Vladislav Volkovich, written Vladyslav Volkovych in Ukrainian, and Volodymyr Kondratenko were the two men Ukrainian police and prosecutors held responsible for a run of killings in Kyiv in the first years of Ukrainian independence. Investigators proved at least 16 deaths against the pair, according to Ukrainian press accounts, and the district investigator who questioned Kondratenko said he spoke of more than twenty. Long before anyone knew there were two men, the Kyiv papers had a name for the unknown gunman: the night serial killer.
Only Volkovich was sentenced. Kondratenko died in custody in May 1997, just as the case was due to come to court, and he was never tried. His part in the killings therefore rests on what investigators attributed to him and on what he and his partner told them. Volkovich, who after Kondratenko's death tried to lay every killing on the dead man, was sentenced to life imprisonment in August 2000, Gazeta.ua reported.
Kondratenko was born in Kyiv in 1967, according to a 2003 reconstruction of the case by Kostiantyn Stohnii for Podrobnosti, the news service of the Inter television channel. Volkovich's date and place of birth have not been reported. Neither man had steady work at the time of the killings, Podrobnosti reported. Kyiv.Yes, a city outlet that returned to the case in 2024, wrote that both came from troubled families and were out of work.
What joined them, by their own later accounts, was an ambition. Gazeta.ua wrote that the two admitted they had planned to become hired killers, and Kyiv.Yes described their victims as practice for that career. In another version recorded by Podrobnosti, the pair said they had formed an armed group to destroy what both of them called the dregs of society. By most accounts, their victims were mostly ordinary men: workers, a doctor, men living alone, drivers.
Podrobnosti dated the start of the case to the summer of 1991, when an anonymous caller rang the police in Kyiv's Solomianskyi district to report a shooting. He described the gunman as a dark-haired man of thirty to thirty-five, of medium height and dressed in dark clothes. The number he called from could not be traced.
The man who had died was Yevhen Osechkin, 44, from Vyshneve, a town about eight kilometers from Kyiv. He worked at the Kyiv motorcycle plant, had collected his pay that day and was waiting for a commuter train home. He had been shot. At first he carried no documents, and naming him took time. His colleagues described him as a single, reserved man who stayed out of quarrels; detectives looked at a theory that a former workmate was involved and judged it unlikely. His wallet still held money, so robbery did not seem to explain the killing either. Cartridge cases recovered by investigators would become the first thread tying this death to others.
Going back through unsolved files, detectives found a similar earlier killing in the same area. Both had happened between five and eight in the evening, and police began watching commuter trains and bus routes at those hours. On June 21, the third day of that search, officers detained a 30-year-old man, S. L., who had two earlier convictions and partly matched the caller's description. His relatives and the records of a hospital trauma ward showed he had been under treatment for a leg injury when Osechkin died. He was released, and the watch went on.
Two weeks later Oleksandr Yehorov, a well-known Kyiv doctor, was shot dead in Kyiv. The cartridge cases matched the earlier ones. From that point investigators began to think they were looking for one offender. Witnesses had noticed an unfamiliar man in the area, and soon afterward another man was killed the same way not far off. The witnesses' descriptions matched the composite sketch already drawn up in the first case.
Two weeks after that, Oleksandr Shpak was killed. Earlier that night he had argued with two young men at a gathering, and his partner later remembered that one of them had been called Volodymyr; the description she gave matched the sketch.
The detail puzzled the investigators. A gunman who left almost nothing behind had now let several people see his face, which did not fit their picture of a careful professional. They kept going, and specialist detectives worked through the records of men with earlier convictions.
On September 4 another man was found shot dead in Kyiv. The cartridge cases were again of the same type. Podrobnosti reported that no relatives or acquaintances of the dead man could be traced.
By then the investigators were certain the deaths were linked, but they still had no motive. Oleksandr Mysiurenko, a prosecutor on the case, told Podrobnosti that knowing a motive lets investigators work out roughly who could have committed a crime, and that without one the task was far harder.
An analytical report by the Kyiv city criminal investigation department summed up what was known. Between 1991 and 1996, it said, a series of killings had been committed in Kyiv. The victims were men aged 35 to 45, most of them living alone. Two men were wanted, both apparently between 30 and 35, and one of them was called Volodymyr. Kyiv.Yes wrote in 2024 that the victims seemed to have been chosen at random, which is why police were slow to see the deaths as one series.
The newspapers had seen it. Podrobnosti recalled headlines that frightened readers, among them "Night Serial Killer" and "The sixth episode is over. Who is next?" After the September 4 killing, Podrobnosti reported, the killer seemed to sense danger and went quiet for almost three weeks.
On September 28 Petro Hromov, a man aged between 35 and 40, was shot dead. His car, a Zhiguli, was taken, but it had been damaged and the killers soon left it behind. A private taxi driver who knew Hromov and a woman living nearby gave statements about the shots and about a car leaving in a hurry.
Detectives took the composite sketch around the neighborhood. A resident recognized the man in it as someone she had seen living in the next building, and police put that building under watch.
Podrobnosti's reconstruction then turns to the death of Oleksandr Bykov, killed in Kyiv on September 23 at about eight in the evening. He was not shot; he was stabbed and beaten to death.
When police examined the scene, the law required civilian attesting witnesses to be present, and one of the two who took part was a family friend: Volodymyr Kondratenko. Investigators later said he had been in a relationship with Bykov's wife. In the days after the killing he drove her around the city's hospitals and morgues, and he told investigators he had agreed to act as a witness because he wanted to help the widow find her husband's killer.
