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.

What is holding the mechanism back?

The auctions are transparent, but selling confiscated assets is still a long and painstaking process. Over the past two years, the SPFU has sold only 17 assets: six in 2024, five in 2025, and six so far this year. Moreover, problems with assets begin as soon as the court rules on confiscation. 

The key obstacle to gaining control over confiscated assets is the large number of freezing orders and encumbrances. For example, while preparing just one asset for privatization, the sanctioned AEROC plant, 14 freezing orders imposed in various criminal proceedings had to be lifted. Lifting them takes considerable time. They may be reviewed by different courts, including within criminal proceedings, which holds up further preparation for sale. Freezes and encumbrances affect 70% of confiscated enterprises, or stakes in them, located in government-controlled territory.

AEROC plant 

One of the main problems at the assessment stage is the lack of access to information. In particular, financial records on assets are often missing after the assets are transferred. This may happen because previous owners concealed, removed, or even destroyed the records. That was the case with AEROC and with the Demurinskyi Mining and Processing Plant. Restoring the records can take up to two or three months, which further slows down the procedure. 

This problem is especially acute for assets located in the temporarily occupied territories. There are currently at least 135 such assets. The exact number cannot be determined because the location of some of them is unknown. In addition, more than a third of confiscated companies, or companies in which a stake has been confiscated, are located near the front line. 

Some confiscated assets also have low investment appeal, which adds to the difficulty. If an enterprise is heavily indebted, tied up in pending litigation, has virtually no assets, or is on the verge of bankruptcy, there may simply be no buyers at auction. 

We previously wrote about a former agricultural enterprise of Russian titanium tycoon Mikhail Shelkov. The state managed to sell it only on the fourth attempt, after its debt burden was reduced and the encumbrances on its property were lifted. Another example is Investment Union Lybid LLC, which owns the Ocean Plaza shopping mall. After the state confiscated a stake in the company, it emerged that the company owed more than USD 200 million to a firm linked to its former owners. As a result, a separate lawsuit had to be filed to confiscate the claim under this debt. 

In some cases, only the legal entity itself remains, with no other assets. According to the SPFU, about 20% of enterprises located in government-controlled territory own no property. This effectively strips such assets of any investment appeal for future sale. They include several former enterprises of Russian oligarchs Yevtushenkov, Deripaska, and Usmanov.

If the first auction for an asset fails, repeat auctions are held at a reduced starting price, as provided by law. Investors can still bid up the price in these auctions. Large or strategic assets also require separate preparation. Selling an entire enterprise or a multi-component property complex takes much longer than selling an apartment or a car.

Finally, there are legal risks. Some investors distrust the confiscation mechanism itself and fear they could later lose the property they acquire. The law provides a safeguard against this: a person who acquires an asset through an electronic privatization auction cannot be deprived of that property. 

As for the sanctioned persons themselves, most of them appeal the HACC’s first-instance decisions, but the vast majority of these decisions are upheld. The exceptions are cases where the confiscated property turns out to belong to third parties unrelated to the sanctioned person. In such cases, the appellate court may partially amend the decision. 

Two auctions for major sanctioned assets are scheduled for this October. One is for the Demurinskyi Mining and Processing Plant, mentioned above. The other is for Motordetal-Konotop, a manufacturer of internal combustion engine parts that belonged to Russian senator Sergei Kalashnikov. The starting prices are UAH 1.82 billion and UAH 415 million, respectively. 

Both auctions will offer asset pools, meaning several related assets (corporate rights and claims) combined in a single lot. The option to pool assets was introduced in May this year. It is expected to make the assets more attractive to investors and simplify pre-sale preparation. The October auctions will therefore test the new model for selling sanctioned assets.

Carthage: how the system worked

At the center of the NABU-SAPO investigation is Serhii Kropyva, Deputy Head of the International Cooperation Department of the Prosecutor General’s Office, known on the released tapes by the alias “the Chancellor.” According to the investigation, he owed this to the patronage of “the Chief” himself. Before his appointment to the PGO in August 2025, Kropyva held senior positions in the Cyber Police for a long time (in particular, he was First Deputy Head of the Department), and later served as an advisor to the Prosecutor General and as Deputy Head of the Odesa Regional Military Administration for digitalization. 

According to the investigation, while holding a senior position at the PGO, Kropyva effectively took personal control over the management of criminal proceedings against fraudulent call centers (in particular, under Article 255 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, creation of a criminal organization, and Article 209 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, legalization (laundering) of criminally obtained property).

The scheme allegedly worked in two directions: 

• “covering” and clearing out the market, where call centers under their control were guaranteed immunity in exchange for bribes, while investigative actions and mass searches were carried out against their competitors to “stir things up”; 
• laundering of over UAH 89.9 million in criminally obtained property through overseeing networks of individual entrepreneurs, purchasing real estate (including in Bukovel), cryptocurrency transactions, acquiring luxury items, and registering assets in the names of front persons and close associates. 

The released materials from covert investigative actions revealed a new trend: the individuals in the case systematically studied the HACC’s case law on civil forfeiture, prepared potential witnesses for questioning at NABU, and used their knowledge of procedural nuances to counteract the anti-corruption agencies. 

It was precisely the positions held by the individuals in the case and their understanding of the process that made this investigation an extremely difficult task for NABU detectives. Pavlo Demchuk, Senior Legal Advisor at TI Ukraine, put it this way: 

“Such complex investigations into senior law enforcement officials only demonstrate that the Anti-Corruption Bureau and the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office are truly capable and independent. Documenting other law enforcement officers is a task of the highest difficulty, if only because they understand the methods and tools used by other employees of the prosecution service or the NABU. Given that international partners support anti-corruption reforms, such investigations only show that this support makes sense.”

From an “illusion of calm” to a resignation letter: how the SAPO tapes changed the Prosecutor General’s stance

The reaction of PGO head Ruslan Kravchenko to NABU’s first procedural actions was pointedly calm. He assured that his office was open, that the safe in the photo released by NABU did not belong to him, and that rumors of his escape were fabricated.

“I understand that many would like me to go into hiding, end up in the hospital, or something else. I’ll disappoint my fans. Yesterday I was at my workplace, today I’m working as usual and doing a bit of exercise,” Kravchenko insisted.

He made this statement even as the media was reporting that “the Chief” was none other than Kravchenko. Andrii Borovyk, Executive Director of TI Ukraine, pointed out that in such a situation, the head of an agency cannot remain in office as if nothing had happened. 

“It seems that the Prosecutor General could not have been unaware of this. From the standpoint of reputation and what is best for the country, the most logical thing would be for him to resign.”

And on September 6, during the HACC hearing on the preventive measure for Serhii Kropyva, SAPO prosecutor Mykola Karas dispelled any doubts about who was hiding behind the alias. He read out conversations between Kropyva and Kravchenko in which the former calls the latter “chief.”

“Hello. Yeah, Andreevich, yeah, chief. No, everything’s fine. No, nobody’s giving me a hard time. Who’d dare cross me? You’ve got my back, everyone knows it,” the prosecutor quoted Kropyva as saying.

When these materials were heard in court, the situation changed dramatically, and the clouds, as they say, gathered over the Prosecutor General. The very next day, according to sources of Ukrainska Pravda, after a late-night conversation with President Volodymyr Zelenskyi, Kravchenko submitted his resignation letter, calling it a “political decision.”

Escalation and counterattack: Kravchenko signs a notice of suspicion for Kryvonos and abruptly leaves the country 

On the morning of September 14, despite his announced resignation, Kravchenko made a loud statement: he said he had signed a notice of suspicion for NABU Director Semion Kryvonos, as well as for a person “close to the head of SAPO” Oleksandr Klymenko. In his video address, he also said that his resignation was not an admission of guilt, the result of any deal, or a refusal to fight for his reputation. 

“Operation Carthage was aimed not only at me. Its real goal was to gain access to the materials of criminal proceedings concerning the heads and employees of the NABU and the SAPO. And after that, to remove the Prosecutor General and stop procedural decisions from being made in these cases,” Kravchenko said.

In the same address, he publicly accused Kryvonos of forging official documents to obtain an unlawful benefit and of a “fictitious adoption of a child” to artificially create grounds for evading liability in court. 

Meanwhile, alongside this media attack, an equally telling storyline was unfolding: immediately after these statements were published, it emerged that Kravchenko had left the country. Ukrainska Pravda was the first to report the details: at 2:30 a.m. on September 14, Kravchenko crossed the border in an official car. The official later stated that he was on a business trip abroad to inform international partners about “the real state of affairs in the system of anti-corruption agencies.”

