According to police, a 23-year-old Lutsk resident driving a Mazda 6 mounted the pavement and hit a pedestrian. A test at the narcology clinic showed 1.21 promille of alcohol in his blood. The car was taken to an impound lot and the driver was detained. Volyn police spokesperson Olha Buzuluk said the detention was made after the incident, which occurred the previous evening.
“Law enforcement officers detained the driver who struck a pedestrian in Lutsk the previous evening”
Death on the Pavement
Stanislav Lynyk, head of the Lutsk ambulance dispatch, said the victim was taken to the city clinical hospital. He died in the morning. Police did not name the deceased. According to Suspilne Lutsk's own sources, he was Bishop Oleh Vedmedenko of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, and it was in that capacity that his name appeared in reports.
Oleh Vedmedenko was born on 18 September 1961 in Lutsk. In 1997, at the Holy Trinity Cathedral, he founded the Bible School of Spiritual Perfection, where he taught and which became a notable part of religious life in Volyn. He began in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate; in 2006, after a conflict with that structure, he was ordained a priest of the UAOC. In 2012 he was consecrated a bishop, and from 2013 he headed the Volyn and Galician Eparchy. In 2015–2019 he was the primate of the Ukrainian Independent Autocephalous Orthodox Church (this spelling also appears in sources). Vedmedenko was rector of the Church of the Resurrection of Christ in Lutsk, a member of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine, and an author of books.
A Driver with a Past
As Ukrainian publications reported, the detained driver, 23-year-old Roman Savych from the village of Zhydychyn, had previously been convicted. The case concerned an attack with a gas canister on Lutsk municipal guards in the summer of 2020: under Part 2 of Article 350 of the Criminal Code, the court sentenced him to three years of restricted freedom. The Volyn Court of Appeal upheld this sentence on 19 October 2021. According to media reports, the punishment was not being enforced. Linking the previous case to the current incident is possible only as a biographical fact: guilt in the accident has not yet been established by a court, and all accusations are presented with reference to the investigation and publications.
Roman Khomych, the lawyer for the deceased's family, and Vedmedenko's relatives were at the side of the victim and his family during those hours. Oleh Vedmedenko's son, priest Vasyl, was by then his father's successor at the parish, and his second son, Pavlo, served in the church.
The Charge and the Next Step
Proceedings were opened under Part 3 of Article 286-1 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. This provision concerns violation of traffic safety rules by a driver in a state of intoxication, if it resulted in the death of a person. The sanction provides for five to ten years of imprisonment. The detention was processed under Article 208 of the Criminal Procedure Code, which allows a suspect to be detained without a court order if he is caught at the scene of the crime or immediately after it.
On 16 November, the Lutsk City and District Court, having considered the investigation's motion, Judge Alla Paliushko ordered the driver to be held in custody for 60 days without the right to post bail, until 12 January 2022.
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