Anatoliy Matios, the 47-year-old chief military prosecutor, described himself as a “highly controversial figure” in an interview with the Kyiv Post on May 18.
Matios has been working in the General Prosecutor’s Office and Security Service of Ukraine since the late 1990s. He was appointed chief of the 650-member military prosecutors’ office by President Petro Poroshenko in 2014.
The same year, he got married to agrarian millionaire Iryna Barakh from Kherson. “I have the luxury to be independent as I was lucky enough to marry a very successful businesswoman,” Matios said, flashing a luxury watch. His declarations show he has multiple land plots and apartments, luxury watches and millions in cash and bank accounts.
Matios is known for his eccentricity and his taste for harsh remarks. In the past, he refused to answer the journalists’ questions about his family’s wealth.
During an hour-long interview, he said that Russia’s war has radicalized society, now full of Donbas war veterans and smuggled weapons.
“There are more than 350,000 servicemen and law enforcers in Ukraine, half of them have post-war trauma stress disorder. The government doesn’t control and treat them properly,” Matios said.
A special justice system for the military is needed, Matios said. A Military Justice Bureau needs to be created to track, protect and even try soldiers for crimes.
Matios also claimed he has a plan on how to end Russia’s war in the Donbas, which has killed more than 10,300 people since its start in 2014.
“Ukraine must be ready to pay the highest price to win the long-lasting war — lives of patriots,” Matios said. “Every citizen must be prepared to sacrifice his or her life for every inch of the territory.”
Matios said he is not calling for all-out war, but said: “Sometimes, using patriotism and self-sacrifice, a commander can achieve better results at war than by the best modern weapon.
Matios said that nobody wants to listen to his plan on how to end the war in Ukraine.
Uncontrolled country
But society isn’t ready to sacrifice their lives for Ukraine, Matios said. People have no trust in Ukraine’s state and only rule of law can help to win the war. “Sometimes I have a feeling that the first one who’ll lynch somebody will become the national hero and a presidential candidate,” Matios said.
The Ukrainian justice system has discredited itself, with no corrupt high-profile officials being convicted since the EuroMaidan Revolution that drove President Viktor Yanukovych from power in 2014.
“Oh, this cosmic Ukrainian corruption has already become a meme,” Matios responded. “By concentrating on corruption, we here in Kyiv forget that many people are still fighting at war in the middle of Europe.”
Matios called himself and his agency the most effective law enforcers. Government spoiled their reputation by taking away powers and giving them to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine and the non-existent State Investigations Bureau.
“We were labeled as the representatives of the old system that must be destroyed,” Matios said. “While the NABU is presented as 500 Spartans who will save Ukraine.”
Furthermore, the Ukrainian parliament is to blame for the people’s distrust, he added, for adopting laws that thwart investigations and allow suspects to escape justice.
His office
The division for military prosecutor was established in 1992 and demolished in 2012 by the Yanukovych government. But it was revived in August 2014, four months after the start of Russia’s war.
Military prosecutors were supposed to investigate corruption in law enforcement and military, as well as war crimes. Since its reincarnation, however, Matios’ division has been forced to deny allegations of abuse of powers and corruption.
In June 2016, NABU searched a house of Matios’ deputy, Konstyantyn Kulik, and filed a notice of suspicion in an unlawful enrichment case of more than Hr 2 million ($80,000). Kulik was suspended, but then the court of appeals reinstated him. Moreover, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko took the case from NABU in an attempt, anti-graft activists allege, to bury the case.
Although Kulik’s case is still in court, Kulik in April 2017 was transferred to the international cooperation department of the General Prosecutor’s Office. Matios denounced his former deputy as “a man of poor morality” in an interview with TSN in 2017.
In the same year, Matios classified the wealth declarations of his military prosecutors, citing security concerns.
In one of the division’s most famous cases, in May 2017 military prosecutors conducted the arrest of 26 tax service officials, in relation to the criminal case suspecting Yanukovych-era Tax and Revenue Minister Oleksandr Klymenko, now in exile, in laundering $12 billion.
Tax officials, suspected of managing money laundering centers all over Ukraine, were delivered to Kyiv on military helicopters. However, many were released by court due to lack of evidence. Matios blamed the bureaucratic court system that forces prosecutors to collect unnecessary papers.
In 2016, Matios was one of the main candidates to head the new State Investigations Bureau. But since prosecutor Roman Truba was appointed instead of him, Matios has been publicly criticizing the new bureau for taking powers from his office and blocking their investigations. The State Investigations Bureau was supposed to take over all the investigative functions. However, as of 2018, only three top managers hired through the competition, but no staff or office.
“The Rada ruled that 100 non-existent civilians, detectives of the new investigations bureau must monitor the actions of 350,000 armed servicemen. Absurd,” Matios said.
Military justice
Regular courts shouldn’t convict soldiers, Matios said. There must be military police with special powers, military investigators and state-funded defense lawyers for soldiers.
A military court must be the final authority. “Instead we have regular judge being discredited, attacked by different activists, being reformed by the state, to convict a hero of war,” Matios said. “What will a judge rule if this soldier approaches and threatens to find them after the court?”
Donbas war veterans return to conduct their own version of justice, Matios added.
The discussion about the need in Military Justice Bureau with legal powers started due to increasing number of crimes involving veterans and to get control of weapons smuggled from the war zone, Olena Tregub, a Transparency International watchdog organization activist and Atlantic Council fellow, told the Kyiv Post on May 23.
“To convict a soldier, the judge must know the relations and traditions in his brigade, be aware of all of his commanders’ orders and understand the specific character of military regulations and much more,” she added.