The reaction of the public, the country’s leadership, and the anti-corruption sector only underscored the nature of this demarche. Volodymyr Zelenskyi publicly called on the Verkhovna Rada to immediately support Kravchenko’s dismissal, and the Presidential Office described his actions as unsanctioned freelancing. 

The NABU stated that no notice of suspicion had been officially served on Kryvonos. At a briefing on the situation, Klymenko said that none of the relatives he knew of had received notices of suspicion either, and that Kravchenko’s actions were a continuation of a systemic attack on the independent anti-corruption agencies, which began in earnest with last year’s attempts to subordinate NABU and SAPO to the Prosecutor General’s Office. Incidentally, the heads of the anti-corruption agencies had repeatedly warned about a planned attack on them, including at their press conferences. 

Transparency International Ukraine is convinced that these notices of suspicion are not the outcome of a lengthy investigation but a purely political and performative move designed for media effect. First, the proceedings concerning Kryvonos were entered into the Unified Register of Pre-Trial Investigations back on April 25, 2014, meaning they concern events from 12 years ago that lay dormant and relate to a period long before he became head of NABU. Second, the official proceedings concerning the “person close to Klymenko” relate to fraud and obstruction of the activities of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, not to “influencing HACC judges,” as Kravchenko publicly claimed. Finally, the very method of “serving” the notices, by sending them by mail to NABU’s address instead of delivering them in person, points to an effort to create public noise rather than achieve a procedural result.

All these actions clearly showed that when the law enforcement system operates on the principle of political appointments, its leaders, at a moment of crisis-level exposure, resort not to legal defense but to unprecedented institutional retaliation.

No integrity filter: how a man barred from the NABU and the SAPO came to head the Prosecutor General’s Office

What makes this story especially telling is not the scandal itself but how Kravchenko, before becoming Prosecutor General, tried to get into the anti-corruption agencies. In 2021, he took part in the competition for SAPO prosecutors, and in 2023, he sought the post of NABU Director. In both cases, Kravchenko was eliminated due to the selection commissions’ doubts about his integrity. 

In other words, a person whose candidacy was twice rejected in independent competitive selections became head of the Prosecutor General’s Office within a few years, without any competitive selection, through a purely political procedure. Almost immediately after his appointment, Kravchenko became one of the chief lobbyists of the law that effectively subordinated to him the very agencies he had once been denied the chance to lead. 

On July 22, 2025, the Verkhovna Rada backed Draft Law No. 12414, which aimed to eliminate the independence of the NABU and the SAPO. Publicly defending these changes, Kravchenko assured: “We will be one family.” Only mass protests and pressure from international partners forced the authorities to reverse these provisions. 

“A year ago, they wanted to effectively subordinate the SAPO and the NABU to Ruslan Kravchenko, the Prosecutor General. He held that post then, and he holds it now. But a year later, the NABU and the SAPO, which he failed to subordinate, came to him,” says Andrii Borovyk. “Formally, they came to his subordinates. But, figuratively speaking, they came to his home, in quotation marks, of course.”

The question that remains open: who should decide who leads the prosecution service?

Kravchenko’s career in itself calls into question Ukraine’s established mechanism for appointing the Prosecutor General, where the decision is effectively made by the President and the Verkhovna Rada merely rubber-stamps it. It was precisely this logic that allowed a person twice screened out by the NABU and SAPO selection commissions to obtain a leadership position in the prosecution system without any competitive integrity filter at all, simply through a political decision.

And under the current government, such appointments have now failed for the third time in a row. Before Kravchenko, the post was held by Andrii Kostin, who was also appointed by the President and eventually resigned following a scandal over fake disability status obtained by regional prosecutors. Before him, the post was held by Iryna Venediktova, remembered for effectively “burying” NABU’s crucial investigation into Deputy Head of the Presidential Office Oleh Tatarov. And, as if by habit, both of Kravchenko’s predecessors, like him, had at one point failed a competitive selection: Kostin for the head of SAPO, and Venediktova in the competition for Supreme Court judges. Likewise, none of these Prosecutors General served the maximum six-year term.

Notably, the idea of replacing this political appointment with a transparent competition is not an abstract theory but an already formulated legislative proposal. Back in June 2026, long before Carthage, Draft Law No. 15343 was registered in the Verkhovna Rada. It proposes introducing an open competition for the post of Prosecutor General through the High Council of Justice with the involvement of international experts, as well as a procedure for a vote of no confidence in the Prosecutor General. The authors of the document directly named the problem that this whole story illustrates: “The Prosecutor General’s Office becomes politically dependent on whoever is in power,” precisely because the Prosecutor General is currently appointed by the President with the consent of the Verkhovna Rada rather than by an independent selection commission. 

It is worth noting that introducing competitions for prosecutors of the PGO and regional prosecutor’s offices is also one of the conditions for Ukraine to receive EUR 550 million from the EU under the Ukraine Facility. And the European Commission reminded of this once again after Kravchenko’s scandalous statements.

In other words, these warnings were voiced long before Kropyva and Kravchenko, and each time they came true in almost the same scenario: a political appointment, then a loss of trust, then a loud scandal and resignation. 

The systemic lesson of Carthage: from reputational fires to institutional change

Reducing the Carthage case to luxury watches, mansions, or the personal greed of individual officials means ignoring its main challenge. The scale of this scheme and the scandal that followed became possible not only because of the particular brazenness of the individuals in the case but also because of the architecture of the prosecution system itself. When appointments to key positions are made behind closed doors rather than through a transparent competition, officials answer not to the law but to their personal “chief.”

The NABU-SAPO operation proved the capacity of the anti-corruption infrastructure, but this victory is fragile. Changing specific names in PGO offices will not stop new “Chancellors” from emerging if the principle by which people get these positions remains unchanged.

The only way out of this cycle is to depoliticize the post of Prosecutor General, close systemic loopholes, and hold accountable those who abuse their position. 

 

This material is funded by Norway. Its content is the sole responsibility of Transparency International Ukraine and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Norwegian Government.

Where these positive numbers come from

To my mind, the most telling thing is not the impression the figures themselves make, but what lies behind them. From the very start, hundreds of cases flowed into the HACC, and for years the backlog of pending cases grew relentlessly — from 149 in 2019 to 327 in 2025. This not only reflected the court’s rising workload; it also gave the HACC’s opponents grounds to question whether it should exist at all. 

But as the court built up experience and worked on its own mistakes, the picture began to shift. In 2025, the HACC heard a record 114 criminal cases, and in the first half of 2026 the number of cases heard (72) exceeded, for the first time, the number of new ones filed (71). The years-long accumulation of pending proceedings finally halted — and even edged down, from 327 to 322 cases. 

As for verdicts, in the first half of 2026 alone the HACC handed down 65: 82 persons were convicted and 8 acquitted. Given that the court delivered 109 verdicts in all of 2025, the current figures again point to a marked rise in its output. It also applied special confiscation to 10 persons, confiscating almost UAH 71.8 million in the process.

Over seven years, the HACC has handed down 431 verdicts concerning 601 persons: 398 convictions and 33 acquittals, with 211 of the convictions based on agreements. Those convicted include judges, prosecutors, heads of state enterprises, members of the government, and former and sitting members of parliament. Custodial sentences have gone, among others, to sitting MP Anatolii Hunko, former Prosecutor General’s Office official Dmytro Sus, former MP Ruslan Solvar, and Orest Furdychko, former director of the Institute of Agroecology of the NAAS.

A separate result of the HACC’s work is the civil forfeiture of unjustified assets: property worth almost UAH 230 million in total has been seized from 48 officials. 

These figures capture only part of the picture. To see the fuller one, it matters how many convictions have entered into legal force, how many of those convicted are actually behind bars, and how many of them are senior officials. It is just as important to distinguish between the fines, confiscations, and compensation for damage to the state that have been imposed and those that have actually been enforced. The corresponding measure of the Rule of Law Roadmap was due to be implemented by the end of 2026.

Voluntary payments under agreements — contributions for the needs of the Armed Forces, in particular — serve a public good, but they are not a punishment, and they are hard to classify as the recovery of resources the state has lost. Even so, they show how the tools of criminal justice are being used to help replenish the budget.

So where did this positive change come from? There are several explanations.

First, single-judge proceedings — introduced in law back in 2024 — have proven their effectiveness in practice: the share of cases heard by a single judge has risen from 22% to 29% of all proceedings before the HACC. 

