“Fair Deal”: Do Plea Agreements Really Work in High-Level Corruption Cases?

The plea agreement in the case of Serhii Pashynskyi is still generating debate, and each new wave of discussion raises more questions about this type of verdict. Let us try to address some of them.

On September 23, 2026, the High Anti-Corruption Court approved a plea agreement with Serhii Pashynskyi, former acting head of the Presidential Administration, in the case concerning the misappropriation of seized “Kurchenko’s oil products.” The verdict shows that Pashynskyi fully admitted his guilt of abuse of office and participation in a criminal organization and agreed to provide incriminating testimony. The total amount he must pay to the state or direct to the Defense Forces is about UAH 1.1 billion. 

Public reaction to the first report of the agreement was nearly unanimous: “He bought his way out.” Nor is this the first time a plea-agreement verdict has drawn such a response.

In recent years, plea-agreement verdicts in high-level corruption cases have become more frequent. According to the HACC, from 2019 through the end of the first half of 2026, the court delivered a total of 201 verdicts based on plea agreements. During the first four years, these were isolated cases, between one and ten verdicts a year. Later, however, the number rose sharply: 27 in 2023, 38 in 2024, and as many as 72 in 2025. 

The latest jump is not surprising, since it coincided with the first full year in which the law streamlining plea agreements in cases involving corruption and corruption-related offenses was in force. Data for the first half of 2026 (35 verdicts) indicate that the plea-agreement mechanism has settled at a relatively stable level. But does it actually work?

How plea agreements are concluded in Ukraine

First, a reminder: a plea agreement is a compromise under criminal law. The state agrees to a more lenient punishment, and in return the accused admits guilt and assumes a number of obligations: to expose accomplices, compensate damages, and accept the agreed punishment. In other words, a plea agreement is about convicting a person and finding them guilty. 

The terms of the agreement are set by the parties: the prosecutor and the accused with defense counsel. The agreement is approved by the court (in high-level corruption cases, the HACC), which does so by delivering a guilty verdict. A person who has entered into a plea agreement is therefore convicted, not “released from liability.”

On receiving the indictment together with the agreement, the court examines whether the agreement’s terms comply with the law and the public interest and whether they violate the rights of others. The court cannot rewrite the agreement or redistribute the payments it provides for. It may only approve the document or refuse to approve it, giving reasons why it contradicts the law. 

Refusals to approve agreements concluded at the pre-trial investigation stage are rare. As of mid-September, the HACC reports only four cases in which an agreement was not approved and the case was returned for pre-trial investigation. In the “Kurchenko’s oil products” case, for instance, the court had previously refused to approve the agreement with Serhii Pashynskyi, finding that it provided for punishments not permitted by law, did not ensure full compensation of damages, and shifted its performance onto an undefined circle of third parties. 

From the start, plea agreements in corruption cases have drawn reservations. The main one is the risk that an agreement would become a way to “cut a deal” with the organizers of schemes who bear the greatest responsibility for the crimes committed. For this reason, the law restricted the categories of persons and the grounds for plea agreements. The new law on plea agreements, adopted in October 2024, broadened these grounds: an agreement can now be concluded if the person exposes another individual’s commission of any corruption or corruption-related crime, and also if the person compensates damages and exposes other persons involved.

At the same time, the law significantly sweetened the “carrot” for the accused. It introduced Article 69-2 of the Criminal Code, which allows a sentence below the minimum set by the sanction where the person exposes others. If the court imposes such a sentence, the person can no longer be released from serving it on probation. 

The maximum term of imprisonment at which a plea agreement may still provide for release on probation was raised from five to eight years. It also became possible to impose an additional fine even where the sanction of the relevant article does not provide for one. The procedure changed as well. Agreements must now be cleared by higher-level prosecutors, depending on the gravity of the offense. A plea agreement with the same person may be resubmitted to the court only once, and only after the grounds on which the court previously refused it have been eliminated. This is exactly what we saw with the second plea agreement concerning Serhii Pashynskyi.

But are these changes enough to ensure truly high-quality agreements, and how have they worked so far? 

On the one hand, for the first time there have been verdicts imposing sentences below the statutory minimum under Article 69-2 of the Criminal Code. In at least three such cases, the convicted persons are serving actual, albeit shorter, prison terms: former Chairman of the Supreme Court Vsevolod Kniaziev, former prosecutor of the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine Volodymyr Derhunov, and former Ministry of Defense official Oleksii Stasiuk. The additional fine under Article 53(3) of the Criminal Code is being applied, though not consistently, as is special confiscation. 

