Hell on Earth for an Activist Murdered With Acid in Ukraine
The deputy
mayor of Kherson was a tireless opponent of corruption. Then some thugs were
hired to pour sulfuric acid on her. It took her more than three months to die.
Ever since Handziuk entered politics in 2006 to become the youngest
elected deputy mayor of her hometown of Kherson, she stood out: blonde,
round-faced, jolly, fearless, passionate, unstoppable. She was always ready to
crack a sarcastic joke or two, always owning up to her decisions. She dressed informally, comfortably, never looking like an ordinary
bureaucrat. In private life, she still had her little girl’s habits. She asked
friends to bring her peanuts in chocolate from Poland, and her favorite sweets
had a clown on the yellow package. She brought stuffed teddy bears in her
backpack on her trips abroad with her husband.
At work she was a natural team builder, gathering a community of
revolutionaries around her. Together they took part in the Orange Revolution in
2004, then in the Revolution of Dignity centered on Kiev's Maidan square in
2013 and 2014. In the spring of 2014, Moscow annexed the Crimean Peninsula, just 300
kilometers, or about 180 miles, from Kherson. After that, Handziuk was part of
the vibrant community of pro-European Maidan activists who were struggling to
stop the pro-Russian rebel movement, also known as the Russian Spring.
“Distinguishing criminality from politics has become very hard here.”
Handziuk kept up the fight over the last year, even as billboards for
pro-Russian politicians went up along the highway from her downtown office to
the two-room apartment where she lived together with her father and husband. In her biting Facebook posts, Handziuk denounced illegal seizures of
property and illegal logging in the region, which often was organized by
dangerous thugs and local officials. Thousands of her followers read and shared
her posts on social media. Kherson knew Handziuk for her aggressive criticism
of the local police and regional government, and for a word she often used, “musora,”
humiliating slang for Soviet-style policemen.
To reach out to a bigger audience Handziuk, together with the journalist
Sergiy Nikitenko, founded a news website called “Most,” or the Bridge. Local
elites read articles that detailed corrupt schemes, and watched the documentary
made by Nikitenko about the regional administrator, Vladislav Magner. “A bandit
from the 1990s,” they called him. On June 18, two bearded men attacked Nikitenko for his journalism. “I am
convinced that the attack on me was revenge for my film about Magner,” he told
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