The difference in time is striking. Single-judge cases wrap up in about 11 months on average, whereas panel proceedings drag on for nearly 3 years and 9 months. In some instances a single judge proved faster still: the case of Viktoriia Poltavchenko, acting director of one of the state enterprises of an NAAS institute, took the court just 5 months. Even the longer proceedings in this format stay within relatively moderate bounds — the case of Anatolii Khmilkivskyi, a member of the Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi District Council in Odesa Region, took exactly one year.

Another factor likely to reinforce this momentum is the court’s long-awaited new personnel. The two judges appointed through the second HACC competition are already presiding over a number of high-profile proceedings, which has noticeably eased the court’s load. And since the President of Ukraine has by now appointed a further 17 winners of the competition to judgeships at the HACC and its Appeals Chamber, the scale of the reinforcement will grow further still. The appointment of another 5 judges, meanwhile, remains in limbo.

It is also worth looking at the make-up of verdicts over the past 12 months — from July 1, 2025, to June 30, 2026. In that time, the number of verdicts based on agreements rose to 72, up from 58 in the previous 12 months, although their share of all convictions slipped slightly, from 66% to 62%.

For the first time, too, there have been cases where a person convicted under an agreement still serves an actual, if shorter, sentence. Under one of the highest-profile agreements of the past year, former Chairman of the Supreme Court Vsevolod Kniaziev was nonetheless sentenced to 4 years behind bars. The approach to transparency is changing as well: in the case of Oleksii Basan, head of the Agency of Local Roads of Poltava Region, the court sealed only part of the information from public access rather than the entire verdict, as had usually been the practice. This is still an exception rather than the norm, but the very fact that the approach is being used matters. 

That said, a rising number of agreements does not in itself prove they are effective. In top-level corruption cases, their value lies not only in a faster verdict but also in incriminating testimony against other participants and the organizers of schemes. Such information cannot always be made public right away, so as not to harm the ongoing investigation. But in due course it should be assessed whether that testimony led to new verdicts. For now, SAPO’s policy on concluding agreements and its criteria for “public interest” are not always clear, and some verdicts are sealed in full. So the SAPO and the HACC need not only to use this tool but also to explain its purpose and results to the public convincingly.

The numbers explain why the public views such agreements warily. Almost half of the accused undertook to transfer between UAH 10,000 and UAH 20 million for the needs of the Armed Forces, yet defendants received actual — if reduced — prison terms in only three cases. Nor did the parties agree on large fines as an additional punishment. According to a TI Ukraine survey, 60% of Ukrainians consider actual punishment — imprisonment or the confiscation of property — the main criterion of an effective fight against corruption.

It is important to understand the nature of the progress described here. It is not that the HACC has “learned” to work more effectively under unchanged conditions; rather, it shows that the tools adopted earlier by the legislature — often imperfectly drafted, riddled with gaps and ambiguities — have finally begun to yield measurable results in practice. 

Single-judge proceedings, for one — unquestionably a step forward — still lack a consistent approach to when the accused may demand that a panel of judges hear the case after all. And unjustified exceptions that bar single-judge hearings for certain categories of officials (for instance, cases involving MPs’ false asset declarations) narrow the mechanism’s potential. Yet even in this half-built form, single-judge proceedings work — and, as we can see, to tangible effect.

Why the upward trend in the HACC’s efficiency is still fragile

The reason is that the external problems — the ones whose solution depends above all on parliament — have gone unaddressed for years. Which means the progress achieved could be lost at any moment.

Take the ineffective regulation of limitation periods, which we have consistently documented since 2023: it has not merely gone unresolved but has grown worse. A lengthy trial in a top-level corruption case does not, in itself, interrupt the running of the limitation period, so proceedings can end not in a finding of guilt but in the person’s release once the time set by law has elapsed. Interrupting the period would mean that, after an event defined by law, the count starts anew rather than resuming from the point where it was suspended. Over the past year, the number of people released from liability because those periods expired rose from 13 to 22, and those released from punishment from one to nine.

The lion’s share of these closures fall under Articles 364 and 368 of the Criminal Code — among the very articles used to classify top-level corruption. On this ground, those released from liability include former Minister of Agrarian Policy Mykola Prysiazhniuk, suspected of securing an unlawful win for private firms in Agrarian Fund tenders worth more than UAH 521 million, and all four defendants at once in the case of corruption at the Odesa Port, with damages exceeding UAH 21 million. The specific problems that led to these limitation periods expiring — and the handling of such cases more broadly — can be followed on our HACC Decided platform.

Pressure on the court and attempts to reassess its institutional capacity — like what unfolded around the Vlasenko-Buzhanskyi Temporary Investigative Commission — add no stability either. We studied the commission’s report and concluded that the document rests on selective analysis and contains a good many illogical and manipulative conclusions. 

The HACC’s effectiveness cannot be reduced to the ratio between the cost of running it and the money recovered for the budget. The court’s core task is independent and fair justice in top-level corruption cases, and its public value is measured also by the inevitability of punishment and by trust in its rulings.

At the same time, the public has every right to know the financial side of the HACC’s work too: how much the state spends to run it, and what volume of confiscations, fines, and compensation has not only been imposed but actually enforced. The absence of consolidated data does not make this a manipulative question — it points to the need for a separate analysis.

The commission’s own chair, Serhii Vlasenko, publicly alleged pressure and political persecution by the NABU, the SAPO, and the HACC even before the commission had finished its work — which alone casts doubt on the impartiality of its final conclusions. Episodes like this divert the court’s resources and attention from its core job.

One more point worth stating plainly again: the HACC is a body of justice, not part of an investigator-prosecutor tandem. That means the court’s task is not to produce results together with the NABU and the SAPO, but first and foremost to test the quality of their work impartially. And that is precisely why, among other things, the court must acquit defendants where the prosecution has failed to prove its case. 

Let me also recall that the NABU and the SAPO are only one side of the process, alongside defense attorneys and the accused. The fact that detectives and prosecutors are pursuing ever more high-profile investigations of senior officials raises the stakes for the court, but it does not make the HACC an “extension” of the investigation. On the contrary, the prominence of these investigations underscores just how critically important the Anti-Corruption Court’s institutional independence is. 

And although most high-profile proceedings — such as the Midas and Dynasty cases — are still at the investigation stage, the HACC has already shown its consistency and impartiality in choosing preventive measures for the defendants in them. The case against Yuliia Tymoshenko, by contrast, moved from pretrial investigation to trial fairly quickly. In preparing for the hearing, the defense deployed the argument that no judge could be impartial toward the politician given her long-standing rhetoric. For now, the case is at the preparatory hearing stage.

What it will take to turn a hint of positive change into a trend

Without legislative change, the positive trend will remain fragile. It could swing unpredictably from case to case and from period to period, depending on which proceedings happen to reach their conclusion in a given year.

To consolidate the trend, parliament needs to:

1. Adopt amendments to Article 49 of the Criminal Code that genuinely interrupt — rather than merely suspend — the running of limitation periods in top-level corruption cases.
2. Give the court effective tools against the abuse of procedural rights — in particular, the power to impose monetary penalties on defense attorneys.
3. Abolish the automatic closure of cases over the formal expiry of pretrial investigation time limits.
4. Remove the ambiguity around the point of transition to panel proceedings and scrap the unjustified exceptions to single-judge proceedings.

For years we have watched the people’s elected representatives fail to pass these changes — even though they have been raised time and again at various levels. Perhaps one reason has been that more and more MPs are themselves becoming defendants in corruption cases. Perhaps it lies in the stagnation of the Rada’s own work in the eighth year of this convocation. But these and other arguments can no longer stand as excuses for not making the changes that are needed. 

New challenges have emerged, too — tied not only to the size of bail in top-level corruption cases but also to the origin of the funds that third parties and companies post on suspects’ behalf. A telling example is the bail for former minister Herman Halushchenko, which the court reduced from UAH 200 million to UAH 150 million. According to the investigation, this money was collected and laundered through dozens of enterprises and more than a hundred financial transactions, after which four companies transferred it to a dedicated HACC account. Among those the investigation suspects of organizing the scheme is Iryna Mudra, former Deputy Head of the Office of the President. Mudra herself, meanwhile, had bail set at UAH 20 million.

These cases raise a broader question: who should verify that bail money is of lawful origin, and at what stage — and should the court react if the money comes from companies with a questionable financial history? The same goes for the compensation, restitution, and payments to the Armed Forces made under agreements: is the origin of these funds, and of the payers themselves, ever checked? The relevant legislative initiatives have already been registered in the Verkhovna Rada, but their consideration remains in limbo. We will describe the possible mechanisms for such checks, and the specifics of concluding plea agreements in top-level corruption cases, in separate materials.