The exposure mechanism is also producing results. According to the SAPO, 15 people have already been convicted on the basis of testimony from convicted persons who agreed to cooperate, and in most proceedings in which such testimony has been or will be given, trials are still ongoing.

As for special confiscation, the law still does not expressly require this instrument to be applied when plea agreements are concluded, although we recommended such an amendment. In our view, this is a gap that must be closed: where there are grounds for special confiscation, the court should approve an agreement only if it provides for it. This would guarantee that the state receives the property obtained through the crime.

This position is supported and expanded upon by the authors of an analysis of 2024–2025 case law prepared by the Centre of Policy and Legal Reform together with the NACP. They specifically note that asset freezes on land plots, vehicles, and funds were often lifted precisely because the agreement did not include a confiscation requirement. In other words, property the state had already frozen was returned to the convicted persons because of how the agreement was worded.

That said, the court’s refusal to approve the agreement with former MP Kachnyi in his illicit enrichment case is telling. The agreement provided for special confiscation of an apartment, a house, and land formally owned by the husband of the late nominal owner. Although the husband had acted under a power of attorney when the apartment was purchased, inherited the property free of charge, and expressly confirmed in court that he was only its nominal owner, the court refused approval. The reason given was that the third party’s awareness of the illegal origin of the funds had allegedly not been proven. In our opinion, these circumstances left no grounds for such doubts.

The main problems with current plea agreements

Despite all their benefits, plea agreements are not always well received by the public, because the state does not always explain such verdicts well. Below are what we see as the main reasons for this.

The first reason is classified verdicts.

The texts of some plea-agreement verdicts, including those concerning Pashynskyi, former Head of the Western Commercial Court of Appeal Plotnitskyi, and others, are fully classified. As a result, the public communications of the court and SAPO make it impossible to learn what exactly the state received in exchange for a lighter sentence. And since these cases very often involve well-known individuals, public outrage at such secrecy becomes a predictable reaction.

One of the earliest and still most notorious cases of a classified verdict is the agreement with former Minister of Ecology Mykola Zlochevskyi, who tried to have the criminal proceedings against him closed by offering a $5 million “super bribe” to the heads of the NABU and the SAPO. Under the plea agreement concluded in August 2023, the HACC fined Zlochevskyi UAH 68,000. In addition, under the terms of the agreement, he donated UAH 660 million to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. That was all. And because the verdict was fully classified, the public never learned whether the “public interest” requirement had been met or whether the state had truly benefited from the deal.

In fact, this agreement became one of the main reasons the need to update legislation on such verdicts was raised at all. Since then, we at TI Ukraine have consistently stressed the need to publish the maximum permissible amount of information about each agreement, so that Ukrainians would not be left asking such questions.

Full classification often fails even in its immediate purpose of concealing cooperation with the investigation. If the law requires the convicted person to testify against accomplices, they will learn about the agreement anyway from the very fact that the proceedings have been separated. 

It is worth recalling that the HACC already knows how to redact individual parts of a verdict without classifying the entire text. For example, in the case of the head of the Agency for Local Roads of Poltava Region, the court kept the public-interest reasoning and other parts of the verdict public. The plea-agreement verdict in the Pashynskyi case was also initially classified, which we immediately flagged as a very bad precedent. The HACC responded promptly to our criticism and published a partially redacted verdict, which made the details of the agreement clear.

The second reason is the lack of clear rules for concluding agreements. 

In its response to our information request, the SAPO confirmed that it has no separate internal methodology for assessing whether an agreement can be concluded. At the same time, its Development Strategy for 2026–2028 provides for developing unified approaches, and the prosecutor’s office plans to involve judges, lawyers, and civil society organizations in this work. 

The HACC also informed us that it had not conducted any review of its case law on plea agreements. Nevertheless, a discussion is already under way on striking a balance between the effectiveness of criminal justice, the inevitability of liability, the fairness of punishment, and public trust in the anti-corruption system. The groundwork for developing clear policies on concluding agreements has also been laid.

The Pashynskyi agreement illustrates this process well. SAPO’s announcement listed the amounts of fines and compensation but did not explain why these terms were advantageous to the state. The necessary explanation appeared only once the verdict was published. It showed that, under the agreement, the prosecutor obtained testimony regarding other participants and that the overall number of defendants in the case had decreased, which offers a chance to try the case against the remaining defendants before the limitation period expires. 

