Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova has achieved some minor successes in criminal investigations but the biggest fish have escaped prosecutors.
Read the story: Top prosecutor’s priority appears to be image over achievement
Below is a list of major cases:
Defense corruption
There has been some limited progress in investigating the alleged corruption of some allies of ex-President Petro Poroshenko but most escaped charges.
The most significant results have been achieved in the defense corruption cases against Oleh Hladkovsky, a former partner of Poroshenko and ex-deputy secretary of the National Defense and Security Council, and his son Ihor.
Prosecutors sent the case against Ihor Hladkovsky to trial in April and submitted the one against Oleh Hladkovsky to a court in July.
However, in 2020 the High Anti-Corruption Court exempted Vitaly Zhukov, a suspect in the Ihor Hladkovsky case, from responsibility due to the expiry of the statute of limitations at the request of Venediktova’s prosecutors. The same may happen to Ihor Hladkovsky himself.
In July prosecutors also charged ex-Deputy Defense Minister Ihor Pavlovsky with embezzling budget money through Kyiv’s Rybalsky shipyard, which used to belong to Poroshenko.
In April 2020 prosecutors completed the embezzlement investigation against another Poroshenko associate, lawmaker Yaroslav Dubnevych, but the case is not on trial yet.
Other Poroshenko allies
Other cases against Poroshenko associates have been blocked, however.
No charges have been brought against Poroshenko’s top allies and ex-lawmakers Ihor Kononenko and Oleksandr Hranovsky despite numerous journalist investigations implicating them in corruption.
In February the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) said that it had drafted charges for Kononenko and Hranovsky. However, they have not been authorized by prosecutors so far.
Specifically, Hranovsky has been investigated over alleged corruption at the Odesa Portside Plant and over interfering in the work of election commissions.
Venediktova has blocked the Odesa Portside Plant case by failing to put a former Hranovsky aide on a wanted list, refusing to authorize searches at a Hranovsky-linked law firm and replacing the group of prosecutors, according to a July 22 investigation by Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe’s Schemes project.
The NABU is also investigating Kononenko in a corruption case involving Dmytro Kryuchkov, the CEO of power company Energomerezha. He testified in court in 2019 that Poroshenko and Kononenko had received 50 to 70 percent of the income from energy corruption schemes. Both have denied the accusations.
The case has seen little progress, and no charges have been brought against Kononenko or Poroshenko in connection with the alleged scheme.
Venediktova’s office has also refused to authorize the extradition of Oleh Bakhmayuk, a banker and an ally of Poroshenko, in an embezzlement case.In December the NABU said that it interprets this refusal as “an effort to sabotage the investigation of a severe crime.”
In 2019 prosecutors also charged Valeria Gontareva, the former head of the National Bank of Ukraine, Borys Lozhkin, Poroshenko’s former chief of staff and his former deputy chief of staff Oleksiy Filatov with organized crime, embezzlement and money laundering. However, the charges were later canceled, and the case has been dead ever since.
Firtash and Akhmetov
Despite the promises of de-oligarchization, billionaire oligarchs Dmytro Firtash and Rinat Akhemtov appear to be doing well.
In June the National Security and Defense Council imposed sanctions on Firtash.
Since the Gas Transmission System Operator of Ukraine (GTSO) was launched in 2020 as an independent network, regional distribution gas companies that belong to Firtash kept pumping gas from the pipeline without paying for it.
Altogether, regional gas companies belonging to Firtash owe Ukraine $326 million (Hr 9 billion). Yet, no charges followed.
Firtash is fighting against foreign prosecutors, who are more keen to see a shady Ukrainian oligarch behind bars. He has been living in Vienna since 2014, fighting off a U.S. extradition warrant. The U. S. has charged Firtash with bribery and racketeering.
Another major case, Rotterdam+, involves Akhmetov. The scheme was initiated under Poroshenko and benefited, among others, Akhmetov’s energy company DTEK. The formula set energy prices based on a coal index in European hubs “plus” the cost of its delivery to Ukraine. This is unreasonable price-setting because only a tiny portion of coal, around 5%, actually came from abroad, according to the NABU.
Venediktova’s prosecutors have closed the Rotterdam+ case four times despite court decisions against the closures, effectively making the investigation impossible.
War crimes
Venediktova has also faced accusations that she is destroying the department investigating war crimes committed in the Russian-occupied Crimea and Donbas.