How transparent and well-reasoned bail decisions are will determine trust in preventive measures in top-level corruption cases. The effectiveness of agreements, by contrast, should be judged by other criteria: the fairness of the punishment, the value of the incriminating testimony, the recovery of lost resources for the state, and a result the public can understand.

Since returning from recess, MPs have not taken up a single anti-corruption initiative. They even struck from the agenda the draft Anti-Corruption Strategy for 2026–2030 — and the timely adoption of that document, by the end of September, is tied not only to a coherent fight against corruption but also to Ukraine’s financial support under the Ukraine Facility Plan. This matters for the HACC as well: without a coherent state anti-corruption policy, the legislative amendments the court needs will keep being passed piecemeal or postponed.

As long as parliament keeps putting off the decisions that are needed, the progress the HACC has achieved will remain fragile.

1. NABU and SAPO are among the most independent law enforcement bodies there are — impervious to pressure even from the highest offices of the state. Even when it comes to the Office of the President.

On the tapes, Mudra and Mykytas say plainly that walking into the anti-corruption agencies with the kind of offers or pressure that pass for “business as usual” in Ukrainian politics is a waste of effort. The people caught in these conversations openly acknowledge the autonomy of the NABU and the SAPO, all but stating outright that Bankova Street — the seat of the President’s Office — is no longer an umbrella that can guarantee immunity or quietly bury a case. This is the best proof that, over years of reform, the NABU and the SAPO have managed to build a durable immunity to instructions from outside.

For society and for international partners, this is an important marker of the anti-corruption institutions’ genuine independence. When an investigation reaches officials of the rank of a deputy head of the Office of the President, it shows that there are no “untouchables,” whatever their post or their proximity to the rooms where decisions are made. In this instance, institutional independence outran private political arrangements. And it likewise showed that last year’s protests in defense of NABU’s and SAPO’s independence were not in vain.

2. Today’s senior officials do not shrink from taking part in schemes alongside people already suspected or accused of corruption.

Take Mykytas: the Forrest Gump case brings his fifth notice of suspicion. Despite a toxic background, a trail of criminal proceedings, and life spent permanently in law enforcement’s sights, such figures remain sought-after partners for those currently in power — because they know how to “sort things out” and have no shortage of the right contacts. This points to a deep deformation of power, one in which well-worn schemes and ready-made connections are prized above any reputational risk.

Bringing such people in underscores how narrow the circle is of those willing to run dubious operations at the very top. Senior officials, in all likelihood, knowingly join forces with those whose reputations are already compromised, in the hope that status and the levers of influence they hold can offset their partners’ toxicity. Yet each new notice of suspicion only multiplies the systemic failures of that cooperation.

3. Many of the powerful, for all their assurances to international partners, still want to establish controlling influence over the anti-corruption bodies.

Public declarations of devotion to reform and to meeting the demands of European integration regularly shatter against behind-the-scenes attempts to bring key institutions to heel. For many in government, the independence of NABU and SAPO remains a convenient slogan meant for external consumption only, while inside the system the search for “loopholes” and levers of influence never stops. The urge to control how leadership is appointed, how investigations unfold, or how audits are conducted has gone nowhere — nor have designs on assembling one’s own “personnel reserve” for these institutions.

This double standard poses a constant threat to the country’s entire anti-corruption architecture. Attempts to install loyal people, or to curb the procedural independence of prosecutors and detectives, expose the heart of the matter: those in power still treat a controllable law enforcement as an element of their own security. That is precisely why safeguarding these bodies’ independence remains a daily challenge, not a task already accomplished.

4. A senior official’s sound decisions and good deeds do not earn them an indulgence.

For all Iryna Mudra’s work in setting up the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, her part in the scheme to raise bail for Halushchenko and in the corporate raiding of state enterprises will not be forgotten. For a long time, Mudra was regarded as a key driver of the international reparations mechanisms, yet the suspicion has dealt a serious blow to her reputation. Political reality makes the point: no past merits, no lofty affairs of state, can serve as a “shield” or an advance credit to justify unlawful acts.

The wartime and diplomatic context only raise the bar society sets for officials’ ethics. She will enter Ukrainian history and the public record not through her appearances on international stages, but through her banal participation in shadow schemes to launder funds and unlawfully redistribute assets. It is a sobering lesson for everyone in the corridors of power: public achievements do not paper over hidden, allegedly corrupt acts, and society will not hand out indulgences for past accomplishments.

5. We do not know how deep corruption runs or how far it has spread, but it is becoming ever harder to conceal. And the conditions are now in place for those guilty in such schemes to be punished.

Since last November, after the first notices of suspicion in the Midas case, we have seen a further string of high-profile investigations, and their range — like the range of people drawn into them — keeps widening. But we can already see the momentum of these cases, and the very fact that this work is being done speaks less to how widespread corruption is than to the strong likelihood that it will be exposed, and that those named will stand trial. 

The steady stream of new notices of suspicion lays bare the real depth of the problem, but at the same time it establishes a fundamentally new level of transparency. The systematic work of the anti-corruption institutions is gradually changing the risk arithmetic for would-be corrupt actors: the cost of exposure is coming to outweigh any potential shadow profit. When law enforcement works without regard for high office, the sheer inevitability of disclosure ought to become the most powerful tool for preventing likely new crimes. And it is already working: as we recall, officials at the Ministry of Justice never did agree to cooperate with the organized criminal group led by Mykytas and Mudra.

6. Nationalizing a Russian asset does not mean it will work well for Ukraine.

This is a lesson not yet learned and not yet fully worked through, but the warning flags are already up. For it was precisely after the Russian Alfa-Bank was nationalized and turned into the state-owned Sense Bank that the conditions emerged for interested parties to install the people they needed on its board and to push the operations they wanted through the bank. Nationalizing enemy property under patriotic slogans effectively opened the way to creating a new shadow resource under the roof of state institutions. Swapping the nominal owner from a Russian oligarch to the Ukrainian state did not change the substance: the bank came under threat of turning into a captive instrument for scheming.

This episode throws light on one of the gravest systemic dangers in the process of stripping Russian property out of the Ukrainian economy: without independent management, seized assets become a tempting morsel for operators on the inside. Handing property into state ownership without transparent public oversight and independent management only breeds the temptation to use these resources to legalize dirty money or serve private interests. Confiscating an asset from the enemy is only a quarter of the job; the main thing is to keep it from being plundered or commandeered once it is inside the country.

Timur Mindich (“Karlsson”) and Oleksandr Tsukerman (“Sugarman”)

Timur Mindich and Oleksandr Tsukerman

According to investigators, the two jointly and in coordination ran the organization — setting the rules of secrecy (a ban on using surnames, communication through messaging apps, code names) and distributing funds among the participants. Both left the country before the notices of suspicion were served and have been put on the wanted list.

The HACC issued the following rulings on them:

• December 1, 2025 — detention in absentia for Mindich;
• November 28, 2025 — detention in absentia for Tsukerman.

Ihor Myroniuk (“Rocket”)

Ihor Myroniuk. Photo: Suspilne News/Oleksii Arunian

The conduit for funds from the energy sector to the “office”: according to investigators, the main cash sums passed through him from Fursenko (Tsukerman’s trusted associate) to “Karlsson.” Investigators describe both him and Basov as people who controlled the money flows rather than merely carrying out orders.

After the initial measure, the HACC’s rulings on Myroniuk changed as follows:

• November 12, 2025 — detention with UAH 126 million bail;
• March 5, 2026 — bail reduced to UAH 100 million;
• March 31, 2026 — the HACC Appeals Chamber raised bail back to UAH 126 million;
• April 29, 2026 — bail reduced to UAH 112 million;
• June 23, 2026 — bail reduced to UAH 85 million.

Myroniuk’s bail has still not been posted, so he remains in custody to this day.

Dmytro Basov (“Tenor”)

Dmytro Basov. Photo: RBC-Ukraine

Through his post as Energoatom’s executive director for physical protection and security, Basov handled both the laundering of funds and the cover function — he was the one responsible for detecting and neutralizing “threats” from oversight bodies. Basov is the second suspect (along with Myroniuk) with operational control over the flows, not merely an executor.

After his measure was set, events unfolded as follows:

• November 12, 2025 — a HACC investigating judge ordered Basov detained with UAH 40 million bail;
• November 26, 2025 — bail posted in full;
• July 10, 2026 — a new suspicion for laundering funds within the “Barrier” scheme.

Ihor Fursenko (“Rioshyk”)

Ihor Fursenko. Photo: Suspilne News/Polina Palamarchuk

Tsukerman’s trusted associate in the “back office”: he arranged the day-to-day needs of the “office” and personally took part in laundering funds.