However, this information came out almost a week after the news of the agreement, when the public had already spent several days discussing, and expressing outrage over, the “billion for freedom.”

The fact that the compensation paid to the budget (UAH 600 million) is smaller than the established damage (UAH 817 million) also turned out not to be accidental. The Pashynskyi case concerns a criminal organization rather than a single defendant, and the damage was caused by the actions of seven people, not one. The parties therefore agreed to partially release Pashynskyi from civil liability, taking into account the obligations of other persons convicted under plea agreements (UAH 111 million in compensation and UAH 40 million to the Armed Forces) as well as his own UAH 500 million for the army’s needs. Taken together, the compensation paid to the budget by all convicted persons in this case does not yet reach the established damage. Whether future verdicts against the remaining defendants will cover it is a question for SAPO.

The third reason is public expectations, and the public wants just punishment. 

Last year, a TI Ukraine sociological survey showed that 60% of Ukrainians consider the number of corrupt officials actually punished to be the most telling indicator of an effective fight against corruption, and that such punishment should involve imprisonment or confiscation. 

Agreements built on fines and charitable contributions do not meet this expectation. That is why SAPO must explain them with particular care, and the rules under which prosecutors agree to conclude plea agreements must be clear before the next high-profile case emerges.

Is the money clean?

In nearly half of the plea-agreement verdicts we analyzed, concluded between July 1, 2025, and June 30, 2026, the accused undertook to make a charitable contribution to the needs of the Armed Forces. This practice emerged after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, that is, even before the updated law on plea agreements in high-level corruption cases was adopted. Today, however, it can be considered almost mandatory for this type of verdict.

Charitable contributions range from UAH 10,000 to UAH 20 million. According to the HACC, more than UAH 321 million was directed to the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in 2025 alone. According to SAPO’s latest data, plea agreements in high-level corruption cases have already channeled more than UAH 1.6 billion to the needs of the Defense Forces. Of this, more than UAH 1.1 billion came through the state fundraising platform United24, more than UAH 272 million through the Come Back Alive foundation, and more than UAH 50 million through the Sternenko Community foundation.

The Serhii Pashynskyi agreement set one of the records for the amounts involved: UAH 600 million in compensation to the state budget, paid in installments over 2.5 years; UAH 400 million, or weapons worth that amount, to the Come Back Alive foundation within six months of the verdict’s announcement; UAH 100 million to the Sternenko Community foundation for weapons within 30 days; and a UAH 850,000 fine as the principal punishment, plus a UAH 17,000 fine and a one-year ban on holding public office as additional punishments.

Three questions arise around this money, and in fact they apply to all the amounts set out in other plea-agreement verdicts.

Has inflation “eaten” the compensation? 

One of the most common arguments made by critics of the Pashynskyi agreement is that damage caused in 2014 is being compensated today at a nominal amount that has lost much of its value over twelve years. In other words, UAH 600 million in 2026 is nowhere near the money Ukraine lost in 2014 through the machinations of the former acting head of the Presidential Administration. 

The argument has merit, but it is aimed not at plea agreements as an institution but at how the state protects its property interests in criminal proceedings generally.

On the whole, the law does not leave the state defenseless against inflation. Under Article 625(2) of the Civil Code, a debtor who has defaulted on a monetary obligation must, at the creditor’s request, pay the debt adjusted for inflation plus 3% per annum. Back in 2018, the Grand Chamber of the Supreme Court held that this rule applies to all types of monetary obligations regardless of how they arose, which means it should also extend to damage caused in criminal cases. In addition, Article 1192 of the Civil Code provides that losses from the loss of property are calculated according to its actual value at the time the case is heard. 

In a case concerning misappropriated oil products, such as Pashynskyi’s, this may be of practical importance, since it involves property whose price changed with the market rather than a fixed sum of money. However, recovering this difference would most likely have required a separate expert examination, which would also have taken time and might not have produced any result.

Claims for inflation losses can also be brought in criminal proceedings by filing a civil claim, and case law contains such examples. In a misappropriation case (Article 191(4) of the Criminal Code), the Kamianets-Podilskyi City District Court recovered inflation losses and 3% per annum from the accused. However, because the limitation period for civil claims was applied at the defendant’s request, interest could be recovered only for the last three years. As a result, instead of the more than UAH 419,000 in inflation losses claimed, the state was to receive approximately UAH 30,000. 