In June Venediktova transferred the war crimes department from her deputy Gyunduz Mamedov to Maksym Yakubovsky, another deputy of Venediktova and a former lawyer for pro-Kremlin lawmaker Viktor Medvedchuk. Given that oversight over Russian war crimes was entrusted to an associate of a pro-Kremlin politician, the move prompted an immediate backlash from civil society.
After the uproar, Venediktova transferred the department from Yakubovsky to her own oversight.
But several human rights groups lambasted the decision to take the cases away from Mamedov.
They said the transfer would disrupt the investigation of war crimes. Mamedov’s unit has been praised by civic activists and human rights groups for effective coordination of all war crimes cases, creating a coherent strategy for such investigations and reanimating “dead” cases.
“The elimination of the war crimes department can be advantageous only for one party – the Russian Federation,” they said in a joint statement. “…The department has come into the epicenter of political games of unknown origin, which jeopardizes the achievements of its employees and may destroy the progress made in the latest months in the investigation of war crimes.”
In July the Prosecutor General’s Office also opened a forgery investigation against Mamedov for allegedly failing to indicate that he has a university job – something that human rights groups believe to be part of a political vendetta against Mamedov. He resigned in the same month.
EuroMaidan murders
The main EuroMaidan case, which looks into the murder of 48 protesters on Feb. 20, 2014, collapsed after five ex-police officers on trial were released by a court in 2019 under Venediktova’s predecessor Ruslan Riaboshapka as part of a prisoner exchange between Ukraine and Russia’s proxies. The exchange was at odds with Ukrainian law, and Vitaly Tytych, a lawyer for EuroMaidan protesters, believes it constituted a crime on the part of prosecutors.
This drew attention to the problem of trying EuroMaidan cases in absentia against fugitives who have fled to Russia and its proxies. Under Venediktova, the first in absentia trials in EuroMaidan cases began, earning praise from part of civil society.
In June a Kyiv court started an in absentia trial of police officers charged with killing protesters on Feb. 20, 2014.
But the court has failed to address the issue of whether the officers were released unlawfully, Vitaly Tytych, a lawyer for EuroMaidan protesters, told the Kyiv Post. Moreover, the officers will likely argue that they did not flee and were transported to Russia’s proxies against their will, thus undermining the basis for the in absentia trial, he added.
In June an ex-police officer was also sentenced to four years in prison in absentia for a crackdown on protesters in the city of Cherkasy.
In another case — not in absentia — two ex-police officers were sentenced to three years in jail in June for a crackdown on protesters in Kyiv on Nov. 30, 2013.
Tytych and Sergii Gorbatuk, the former chief investigator for EuroMaidan cases, argue that those sentenced were rank-and-file officers, and higher-ranking officials responsible for the Nov. 30 crackdown stay unpunished.
At the same time, corruption cases against ex-President Viktor Yanukovych and his allies have seen no progress under Venediktova.
Judicial corruption
Venediktova has also blocked the case against Pavlo Vovk, arguably Ukraine’s most infamous judge.
In 2019 Vovk was charged with obstruction of justice. But in the same year a Kyiv court rejected a motion to extend this investigation and ordered prosecutors to either close the case or send it to trial within five days.
In June 2021 another Kyiv court ordered prosecutors to close it, saying that they had failed to send it to trial by the deadline. Later an appeal court upheld this decision.
The same happened to a separate corruption case opened under Venediktova in 2020 by the NABU against Vovk.
For months, Vovk ignored summonses from the NABU. Despite Vovk’s efforts to obstruct court hearings, Venediktova has refused to authorize an arrest warrant for Vovk. She has also fired her deputy who authorized the corruption charges against Vovk and rejected NABU motions to conduct searches and wiretap Vovk.
Responding to accusations of sabotage, Venediktova said in March that she cannot take Vovk to court by force. She added that she doubted the effectiveness of the investigation and said that she did not see any “trial prospects” in the case.
In March the High Anti-Corruption Court refused to extend the corruption investigation against Vovk. However, prosecutors did not send the corruption case to trial within five days, and it is likely to be closed by a court similarly to the obstruction of justice investigation.
“The President’s Office has been trying to reach a bargain with the judicial mafia and political elites for a long time,” Olena Shcherban, an expert at the Anti-Corruption Action Center, told the Kyiv Post in a reference to the Vovk case.
