A Ukrainian court of appeal has prohibited any further attempts to identify the senior government officials alleged to be behind online journalist Georgiy Gongadze’s murder in 2000. The charge was lowered from “commissioned murder” to “murder on verbal orders”. This means that sanctions will apply only to the person who gave the orders and the person who committed the murder.  The person alleged to have given the order was the then interior minister Yuri Kravchenko, who died in mysterious circumstances in 2005.