Volodymyr Kondratenko, known in Russian as Vladimir Kondratenko, was one of two men whom police and prosecutors in Kyiv held responsible for a series of killings in the Ukrainian capital in the first years after independence. With his partner, Vladislav Volkovich, he was accused of killings that investigators proved in at least 16 cases, according to Ukrainian press accounts. The senior investigator who questioned him said he went on to describe more than twenty.
He was never convicted. Kondratenko died in custody in May 1997, as the case against the two men reached court, from an overdose of medication. Because no verdict was given against him, every killing linked to his name rests on what investigators attributed to him, on what he told them in custody, and on the case that went on against Volkovich, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in August 2000.
Kondratenko was born in Kyiv in 1967, according to a reconstruction of the case broadcast and published in June 2003 by Podrobnosti, the news service of the Inter television channel, in a program by the journalist Kostiantyn Stohnii. Podrobnosti gave his full name as Volodymyr Vasyliovych Kondratenko.
Little else is known of his early years. When investigators questioned the two men, Podrobnosti reported, it became clear that neither had any regular job. Kyiv.Yes, a city news site that revisited the case in 2024, wrote that both men came from troubled families and were out of work, and described them as ordinary citizens who at times had even helped investigators. In Kondratenko's case that help became one of the strangest features of the inquiry.
How the two men met is not known. Podrobnosti wrote only that soon after they came to know each other they decided to form an armed group. In the version recorded by Podrobnosti, both of them said their aim was to wipe out people they called the dregs of society. Gazeta.ua, in a later retrospective on killers of the independence years, wrote that the two admitted they had planned to become hired killers, and Kyiv.Yes described the victims as practice for that career.
For a long time investigators did not know that two men were involved. Each new death in Kyiv, as Podrobnosti described the inquiry, added to a description of one gunman: dark-haired, of medium height, aged 30 to 35. The first account came from an anonymous telephone caller who reported a shooting to the Solomianskyi district police in the summer of 1991, by Podrobnosti's dating. The caller could not be traced.
The man who died in that case was Yevhen Osechkin, 44, from Vyshneve, a town about eight kilometers outside Kyiv. He worked at a motor plant in the capital and had been paid that day. Colleagues remembered him as a reserved man without a family who kept out of arguments. Money was still in his wallet, which left detectives without an obvious motive. Going through older files, they found a similar killing nearby and decided they were looking at one offender.
A man with two earlier convictions, S. L., was taken in for questioning on June 21 after a watch on suburban trains and bus routes. Hospital records and his relatives showed he had been treated for a leg injury at the time of Osechkin's death, and he was released.
About two weeks later Oleksandr Yehorov, a doctor well known in Kyiv, was shot dead. Within the hour another man was found dead nearby. People who had noticed a stranger in the area gave descriptions that matched the composite sketch from the earlier case. Oleksandr Mysiurenko, a forensic prosecutor with the Kyiv city prosecutor's office, told Podrobnosti that by then a rough description had been established and that teams from several cases were working together.
The next death, two weeks after that, gave detectives the first name. Oleksandr Shpak was killed after he had argued with two young men he had met that evening. His partner remembered that one of them was called Volodymyr, and her description of him matched the sketch exactly.
The name was a puzzle. The investigators had imagined a careful, almost professional gunman who left little behind. Yet the man called Volodymyr had spent time in front of a group of people who could describe him. Podrobnosti reported that the most experienced detectives were moved onto the case, that records of men previously convicted of similar offenses were checked, and that likely places were watched, without result.
On September 4 another man was found shot dead in Kyiv. Police could not find any relatives or acquaintances. Mysiurenko said later that the hardest part of the work was the lack of a motive: knowing why a crime was committed, he explained, lets investigators narrow down who could have committed it.
A report by the Kyiv criminal investigation department, quoted by Podrobnosti, summed up what the police knew. Between 1991 and 1996 a series of killings had been committed in the city. Most of the victims were men aged 35 to 45. Two men were wanted, both thought to be between 30 and 35 and of medium height, and one of them was called Volodymyr. Officers carried the sketches with them, and men who looked even slightly like them were stopped and checked. Kyiv newspapers wrote about a "night serial killer," and one headline asked who would be next after the sixth killing. Kyiv.Yes noted that because the victims seemed to have been chosen at random, the police were slow to see the deaths as one series.