Three days after the killing a man matching the sketch was seen near the building under watch. Officers chose not to arrest him, hoping he would lead them to an accomplice. He gave them the slip in a market and did not come back.
The break came from the paperwork. Going through photographs from the Bykov investigation, detectives recognized the man who had served as an attesting witness. It was Kondratenko. Not long afterward the officers watching the building saw him arrive there with a second man, later identified as Vladislav Volkovich.
The two men had taken a VAZ-2102 car from its owner in an armed robbery, Podrobnosti reported. Traffic police recorded the car traveling at 80 kilometers an hour. Kondratenko, who was drunk and at the wheel, failed to brake at an intersection, struck a woman and drove on. Investigators worked out the direction in which he had fled, and with the help of operational units of Ukraine's Interior Ministry he was caught and identified. Whether the woman survived has not been reported. Kondratenko later said she was the only one of his victims he regretted.
Kondratenko first spoke to police about eight killings. Later, questioned by Oleksandr Pykul, the senior investigator at the Solomianskyi district prosecutor's office, he described more than twenty, Pykul told Podrobnosti. Volkovich, Podrobnosti reported, expressed no sense of guilt; on the contrary, he regarded himself as a kind of superman.
According to the investigators, the pair began with men they did not know, whom they treated as practice. Then they turned on people they knew, and finally on private drivers. Investigators explained that in the attacks on drivers it was usually Kondratenko whom witnesses saw, which is why so many of the descriptions pointed to a single man with the same face. Both men, the investigators said, took part in the killings together.
Over the course of the series, Podrobnosti reported, the two also took seven cars from their victims and committed several thefts from shops and apartments. Kyiv.Yes wrote in 2024 that investigators had proved at least 16 killings and that the two men confessed to at least 20.
By 1997 the Kyiv police and prosecutors regarded the case as solved. The court hearing was set for May 31, Podrobnosti reported, and on the day before it Kondratenko died in the intensive care unit of an emergency hospital from an overdose of medication. Gazeta.ua wrote that the trial began in May 1997 and that a few days later, on May 31, Kondratenko died in custody from an overdose of medication that had been prescribed to him. The two accounts differ on whether the trial had already opened and on the exact day. Neither describes the outcome of any inquiry into his death.
Because he died before any verdict, Kondratenko was never convicted. The killings attributed to him remain allegations made by investigators and prosecutors, supported by his own confessions and by the evidence against Volkovich.
After his partner's death, Volkovich changed his position and tried to blame all of the killings on Kondratenko. It did not work, Gazeta.ua reported. In August 2000 he was sentenced to life imprisonment. The court, the counts on which he was convicted and which of the killings the court found Volkovich had committed himself have not been reported. No appeal is described.
Podrobnosti's 2003 program placed the case third among Ukrainian serial killings by the cruelty of the crimes and the number of victims, behind those of Andrei Chikatilo and Anatoly Onoprienko. A 2013 list by TSN, the news service of the 1+1 channel, ranked Volkovich and Kondratenko sixth among the country's killers and credited them with 16 killings together. Gazeta.ua included them in a retrospective of killers of the independence years, and Kyiv.Yes in a 2024 survey of the city's criminal history, which said the pair had kept the capital in fear for five years.
The number of victims. Investigators proved at least 16 killings, according to Gazeta.ua, TSN and Kyiv.Yes. Kondratenko spoke of more than twenty, according to the investigator who questioned him, and Kyiv.Yes wrote that the men confessed to at least 20. Podrobnosti put the total at about 20. The killings beyond those proved were never tried.
The years. Podrobnosti dated the first call to the police to the summer of 1991, and the Kyiv police analytical report covered 1991 to 1996, as did Gazeta.ua and Kyiv.Yes. The same Podrobnosti program also summed up the series as running from 1992 to 1997, and TSN wrote in 2013 that the killings began with Osechkin's death in 1996. The Podrobnosti narrative gives the September killings by day and month without a year, so their place in the sequence is not fixed.
Kondratenko's death. Podrobnosti said he died the day before a hearing set for May 31, 1997; Gazeta.ua said the trial had begun and that he died on May 31. Both describe an overdose of medication; neither reports a finding on whether it was deliberate.
Who did what. Kondratenko was never tried, and no account divides the killings between the two men. Investigators said both took part in the killings together.
1967: Volodymyr Kondratenko is born in Kyiv.
Summer 1991 (as Podrobnosti dates it): an anonymous call to police in Kyiv's Solomianskyi district reports a shooting; the dead man is identified as Yevhen Osechkin, 44, of Vyshneve.
June 21: on the third day of a watch on commuter routes, police detain S. L., who is cleared by an alibi and released.
Two weeks later: Kyiv doctor Oleksandr Yehorov is shot dead; another man is killed nearby soon afterward.
Two weeks after that: Oleksandr Shpak is killed after a birthday gathering; his partner describes a man called Volodymyr.
1991 to 1996: the period covered by the Kyiv criminal investigation department's analytical report on the series.
September 4: a man is found shot dead in Kyiv; he is not identified.
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.
Later: detectives recognize Kondratenko in photographs from the Bykov case and see him with Volkovich; Kondratenko is caught after hitting a woman with a stolen car.
1997: police and prosecutors regard the case as solved.
May 1997: the case comes to court; Kondratenko dies in custody of a medication overdose on or about May 31.
August 2000: Volkovich is sentenced to life imprisonment.
June 2, 2003: Podrobnosti broadcasts and publishes Kostiantyn Stohnii's reconstruction of the case.
2013 and 2024: TSN and Kyiv.Yes revisit the case in surveys of Ukrainian and Kyiv crime.