transfer of a sophisticated Ukrainian defence system Kolchuga to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. As a result, Leonid Kuchma was boycotted by Western governments for a time. In particular, he experienced an offensive diplomatic démarche when visiting the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit that took place on 21–22 November 2002 in Prague. Breaking the decades-lasting tradition, the list of participating countries was announced in French, not English. As a result Turkey was named after Ukraine, instead of the United Kingdom and the United States, thereby avoiding the appearance of Kuchma next to Tony Blair and George W. Bush.