For Fursenko:

• November 12, 2025 — measure set: detention with UAH 95 million bail;
• November 24, 2025 — bail posted.

Lesia Ustymenko and Liudmyla Zorina

Lesia Ustymenko and Liudmyla Zorina

The organization’s bookkeeping in the “back office” was divided by function: according to the case file, Ustymenko was assigned to keep the accounts, notably in a file code-named “Manhattan,” while Zorina handled the records of front companies and documents.

For both suspects:

• November 12–13, 2025 — the HACC set measures: detention with bail of UAH 25 million and UAH 12 million;
• November 13, 2025 — UAH 37 million bail was posted for the two of them.

Oleksii Chernyshov (“Che Guevara”)

Oleksii Chernyshov. Photo: his Facebook profile

The end recipient of part of the laundered money in the energy episode — according to investigators, the funds were passed to him directly or through his wife. Chernyshov is also a separate suspect in the “Dynasty” episode, over his alleged involvement in laundering presumably criminally obtained funds into the estates in Kozyn.

Chernyshov’s path after that suspicion:

• November 18, 2025 — detention with UAH 51.6 million bail;
• November 19, 2025 — bail posted by two private individuals;
• December 1, 2025 — the HACC Appeals Chamber altered the measure, lifting the requirement to surrender his Ukrainian passport;
• May 12, 2026 — a further suspicion, in the episode concerning money laundering in luxury construction;
• July 7, 2026 — the HACC did not extend Chernyshov’s obligation to wear an electronic bracelet.

This was not his first preventive measure, however. Even before Midas, in the summer of 2025, the High Anti-Corruption Court set a measure for Oleksii Chernyshov — then Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of National Unity — in a case involving abuse of official position and receipt of an unlawful benefit. He was set bail of UAH 120 million. Within a few days the bail was posted and the official walked out of the pretrial detention center.

It was after this suspicion that the authorities made their attempt to destroy the independence of the NABU and the SAPO.

Herman Halushchenko (“Professor”)

Herman Halushchenko. Photo: Suspilne News

In the main episode, he appears not as a direct organizer but as the person whose official clout — as energy minister — Basov and Myroniuk used to pressure Energoatom’s counterparties.

Halushchenko’s path was turbulent:

• November 19, 2025 — dismissal from the Ministry of Justice;
• February 15, 2026 — Halushchenko was detained while trying to leave Ukraine, and on February 16 he was served a notice of suspicion;
• February 17, 2026 — detention with UAH 200 million bail;
• April 15, 2026 — his measure was extended;
• June 12, 2026 — bail reduced to UAH 150 million;
• June 29, 2026 — bail posted in full.

Андрій Єрмак 

Andrii Yermak. Photo: Office of the President

He is a suspect not in the main energy episode but separately — in the “Dynasty” episode (laundering funds into the construction of luxury estates). Whether Yermak appears on the Operation Midas tapes is not known for certain.

Yermak’s path after Operation Midas:

• November 28, 2025 — dismissal from the Office of the President;
• May 14, 2026 — detention with UAH 140 million bail;
• May 18, 2026 — bail posted;
• August 10, 2026 — the HACC eased his procedural obligations.

In the “Dynasty” episode, the High Anti-Corruption Court set measures for four more suspects: Hennadii Opalchuk (UAH 10.6 million bail), Serhii Siranchuk (UAH 20 million bail), Liliia Lysenko (UAH 9.9 million bail), and Maryna Medvedieva (UAH 15 million bail).

***

As we can see, the tree of alleged high-level corruption tied to the “Barrier” scheme keeps branching out, as shown by the latest notices of suspicion — notably to Iryna Mudra, Maksym Mykytas, and Viktor Dubovyk.

The details of what the Forrest Gump and Themis suspects did are already being discussed in HACC courtrooms, where preventive measures are being set for the new NABU–SAPO suspects.

Ultimately, these may be far from the last suspicions in these episodes.

The new suspicion: illicit enrichment of UAH 13.9 million 

Stefanishyna’s appointment as Deputy Prime Minister for European Integration in 2020 caused a stir: responsibility for the course toward European standards was handed to someone already suspected in the Lukash corruption case — as she herself confirmed in an interview with European Pravda, adding that she was cooperating with the investigation in every way. Then, on August 5, 2026, it emerged that she had been served with a new notice of suspicion. 

What is the substance of this suspicion?

At the hearing on the preventive measure, the prosecutor explained that it concerns two apartments in the Faina Town residential complex — the purchase and renovation of which were allegedly handled, on Stefanishyna’s instructions, by her friend Tetiana Mazurenko — and the search for, and intended purchase of, a house for her parents worth $200,000–300,000. The intercepted correspondence also revealed that Stefanishyna planned to trade these apartments toward the purchase of the house and pay the remainder in cash — all because she had taken a liking to a more expensive house priced at $550,000.

Also, according to the investigation, the then Deputy Prime Minister failed to declare the rental of an apartment on Yaroslaviv Val Street ($1,300 a month in cash) — in her assistant’s correspondence with the landlord there was mention of “not reporting the apartment income to the tax authorities.” Furthermore, in her declarations for 2024–2025 she did not list a Mercedes purchased in August 2021 for $43,500: her use of it is confirmed, among other things, by surveillance cameras and traffic fines. The prosecutor also noted that the apartment in the Lvivska Ploshcha residential complex, to which Stefanishyna moved from the rented one, was purchased by her mother, and that the suspect’s activity at that address dropped sharply precisely during the period of the hromadske investigation. 

According to the prosecutor, this is only “the smallest part” of the evidence — the investigation has more. 

The hearing on the preventive measure for Stefanishyna. Photo by TI Ukraine

Influence on competitions 

A separate topic at the hearing was Stefanishyna’s alleged influence over personnel competitions for the anti-corruption agencies. This was raised not as a standalone count of the charges, but as an argument supporting one of the risks: the possibility of obstructing the criminal proceedings by other means.

The SAPO prosecutor stated that, through controlled members of the selection panel, Stefanishyna influenced the election of the NACP head, and that her correspondence with the State Secretary of the Ministry of Justice, Oleksandr Bukhanevych, allegedly shows the coordination of “suitable” candidates. She may also have interfered in the competition for the NABU director, promoting the current head of the AMCU, Pavlo Kyrylenko — these quotes are cited by Ukrainska Pravda. Kyrylenko himself, incidentally, is a subject of another NABU case concerning illicit enrichment of more than UAH 72 million; it is already before the HACC at the stage of witness questioning. 

Telling against this backdrop is a quote from Stefanishyna recalled by journalist Danylo Mokryk: on December 6, 2024, from the rostrum of the Verkhovna Rada, she spoke of the need to “move away from competitions for filling positions and integrity assessments by international experts.”

Whether this episode will be formalized as a separate suspicion is not yet clear: a charge of trading in influence requires proof of an unlawful benefit. But it was precisely on these facts that the prosecutor built the argument, in the motion on the preventive measure, about the risk of obstructing the criminal proceedings.

The defense’s position

The defense considers the suspicion unfounded: according to the lawyers, the prosecution artificially lumped together disparate expenses — medical treatment, air tickets, the purchase of apartments — in order to “assemble” the required sum, whereas each episode taken separately contains no elements of a crime. 

The Faina Town apartments, the lawyers say, were bought with her own money by Stefanishyna’s friend, who earns well in senior business positions; the house for her parents was merely a consultation, not a purchase, and the money had been saved up and was to be put down by the parents themselves; the Yaroslaviv Val lease was arranged by an assistant, not by Stefanishyna; and she used the Mercedes too little for it to be subject to declaration.

The defense also pointed to procedural gaps — in particular, bank statements missing from the case file, with only records of their inspection and no attachments in the form of a disc — and called the evidentiary basis weak.

The preventive measure

Justifying the need for a strict preventive measure, the prosecutor named three risks: the possibility of fleeing abroad (given the wide connections acquired during her work in the US), influence on witnesses, and the possibility of otherwise influencing the criminal proceedings. The defense called these risks abstract, and Stefanishyna herself stated that she had deliberately returned from the US in order to cooperate with the investigation, and that she had no funds for bail.

The prosecutor requested bail of UAH 13.312 million; the court set bail at UAH 6 million as a preventive measure, while fully granting the motion regarding her obligations: to appear when summoned, to notify of any change of residence, and not to communicate with the persons specified in the ruling.

Stefanishyna leaves the HACC after the ruling on the preventive measure. Photo by TI Ukraine

What comes next?

This case has now moved into the open — at least two more months of pre-trial investigation lie ahead, and this term may also be extended by the Head of the SAPO and the investigating judge. But for Stefanishyna this is nothing new: she is walking a similar path — suspicion, court, years of waiting — in another case, which has already dragged on for more than ten years. More on that below. 