There is also such a case at the HACC. In the case of Oleh Halushko, head of an Armed Forces department, the Ministry of Defense sought to recover almost UAH 8 million in inflation losses on top of UAH 21.5 million in principal damage. However, the court delivered an acquittal and left the claim without consideration. The review of this verdict is still ongoing: in June 2026, the Supreme Court quashed the HACC Appeals Chamber’s ruling upholding the acquittal, so the issue of compensation adjusted for inflation losses may also be reconsidered.

To recover inflation losses, the obligation must be monetary, that is, clearly defined as a specific amount. In criminal cases, this is mostly possible only where funds have been embezzled or misappropriated, not with other types of damage. The Pashynskyi case did not involve the seizure of a specific sum of money; the subject matter was oil products.

Thus, the problem is not that the law prohibits taking inflation into account, but that no mechanism does so automatically. The court cannot index the amount of damage on its own initiative or go beyond the claims submitted. And if the injured state authority, or a prosecutor acting in the interests of the state, has not claimed compensation for inflation losses, those losses will be recovered neither under a guilty verdict in ordinary proceedings nor in proceedings based on a plea agreement. 

In the Pashynskyi case, no civil claim was filed at all. Therefore, a claim for inflation losses could neither be granted by the verdict nor taken into account in the agreement, and the amount of damage was fixed at its nominal 2014 value of UAH 600 million. Moreover, even when such a claim is filed, it is exposed to the limitation period for civil claims, which in cases involving events from a decade ago may reduce it to symbolic amounts.

Hence our recommendation. The issue of inflation losses should be addressed primarily to the prosecution (in this case, SAPO) and to the bodies representing the state as the injured party. A claim for their recovery should become a standard part of civil claims in cases involving the theft of state property, and taking it into account should become one of the criteria by which a prosecutor assesses the amount of compensation in an agreement. 

Separately, it is worth discussing whether the requirement of “full compensation for damages” as a precondition for an agreement covers only the nominal amount of damage or also its real value at the time the agreement is concluded. The law currently gives no direct answer to this question.

Moreover, some of the public’s complaints about the “leniency” of the punishment concern issues that a plea agreement does not resolve. The court did not order confiscation of property in the Pashynskyi case. The SAPO explained that the corresponding additional punishment under Article 255 of the Criminal Code was introduced in June 2020, that is, after the events in the case. The principle prohibiting the retroactive application of a law that worsens a person’s position therefore applies.

2. Why does the money go to foundations rather than to the budget? 

Former Head of the HACC Vira Mykhailenko once explained that it is the prosecution and the defense that agree on where charitable payments should go and in what amount, while the court merely checks whether the agreement complies with the law. Therefore, the question “why these particular foundations?” should be addressed to the parties to the agreement, not to the court. 

But the question should be asked honestly. Are there well-founded concerns about the transparency of the foundations named in the agreement? And if there are none, what difference does it make to the state whether money goes to the budget or to a foundation that procures weapons for the army professionally and accountably? 

In wartime, a large share of the budget goes to defense anyway. A foundation, whether Come Back Alive, Sternenko Community, or any other, may be a faster and more targeted channel in this chain. Moreover, Come Back Alive explicitly states that it does not take a percentage of donations for administrative expenses.

The real risks lie elsewhere. The first is ensuring that the foundation is not connected to the accused or their associates. The second is ensuring that compliance with the condition can be verified. 

Failure to comply with a plea agreement carries separate criminal liability, and the SAPO may ask the HACC to set aside the verdict and hear the case under the general procedure. Notably, in all the time the court has been operating, prosecutors have never filed such a motion. 

According to SAPO, no cases of deliberate non-compliance with agreements have been identified so far, and no convicted person has been held liable for violating the terms of an agreement. Compliance is confirmed by payment documents that are submitted to the court and the prosecutor and added to the case file. In other words, verification of the transfers does exist, but it is carried out solely by SAPO. Beyond that, one can rely on the public reporting of the relevant charitable foundations, which should be open to the general public. If there is demand for reporting specifically on HACC plea-agreement verdicts, it would make sense for the foundations concerned to publish specific information on exactly what the funds from such verdicts were spent on. This would help show which specific needs of the army these donations are meeting.