After a pause of nearly three weeks, Petro Hromov, a man aged between 35 and 40, was shot dead on September 28 and his Zhiguli car was taken. The car had been damaged, and the men who took it left it behind a block away. A driver who knew Hromov gave a statement about what he had heard and seen.
Detectives then went from apartment to apartment in the surrounding buildings with the sketch. A woman recognized the man in it and told them he lived in the next entrance of a nearby building. The building was put under watch.
Oleksandr Bykov was killed in Kyiv on September 23 in the evening, Podrobnosti reported, and he died of stab wounds rather than gunshots. Mysiurenko described the killing as calculated and planned.
When police examined the Bykov case, civilian attesting witnesses, known in Russian as ponyatye, were present to confirm what the officers did. One of them was Kondratenko. He knew the family well. Investigators later said he had been in an intimate relationship with Bykov's wife, and in the days after the killing he went with her to hospitals and morgues, spoke often with the police, and told them he wanted to help the widow find the person responsible. Podrobnosti's reading of his conduct, drawn from the investigators, was that he was doing everything he could to keep suspicion away from himself.
Three days after the killing, a man who closely matched the wanted description was seen near the building. Detectives let him walk, hoping he would lead them to a partner, and followed him for a day. They lost him in a market, and he did not come back. By the police count at that point, eleven deaths were linked to the men they were seeking, and none of the cases had been solved.
The break came from the files. Going back over reports and witness statements, officers noticed in a photograph a man who resembled the wanted suspect. He was the attesting witness from the Bykov examination. His name, Volodymyr Kondratenko, went out to every police station in the city. One question, as Podrobnosti put it, still troubled the detectives: why would the person they were hunting agree to stand as a witness to the police work on his own case?
Soon afterward, officers watching the building saw two men walking toward the entrance. One of them was a man police had been watching for several weeks; the other was Kondratenko. Oleksandr Pykul, a senior investigator at the Solomianskyi district prosecutor's office, recalled that he was at the district station on a Sunday when a local officer called from one of the buildings to say a young man matching the description was there. The man was brought in and questioned. He was Kondratenko. Vladislav Volkovich was also taken into custody and questioned. The date of the arrests is not known.
Shortly before they were caught, Podrobnosti reported, the two men had been in a road accident. They had taken a VAZ-2102 car from its owner in an armed robbery, as they later admitted. Traffic police recorded it moving at 80 kilometers an hour. Kondratenko was drunk and at the wheel; at an intersection he failed to brake in time, struck a woman and drove on. Ihor Demydov, head of the department supervising investigations at the Kyiv city prosecutor's office, told Podrobnosti that investigators worked out which way he had fled and that, with the help of operational units of Ukraine's Interior Ministry, Kondratenko was identified and exposed. What became of the woman is not known. Kondratenko later said that she was the only one of his victims he regretted.
At his first questioning, Pykul told Podrobnosti, Kondratenko spoke about eight killings. When Pykul himself began talking with him, the number he described rose to more than twenty. Both men talked about the killings calmly, Podrobnosti reported. Volkovich said he had felt no pity or remorse and thought of himself as a kind of superman; no comparable remark from Kondratenko is recorded beyond his regret over the woman struck by the car.
According to Pykul, the pair first chose strangers, then turned on people they knew, and in the last part of the series went after drivers of private cars. The investigators also explained a pattern that had shaped the whole hunt. In the attacks on drivers, witnesses usually saw only Kondratenko, which is why so many descriptions pointed to one man with the same face. Investigators were clear that both men took part in the killings together.
Over the series, Podrobnosti reported, the two took seven private cars from their victims and committed several thefts from shops and apartments, as well as other offenses. The program set the total at about twenty killings between 1992 and 1997. Investigators proved at least 16, according to Gazeta.ua, TSN and Kyiv.Yes; Kyiv.Yes wrote that the men confessed to at least 20.
None of these figures was ever tested against Kondratenko in a verdict. What stands on record is what investigators proved to their own satisfaction, what the two men said in custody, and the outcome of Volkovich's trial.