The Lukash case: alleged abuses dating back to 2014

The Ukrainian European integration on which we work so hard today began back in Yanukovych’s time — it was the derailment of that course that sparked the first Maidan protests. But even before that, Ukraine had already done considerable preparatory work: since 2004, the Program for the Adaptation of Ukraine’s Legislation to EU norms had been in force. 

What the alleged abuses involve 

In the summer and autumn of 2013, the then Justice Minister Olena Lukash, together with colleagues from the ministry and representatives of private firms, organized what the investigation considers to be fictitious procurements of comparative legal research services on the legislation of Ukraine and the EU — services chosen precisely because comparing their actual price and quality is nearly impossible. 

The work was performed and the studies were published. By the investigators’ calculations, the state paid from UAH 1,300 to 4,500 per page, and there were 1,335 pages in all. But the main problem was the quality of the research: in the materials that journalists from Bihus.Info uncovered in 2015, edits such as “Nonsense!”, “What a profound thought!”, “No point made!”, and “Déjà vu!” still remained. One of the documents with the original comments can still be found today.

Olena Lukash, Justice Minister of Ukraine under Yanukovych. Photo: blog.tui.ua

This is precisely what became the basis for investigating the alleged misappropriation of budget funds on an especially large scale. In 2014, the Main Investigation Department of the Prosecutor General’s Office registered criminal proceedings.

Who is involved in the case

Besides Lukash, notices of suspicion were served at various stages of the investigation on:

• Yurii Ivashchenko — Lukash’s deputy, former Chief of Staff of the Ministry

• Serhii Mudryi — former Director of one of the Ministry’s departments

• Olena Biriukova — former Department Director, former Chief Accountant, and former Deputy Chair of the Tender Committee 

• Svitlana Kolyshko — former Head of the Division of the Department of International Law and Cooperation of the Ministry of Justice 

• Olha Stefanishyna — former Head of the ministry’s European Integration Unit

• Oleksii Kalmykov — lawyer who received UAH 930,000 for a 500-page study

• Hanna Sapelnykova — entrepreneur who received UAH 680,000 for 149 pages of material 

• Taisiia Bilotska — former Acting Director of European Legal Group LLC, which received over UAH 900,000 for a 686-page study

• Bohdan Kryvolapov, Andrii Bondar, and Viktoriia Koval.

All of them are charged with misappropriation, embezzlement, or conversion of property through abuse of office (Article 191(5) of the Criminal Code) and forgery in office (Article 366(1) of the Criminal Code). That said, in 2024 the HACC released them from liability for forgery in office — the statute of limitations for that offense had already expired. 

How the suspicions were delayed 

The investigation began in 2014 and proceeded rather sluggishly. Olena Lukash received her first notice of suspicion in 2015, but law enforcement later decided to amend it. As journalists from Glavcom reported, Lutsenko’s Deputy Prosecutor General, Yurii Stoliarchuk, held up its approval. Lutsenko himself was likewise in no hurry to sign, even though the text had been finalized back in 2018. 

Finally, in October 2019, under Prosecutor General Ruslan Riaboshapka, the prosecution announced a change to Lukash’s suspicion and served notices of suspicion on the other individuals involved, including Stefanishyna. After that, the case was handed over to the NABU for a long time, and Lukash even challenged the suspicion before the Pecherskyi District Court. The HACC Appeals Chamber judges later overturned that decision, but in 2026 the HCJ held them disciplinarily liable. That decision raises many questions. The case was referred to the HACC in 2023.

The active phase of the case, in fact, coincided with a notable leap in Stefanishyna’s career: in June 2020, the Verkhovna Rada appointed her Deputy Prime Minister for European Integration. It was in this capacity that she remained when the HACC began hearing the Lukash case. 

It is important here that, under Article 7(1) of the Law of Ukraine on the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, a person with a conviction that has not been expunged or lifted in the manner prescribed by law may not be appointed to the office of a Cabinet member. This, however, did not apply to Stefanishyna — there is no guilty verdict against her, and she may yet prove her innocence. 

Why has the case dragged on for over 10 years?

On September 26, 2023, the first preparatory hearing in the Lukash case took place at the HACC. Transparency International Ukraine noted Lukash’s conduct at the time: at first she refused to give the court her identification details, and then she declined to have the court explain her rights as a defendant. All because she considered her summons to court to be a mistake: in Lukash’s view, she is neither a defendant nor a suspect, and her status is that of “a person present” and “a person who has neither the status of a suspect nor of a defendant.” Moreover, she came without defense counsel, which automatically barred the HACC panel from continuing the hearing — and she went on to “forget” about her lawyer more than once, forcing the court to postpone hearings. 

For these and similar reasons, the case is moving extremely slowly. At nearly every hearing, one of the defense counsel or defendants fails to appear — the reasons for these absences range from illness and vacations to an urgent meeting with the President. The defendant Sapelnykova had been out of contact since March 2022, so in December 2023 the court placed her on the international wanted list and soon afterward authorized special (in absentia) proceedings against her. 

Stefanishyna herself did not always attend the hearings either. On October 31, 2024, she once again failed to appear without a valid reason, for which she received a fine of UAH 3,028 — with this, the court underscored that the law is the same for everyone, regardless of position. However, as early as the hearing on November 20, the HACC granted a motion in which she justified the validity of her earlier absences, and lifted the penalty.

Because of all this, the preparatory stage dragged on for almost seven months — from September 2023 to April 2024. This is not a record (in the DACK case this stage lasted almost two years), but it does point to an inefficient use of court time.

What is happening now

On April 18, 2024, the case was finally assigned for consideration on the merits. But its pace did not change — given the number of defendants and the regular adjournments, a swift ruling should not be expected.

As of August 2026, the trial is at the stage of examining evidence — already more than two years. All because of numerous no-shows by participants in the proceedings: in January–August 2026 alone, the court adjourned around seven hearings due to Lukash’s illness, Stefanishyna’s work commitments, and scheduling conflicts among the defense counsel.

If the guilt of those involved, including Stefanishyna, is proven, they face up to 12 years’ imprisonment, with a ban on holding certain positions for up to 3 years and confiscation of property. The statute of limitations in this case expires in 2029. 

A final note 

The two proceedings in which Olha Stefanishyna features are entirely different. The first concerns the state’s procurement of services and the likely misappropriation of the funds earmarked for them. The second concerns the former ambassador’s alleged neglect of her duty, as a public official, to declare properly, as well as enrichment from sources not provided for by law.

Of course, as long as there are no verdicts, we cannot speak with certainty about whether a person has committed a crime. But we will be following the development of these cases closely. 

Vitalina Harkava, Head of the Public Procurement Sector, Executive Committee of Boiarka City Council 

When the legal department asked her to review every contract with additional agreements signed since 2021, Vitalina knew right away this wouldn’t be easy. The task covered 300–400 contracts. Before the training, she had already used the analytics module for price monitoring and looking up procurement information, but by her own admission, her knowledge of the tool was fairly superficial. The legal department’s request pushed her to look for a new approach. Reviewing several hundred contracts by hand, finding every additional agreement, and analyzing the changes would have taken at least two to three weeks.

The solution came during the training itself. At one of the webinars, Vitalina described her task and asked whether BI Prozorro could handle it. The answer turned out to be surprisingly simple: yes.

“Iryna showed me in literally 10-15 minutes how to do it in BI Prozorro. Honestly, I was amazed. Work I’d mentally set aside two-three weeks for suddenly became so much simpler. All I had left to do was the analysis itself and writing up the results,” she recalls. 

That was the moment Vitalina truly grasped BI Prozorro’s practical value. 

Still, she admits it took some time to get comfortable with the tool. The filters gave her the most trouble — one wrong step and the data she needed would disappear. So she kept going back to the recorded sessions, working through each step again from the start. That’s how she gradually built up an understanding of how the module works.

But the biggest discovery for her wasn’t the time savings — it was the ability to see how other communities operate. That’s exactly what she chose to explore for her homework assignment: what other communities procure, how many contracts they sign, how often they amend them, and which procurements they cancel. 

“I learned a lot about how other communities work and the mistakes they’ve made. That’s useful, because it means I don’t have to repeat the same mistakes in my own work,” Vitalina says. 

Since then, she’s started looking at other communities’ procurement in a new light. She believes, procurement data can reveal more about a community than any report. All it takes is a look at where the money goes to understand its priorities — road repairs, infrastructure development, or other projects.

