UKRAINIAN LAWMAKER CLAIMS 'MOROZ'S TAPE' AUTHENTIC... Lawmaker Serhiy Holovatyy said on 11 December that he is convinced that the audio tape released by Socialist Party leader Oleksandr Moroz allegedly showing President Leonid Kuchma's complicity in the disappearance of journalist Heorhiy Gongadze is authentic, Interfax reported. Holovatyy said he came to this conclusion after interviewing the Security Service officer who eavesdropped on Kuchma's office (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 11 December 2000). Holovatyy, along with two other lawmakers, visited the officer in an unspecified Western European country and brought back to Kyiv a videotape of a 24-minute interview with the officer, which they say they will make public this week. The officer was identified as 34-year-old Mykola Melnychenko. Holovatyy and the two other deputies have lodged a complaint with the Supreme Court about the search to which they were subjected at Kyiv airport on returning from abroad with the video tape. Kuchma ordered the prosecutor-general to investigate the incident. JM

...WHILE OTHERS DEMAND RELEASE OF VIDEO ON ALLEGED KILLING OF OPPOSITION LEADER. Lawmakers Hryhoriy Omelchenko and Anatoliy Yermak have requested that Yevhen Marchuk, secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, hand over to the parliament a "video tape containing information about the liquidation of Ukrainian People's Deputy Vyacheslav Chornovil by a special unit of the Interior Ministry," Interfax reported on 11 December. Omelchenko and Yermak said that during the 1999 presidential campaign, Marchuk had showed them a video tape featuring a masked man, who identified himself as a police colonel and admitted to having been involved in an operation to murder Chornovil on orders from Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko. Omelchenko and Yermak added that Moroz failed to comply with his pledge to organize a meeting between that colonel and the parliamentary commission that investigated Chornovil's death in a car accident. JM

DEFECTOR SAYS HE EAVESDROPPED ON KUCHMA 'TO STOP REGIME'S CRIMINAL ACTIVITY.' The Internet newletter "Ukrayinska pravda" (http://www.pravda.com.ua/) has published a transcription of an interview with Security Service officer Mykola Melnychenko, who said he secretly taped conversations that Ukrainian President Kuchma had in his office (see above). Melnychenko told the three Ukrainian lawmakers who visited him abroad that he began eavesdropping on Kuchma after the latter had given a "criminal order" regarding journalist Heorhiy Gongadze. Melnychenko noted that his goal in taping Kuchma's conversations and passing the tape to Moroz was "to stop this regime's criminal activity." Melnychenko said that he taped Kuchma and his interlocutors on a digital dictaphone hidden under a sofa in the president's office. JM