By 1997 the Kyiv police and prosecutors regarded the case as closed, and they publicly credited themselves with breaking up a two-man gang, Podrobnosti reported. The court hearing was set for May 31. Kondratenko did not live to see a verdict. According to Podrobnosti, he died the day before the hearing in the intensive care unit of an emergency hospital, from an overdose of medication. Gazeta.ua gave a slightly different account: the trial began in May 1997, and a few days later, on May 31, Kondratenko died in custody from an overdose of medicines that had been prescribed to him.
The cause was given as an overdose and nothing more. No inquiry into how a prisoner came to take too much medication has been made public, nor any finding on whether the overdose was deliberate.
His death ended the case against him. Under the law he died without a conviction, and the killings attributed to him were never decided by a court in his case.
The proceedings went on against Volkovich. After Kondratenko died, Volkovich changed his position and tried to put all of the killings on his dead partner, Gazeta.ua reported. The attempt failed, and in August 2000 Volkovich was sentenced to life imprisonment. The court, the counts on which he was convicted and the killings it found he had committed himself have not been made public.
The case has stayed in Ukrainian reporting on crime. Podrobnosti's 2003 program placed it third among the country's serial killing cases by the cruelty of the crimes and the number of victims, after those of Andrei Chikatilo and Anatoly Onoprienko. TSN, the news service of the 1+1 channel, ranked the "night killers" sixth on a 2013 list and credited them with 16 killings. Kyiv.Yes, in its 2024 survey of the capital's criminal history, wrote that the two men had kept Kyiv in fear for five years.
Guilt. Kondratenko was never tried to verdict. His confessions, the investigators' findings and the evidence assembled for the trial were never weighed by a court in his case. The killings are his only in the sense that investigators attributed them to him and that he described them in custody.
The number. Investigators proved at least 16 killings, according to Gazeta.ua, TSN and Kyiv.Yes. Pykul said Kondratenko described more than twenty; Kyiv.Yes said the men confessed to at least 20; Podrobnosti put the total at about 20.
The years. Podrobnosti dated the first call to the police to the summer of 1991, and the police analytical report covered 1991 to 1996, as do Gazeta.ua and Kyiv.Yes. The same program also summarized the series as running from 1992 to 1997, and TSN dated the first killing, Osechkin's, to 1996. Podrobnosti quoted a witness statement about one of the shootings dated July 13, 1996, and gave the autumn killings by day and month only.
His death. Podrobnosti placed it on the day before a hearing set for May 31, 1997; Gazeta.ua placed it on May 31, after the trial had opened. Gazeta.ua said the medication had been prescribed to him. No finding that the overdose was deliberate has been made public.
Who did what. No account divides the killings between the two men. Investigators said both took part together, and that witnesses mostly saw Kondratenko.
1967: Volodymyr Vasyliovych Kondratenko is born in Kyiv.
Summer 1991, as Podrobnosti dates it: an anonymous caller reports a shooting to the Solomianskyi district police; the dead man is Yevhen Osechkin, 44.
June 21: S. L. is detained during a watch on commuter routes and released after his alibi is confirmed.
About two weeks later: Dr. Oleksandr Yehorov is shot dead; another man is found dead nearby within the hour.
About two weeks after that: Oleksandr Shpak is killed; his partner tells police one of two men he argued with was called Volodymyr.
September 4: an unidentified man is found shot dead in Kyiv.
September 23: Oleksandr Bykov is killed in Kyiv; Kondratenko serves as an attesting witness at the police examination.
September 28: Petro Hromov is shot dead and his car taken.
Afterward: police recognize Kondratenko in case photographs; he and Volkovich are detained in Kyiv after a road accident in a stolen car.
In custody: Kondratenko describes eight killings, then more than twenty.
1997: Kyiv police and prosecutors regard the case as solved.
May 1997: the case reaches court; Kondratenko dies in custody of an overdose of medication, on or about May 31, before any verdict.
August 2000: Volkovich is sentenced to life imprisonment.
June 2, 2003: Podrobnosti broadcasts Kostiantyn Stohnii's reconstruction of the case.
2013 and 2024: TSN and Kyiv.Yes revisit the case.