Vitalina also uses the tool to spot risk in procurement. With Ukraine’s State Audit Service and other oversight bodies conducting regular checks, she says contracting authorities need to work proactively — analyzing their own contracts and flagging anything that might raise questions during a monitoring review.

“We need to check ourselves before an external monitoring review comes to us. We have to see our own risks and fix them ahead of time,” Vitalina says.

Oksana Karakai, Chief Specialist, Accounting and Finance Department, Kamianske City Council

“I wouldn’t even have noticed that.” That thought crosses Oksana Karakai’s mind more often than she’d like when she reviews State Audit Service monitoring reports and reads through auditors’ findings on other contracting authorities’ procurement.

Working at Kamianske City Council, Oksana regularly tracks procurement not just for her own community but for other organizations as well. She’s especially drawn to monitoring reports — which procurements get flagged, what violations auditors find, and what catches their attention when they review documents. After the BI Prozorro training, Oksana started paying much closer attention to these reports. Now she treats many auditors’ findings as pointers for her own work — a chance to catch risks before they become problems. 

“When I see a comment or a question from an auditor, I immediately check whether something similar could happen in our case,” she says.

Just a few months ago, Oksana only had a passing familiarity with BI Prozorro. She first encountered the module at a training session on price analysis, where she only managed to get comfortable with one section — but it was enough to realize the system had far more to offer. That’s what led her to sign up for TI Ukraine’s training. She says the practical exercises helped the most; working through them was how she gradually got a handle on the interface and the logic behind the module.

Oksana felt the practical benefit almost immediately. She needed to put together a list of contracts for the year. In the past, that meant gathering the information by hand, cross-checking it against her own spreadsheets, and making sure nothing had been missed. In BI Prozorro, the task went far faster.

“It took a bit of figuring out at first, but once I understood how it worked, I had a ready-made table right away. It’s incredibly fast — I mean, super fast,” Oksana recalls.

She says the whole task took about twenty minutes. Previously, putting together a sample like that could easily take half a day.

“You had to gather everything, check it, and format it properly. Here, in a few clicks, I got a full summary of every contract for the entire year,” she says.

Oksana believes the ability to work with open data and analytical tools is becoming increasingly important for local governments. However, she’s noticed that not everyone is ready to pick up new tools and change familiar ways of working.

She sums up BI Prozorro’s main advantage simply: it’s a large body of information that’s already organized and gathered in one place. Instead of spending hours hunting for data by hand, you can find it — and analyze it — in the same tool, in a fraction of the time.

Not long ago, she used to search for procurement records on the Prozorro portal herself, scrolling through dozens of pages and losing a lot of time in the process. Today, most of those tasks get done much faster. That’s why Oksana’s advice to anyone just starting out with BI Prozorro is not to be afraid of investing time in learning it — it’s nothing compared to the time it will end up saving.

Nataliia Kostenko, Chief Specialist, Department of Digital Transformation, Information Policy and Transparency, Sheptytskyi City Council

For Nataliia Kostenko, the BI Prozorro training wasn’t an introduction from scratch. She’s worked with BI modules for a long time and regularly uses them to analyze her community’s work. Even so, the training gave her a fresh perspective on what the analytics could do. 

“The main benefit is that we see the whole picture at once,” Nataliia says. 

She explains that an authorized procurement officer typically looks at one procurement or tender at a time. BI Prozorro makes it possible to see procurement across the entire community — from the executive committee down to municipal enterprises. That kind of overview helps not just with analysis, but with spotting risks and making decisions based on them.

When Nataliia showed the BI tools to staff in Sheptytskyi City Council’s land department, their reaction was strikingly emotional. Within minutes, the system generated a data sample that used to take hours to prepare.

“They were amazed that we could pull a complete sample for any given period in a single minute,” Nataliia recalls. 

Since the training, Nataliia has been using the module more actively to analyze the community’s biggest suppliers. It gives her a quick view of which companies work most often with the municipal enterprises and the executive committee. 

“This way we can see the scale of procurement, the scale of company participation in it, and draw our own conclusions,” Nataliia explains.

In her view, the real value of analytical tools lies in helping communities work more transparently, make decisions faster, and use limited staff resources more effectively.

“We used to have to collect a lot of information manually. Now we can see the whole system at a glance and make decisions based on data,” Nataliia says. 

That’s why she’s convinced analytical tools have long stopped being a nice-to-have for communities. Today, they’re one of the key tools of local governance.

The three communities’ stories are different. For one, BI Prozorro became a faster way to work with contracts; for another, a tool for finding risk; for a third, a way to see the whole procurement system at once. But all the training participants agree on one thing: data analysis is no longer a nice extra skill — it’s steadily becoming an essential part of how local governments do their work.

For city council staff or other local government representatives looking to get started with BI Prozorro, we recommend beginning with the video lecture series How to Manage Procurement.

 

This material was made possible with the support of the MATRA program of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ukraine.

What happened: a timeline of events

At the center of events is a criminal proceeding against Olena Lukash, former Minister of Justice of Ukraine, charged with misappropriation of budget funds and official forgery. Here is how the HCJ decision regarding HACC Appeals Chamber judges came about.

2014 — Proceeding entered into the Unified Register of Pre-Trial Investigations; investigation conducted by the Prosecutor General’s Office. 

October 17, 2019 — Deputy Prosecutor General Chumak serves Lukash with a revised notice of suspicion.

October 21, 2019 — Prosecutor General Riaboshapka transfers the investigation to the NABU; the HACC was henceforth to exercise judicial oversight in the case.

March 2020 — Lukash’s defense counsel files a complaint against the notice of suspicion with the Pecherskyi District Court; the SAPO prosecutor requests the Supreme Court transfer the case to the HACC.

October 12, 2020 — The Supreme Court declines: because the notice was not signed by the SAPO prosecutor, the case supposedly falls outside the HACC’s jurisdiction; the investigating judge of the Pecherskyi District Court grants the defense counsel’s complaint and cancels the suspicion.

November 2020 — The Kyiv Court of Appeal leaves the defense counsel’s complaint against the Pecherskyi District Court’s decision without granting it.

January 2021 — The HACC Appeals Chamber, following the SAPO prosecutor’s complaint, cancels the Pecherskyi District Court’s ruling and closes the proceeding on the complaint.

January 22 and 25, 2021 — Olena Lukash files complaints with the HCJ against the actions of the HACC Appeals Chamber judges. In her complaint, she argued that the HACC Appeals Chamber judges had no authority to review the case.

November 2025 — The Third Disciplinary Chamber of the HCJ refuses to hold the HACC Appeals Chamber judges liable.

May 2026 — The HCJ sitting in plenary session sets aside this decision and issues warnings to judges Kaluhina, Semennykov, and Mykhailenko.

The complaint against the disciplinary chamber’s decision was filed by attorney Ivashchenko—Lukash’s defense counsel, who is himself a defendant in the same criminal proceeding. It is also worth noting that the Supreme Court’s October 2020 decision, on which the HCJ relies, was based on a specific criterion—who signed the notice of suspicion—a criterion that does not actually appear in the Criminal Procedure Code’s provisions on HACC jurisdiction.

The “case dumping” scheme through the Pecherskyi District Court

From 2020 onward, subjects of NABU investigations began exploiting investigating judges, predominantly from the Pecherskyi District Court in Kyiv, as a tool to remove their cases from anti-corruption proceedings. 

The scheme is straightforward: a complaint is filed with the Pecherskyi District Court alleging inaction by the Prosecutor General’s Office concerning the Prosecutor General’s failure to review a defense motion within a NABU criminal proceeding—despite the fact that formally such a court lacks authority to review complaints in NABU cases. Yet the complainants argue that because the Prosecutor General’s Office is located within the territorial jurisdiction of the Pecherskyi District Court, that court is authorized to hear such complaints. The court then issues a ruling favorable to the suspect—for example, ordering the transfer of the case to another investigative body or canceling the suspicion. Subsequently, the Prosecutor General’s Office complies with this ruling, and the case is effectively removed from the system.

This is precisely what happened in the Ukrbud case, involving Oleh Tatarov, then Deputy Head of the Presidential Office. There, the Pecherskyi District Court unlawfully ordered the removal of the case from NABU’s investigative authority. The Prosecutor General’s Office complied, and later Office prosecutors blocked all efforts to return the proceeding to the Bureau by withdrawing an appeal filed with the HACC Appeals Chamber. Similar situations arose in the cases of Zlochevskyi, VAB Bank, and the Dubnevych thermal power plant—matters we will discuss further.

