Cassette Scandal

The Cassette Scandal (Ukrainian: Касетний скандал, Russian: Кассетный скандал, also known as Tapegate or Kuchmagate) was a Ukrainian political scandal in November 2000 in which Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma was caught on tape ordering the months-earlier kidnapping of journalist Georgiy Gongadze, whose decapitated corpse had recently been found. The scandal was one of the main political events in Ukraine's post-independence history, dramatically affecting the country's domestic and foreign policy. The scandal, triggering the Ukraine Without Kuchma protests, also began a slow and gradual shift of Ukraine's political and cultural orientation from Russia towards the West, although this only became more pronounced after Euromaidan in 2013-2014. The scandal also damaged Kuchma's political career.

The scandal started on 28 November 2000, in Kyiv, when Ukrainian politician Oleksandr Moroz publicly accused President Kuchma of involvement in the abduction of journalist Georgiy Gongadze and numerous other crimes. Moroz named Kuchma's former bodyguard, Mykola Melnychenko, as the source. He also played selected recordings of the President's secret conversations for journalists, supposedly confirming Kuchma's order to kidnap Gongadze. That and hundreds of other conversations were later published worldwide by Melnychenko.

Journalists nicknamed the case after the compact audio cassette used by Moroz. Melnychenko himself was supposedly using digital equipment, not cassettes, for recording in the president's office.