The past 13 years of her life were devoted to seeking truth about her son, a journalist and author of critical articles against the then President Leonid Kuchma. Georgiy Gongadze went missing on Sept. 16, 2000. A month-and-a-half later his beheaded body was found buried in the forest in Kyiv Oblast. It took 12 years to arrest and convict three murderers, one of them a former police general, Oleksiy Pukach, but the investigators failed to find those who commissioned his murder.
While Gongadze’s wife identified the body found by police, Lesya Gongadze never accepted that the beheaded body from the forest was that of her son’s. Over the years, the woman gave many interviews, always saying that her son may still be alive. In 2012, she showed journalists of 1+1 TV station letters that she was allegedly receiving from her son after he went missing.
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She later said that the letters came from a mental hospital in Dnipropetrovsk, but kept believing that it was her son who wrote them. She didn’t come to the court hearings in 2012, when Pukach and other arrested murderers were convicted, because she believed the whole investigation was a farce planned by police.
After Gongadze’s murder, his wife Myroslava sought political asylum in the U.S. with their two children, but Lesya Gongadze stayed in her home city Lviv and refused to move to a better apartment, reportedly offered to her at different times by Lviv authorities and billionair Rinat Akhmetov.
“Lesya Gongadze was an incredibly brave woman,” said Lviv mayor Andriy Sadoviy in a statement shared by the City Council. “Daughter of Ukrainian patriot, she raised a wonderful son – real protector of Ukraine’s national idea and independence. The Gongadze family is a model for all of us.”
The Lviv City Council will later announce the time and place of the funeral and farewell ceremony.
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