The response to this was as follows: SAPO prosecutors, and sometimes PGO prosecutors, filed appellate complaints with the HACC Appeals Chamber. That court repeatedly reviewed and cancelled rulings issued by the Pecherskyi and other district courts, consistently holding: appellate review of any decisions in cases falling within the HACC’s jurisdiction may be conducted exclusively by the HACC’s Appeal Chamber. 

Yet the Supreme Court, in several decisions concerning the Zlochevskyi case in March 2021 and August 2021, as well as in the case of DACK judges from August 2020, held that when a decision was formally issued by a court of general jurisdiction, it must be appealed to the appellate court of general jurisdiction, not the HACC Appeals Chamber. Interestingly, this position conflicted to some degree with other similar situations.

In light of this, the HACC Appeals Chamber was sometimes compelled to dismiss appeals of district court rulings. This occurred in the Zlochevskyi case and in the VAB Bank case.

The problem of jurisdiction over NABU cases in courts of general jurisdiction was so serious that it appeared in the National Anti-Corruption Strategy for 2023–2025 as a separate priority. This means that the state, at the level of a government document, acknowledged that judicial review of NABU cases by other courts represents a systemic problem that must be addressed. The state should therefore adopt specific legislation to prevent such practices. Yet by holding accountable the judges who resisted this practice, the HCJ is moving in the opposite direction.

Against this backdrop, the disciplinary case concerning three HACC Appeals Chamber judges developed—judges whom the High Council of Justice warned in May 2026.

Why HACC Appeals Chamber judges had grounds to act as they did

The January 12, 2021 ruling of the HACC Appeals Chamber in the case of Lukash’s complaint against the notice of suspicion contains detailed and coherent legal reasoning.

The judges proceeded from the premise that Article 33-1 of the Criminal Procedure Code establishes subject-matter jurisdiction of the HACC, which takes priority over territorial jurisdiction. This means: if a criminal proceeding, by its characteristics, falls within the HACC’s jurisdiction, no other court—neither at the trial level nor at the appellate level—may hear it. Jurisdiction is determined by the properties of the proceeding itself, not by which court actually issued a particular decision.

At the time of appellate review, investigative authority in this case had been assigned to the NABU, and the case materials had been transferred to that agency. Thus, the condition set out in Section 20-2 of the Transitional Provisions of Ukraine’s Criminal Procedure Code—that pre-trial investigation is conducted by NABU—was satisfied. Consequently, subject-matter jurisdiction of the HACC applied, meaning that appellate review fell within the competence of the HACC Appeals Chamber.

Regarding the Supreme Court’s October 12, 2020 ruling, which denied the prosecutor’s request to transfer the case from the Pecherskyi District Court to the HACC, the HACC Appeals Chamber judges offered a clear explanation: the Supreme Court was deciding only the question of transfer of the proceeding from one trial court to another—and only within the scope of arguments the prosecutor had raised in the motion. The Supreme Court neither decided nor could have decided the question of appellate jurisdiction for the prosecutor’s later filed appeal.

Beyond this, the HACC Appeals Chamber judges’ position on jurisdiction was neither novel nor isolated—it reflected established practice that had developed both before and after the January 12, 2021 ruling.

The HACC Appeals Chamber had repeatedly reviewed rulings of investigating judges of the Pecherskyi District Court in NABU cases, and the Supreme Court did not challenge this:

• In the VAB Bank case, the HACC Appeals Chamber in July 2020 cancelled a Pecherskyi District Court ruling and closed the proceeding on the complaint. The Cassation Criminal Court within the Supreme Court three times—in September, October, and November 2020—refused to open cassation proceedings on appeals challenging this HACC ruling, finding arguments about unlawful action by the anti-corruption court to be unsubstantiated.
•  In the Dubnevych thermal power plant case, in March 2021, the HACC Appeals Chamber cancelled a Pecherskyi District Court ruling, and the Supreme Court twice—in April and May 2021—refused cassation review, stating that the HACC ruling was not subject to appeal. 

Moreover, judges of the Kyiv Court of Appeal themselves directed appeals from district court decisions to the HACC Appeals Chamber:

• In the case of the former head of the Chernihiv RSA, in December 2020, the Kyiv Court of Appeal independently transferred an appeal to the HACC Appeals Chamber, determining that the anti-corruption court was the proper appellate court in proceedings falling within the HACC’s jurisdiction—regardless of which trial court issued the challenged decision.
• In the Dubnevych thermal power plant case mentioned above, the Kyiv Court of Appeal in March 2021 transferred the case for review by the HACC Appeals Chamber.

Furthermore, in September 2023, the Supreme Court confirmed the lawfulness of the HACC Appeals Chamber’s actions in another instructive episode: the head of the Pecherskyi District Court for more than two years ignored fourteen requests from the HACC Appeals Chamber for case materials relating to an appeal filed in the Zlochevskyi case, claiming that the anti-corruption court supposedly was not the proper appellate court. The HACC Appeals Chamber submitted a separate ruling to the HCJ concerning the head of court’s violation of Criminal Procedure Code requirements. In September 2023, the Supreme Court left the Pecherskyi District Court head’s cassation appeal without granting it, confirming that determining the question of jurisdiction does not fall within the authority of a trial court head and cannot serve as grounds for refusing to comply with lawful requests from an appellate court.

And in December 2024, the Supreme Court itself granted a motion and transferred an appeal from the Kyiv Court of Appeal to the HACC Appeals Chamber, citing a violation of jurisdictional rules.

Thus, the legal position for which the judges received a warning was not a departure from practice but part of it—consistently supported by both the Kyiv Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court itself, albeit with certain exceptions in specific proceedings.

What is wrong with the HCJ decision

In May 2026, the High Council of Justice characterized as “obvious” a violation of what, by July 2021, had already been established as settled practice.

The HACC Appeals Chamber had been reviewing Pecherskyi District Court rulings in NABU cases since 2020—and the Supreme Court did not recognize this as unlawful. Conversely, in refusing to open cassation proceedings, the Supreme Court effectively confirmed the lawfulness of the HACC’s actions. Under such circumstances, the HCJ’s assertion about the “obviousness” of the violation is at best unconvincing.

Moreover, the HCJ overlooked the fact that the Supreme Court in December 2024 did precisely what the judges did in 2021. 

The judges, both in their decision and during HCJ proceedings, consistently explained that the Supreme Court in October 2020 was addressing only the transfer of proceedings from one trial court to another. In our view, that same Supreme Court decision contained rather peculiar reasoning regarding the determination of jurisdiction based on who served the notice of suspicion—conditions for such a criterion do not exist in Ukraine’s Criminal Procedure Code.

The HCJ further contends that two conflicting appellate court decisions arose concerning the same ruling. This does not correspond to what actually occurred. The Kyiv Court of Appeal reviewed a complaint filed by the defense counsel of the suspected person, counsel who presented no substantive arguments about any illegality or lack of evidentiary basis for the ruling in their favor. The court emphasized this point in its decision. By contrast, the HACC Appeals Chamber reviewed a complaint filed by the prosecutor, who sought to set aside the same ruling and close the proceeding for substantive violations. Different appellants, different legal requests, different legal positions on review. The HACC Appeals Chamber did not review the Kyiv Court of Appeal’s decision and raised no challenge to it.

Furthermore, at HCJ proceedings, the HACC Appeals Chamber judges pointed out that the HCJ had already declined to open disciplinary proceedings in instances where a HACC Appeals Chamber judge had suspended execution of a Pecherskyi District Court ruling, and subsequently a panel of judges cancelled the corresponding district court ruling.

Under these circumstances, to speak of intentional violation means to contend that the judges acted unlawfully while possessing genuine legal grounds for their position. We found no basis for such a conclusion.

Conclusions and open questions

Following this analysis, several questions remain.

Will the legislature close this gap? The Criminal Procedure Code’s provisions governing jurisdiction over NABU cases in courts of general jurisdiction still contain no clear answer to a situation where a local court, contrary to law, issues a decision in a NABU case. 

What does this mean for NABU and SAPO cases in practice? The problem arose because, during a period when the SAPO leadership post was vacant, certain of its powers were exercised by the Prosecutor General. Attorneys, disregarding rules of subject-matter jurisdiction, challenged actions or inaction of the Prosecutor General before the Pecherskyi District Court. The judges of that court ruled on such complaints. If the term of the SAPO leadership ends and stable leadership of the specialized prosecution service is not ensured by then, the problems will return.

Why did the HCJ not notice contradictions in its own practice? During HCJ proceedings, the HACC Appeals Chamber judges pointed out that the HCJ had previously declined to open disciplinary cases in similar circumstances. How can the same actions in one case constitute no disciplinary breach, while in another they do? The HCJ decision offers no answer.