At the same time, the public reaction to the fact that Pashynskyi must donate to Come Back Alive and Sternenko Community under the agreement has also produced unexpected results. On September 28, the HACC refused to approve a plea agreement with MP Oleksandr Kachnyi in his case concerning illicit enrichment of more than UAH 12.7 million. Kachnyi had admitted guilt and agreed to transfer UAH 3 million to a Come Back Alive project. In her refusal, however, the judge stated that the use of these funds would be beyond the control of the parties and the court, and that the court therefore could not be satisfied that these provisions served the public interest.

3. Whose money is it? 

This is the third and perhaps the most important risk. A formally positive outcome, such as paid compensation or a donation to the army, may be financed with opaque money. The origin of the funds used to fulfill the terms of an agreement should be checked no less thoroughly than, for example, the origin of money posted as bail. 

The SAPO confirmed that, in practice, damages are compensated and charitable contributions are paid not only by the convicted persons themselves but also by third parties; the law does not prohibit this. At the same time, the Criminal Procedure Code does not provide for any separate procedure under which a prosecutor would verify the origin of such funds. The SAPO relies on banks, which, as primary financial monitoring entities, are required to check transactions under anti-money laundering legislation.

However, to be consistent, we must acknowledge something uncomfortable for the critics and recall the special confiscation mechanism. It involves seizing precisely those funds and property whose criminal origin has been expressly established by a court verdict. When it is applied, the state knowingly fills the budget with money obtained through crime. 

From a purely pragmatic standpoint, it is therefore hard to explain why the same logic becomes unacceptable when the funds come not through special confiscation but as compensation for damages or in fulfillment of a charitable condition of an agreement. In the end, the money ends up in the budget or with the army either way, and either way it does not stay with the convicted person. The outrage that “the money did not go to the budget” thus concerns form, not substance. 

Why plea agreements are good after all, and why they need improvement

The main argument in favor of the Pashynskyi agreement lies not in its amount but in the alternative. The events in the case took place in the spring of 2014, yet notices of suspicion were served only in February 2024. The limitation period for abuse of office in this case expires as early as 2028, so the parties explicitly linked the agreement to the fact that it makes it possible to try the case against the other defendants within that period. 

A full trial with several defendants, a large body of evidence, and the defense’s procedural tactics could have lasted for years. Had the limitation period expired in the meantime, the person would have been released from liability altogether, and the state would have received nothing: no verdict and no compensation, not even partial. Despite the European Commission’s requirements, Ukraine’s rules on limitation periods have still not been reformed. In cases investigated decades after the events, a plea agreement is therefore often an alternative not to a harsh sentence but to impunity.

A criminal trial always has a probabilistic outcome. The prosecution considers guilt proven, the defense does not, and the court has the final word. A plea agreement turns probability into certainty: a guilty verdict, the status of a convicted person, real money, and testimony against other participants. A fine is a type of principal punishment under the Criminal Code. It is therefore incorrect to speak of “buying one’s way out” of punishment when the payment is itself a punishment. 

By comparison, another defendant in the Pashynskyi case, Serhii Tyshchenko, received eight years’ imprisonment under a plea agreement and was released from serving the sentence on probation. He transferred UAH 40 million to the Defense Forces and must pay another UAH 110 million to the budget within three years. The “Kurchenko’s oil products” case is not over: there were other suspects, and not all of them entered into plea agreements.

Precisely because plea agreements have become the main way high-level corruption cases are resolved, work on their quality must continue. The HACC should consolidate its approaches to assessing the public interest and make partial redaction of verdicts, rather than full classification, the standard practice wherever full classification is not directly required to protect a person or other proceedings. The SAPO should implement the measures in its Strategy on unified approaches to plea agreements and, in every high-profile case, publicly explain what the state stands to gain. 

Parliament needs to make special confiscation a mandatory condition for approving an agreement where there are legal grounds for it. Wider use of real, albeit shorter, prison terms and additional fines would also improve public perception of such verdicts. 

Finally, the two problems that most fuel outrage over plea agreements lie outside them altogether. These are the unreformed limitation periods, which force prosecutors to negotiate, and the fact that the state does not always use the available mechanisms for recovering inflation losses, so that nominal compensation loses value, whether under a plea agreement or an ordinary verdict. After all, hundreds of millions in damage caused in 2014 are not the same as hundreds of millions in 2026.

Both legislators and practitioners need to address these problems. Until they do, a fair deal remains a better outcome than a case that ends in nothing.