Vadym Polyakh, the security director at Kharkiv-based Malyshev Tank Factory, was fired following the disclosure of his pro-Russian sentiments and his intention to collaborate with Russian authorities in the early months of the Kremlin-sponsored invasion in 2014.
On May 28, pro-Russian defense blog named “Diana Mikhailova” republished a May 2014 interview by Russian media outlet Orel-Region based in the Russian city of Orel, in which Polyakh decries the EuroMaidan Revolution events in Kyiv as something that is conducted by “scum from different oblasts” and also endorses paid pro-government rallies of Anti-Maidan in his home city of Kharkiv.
The material is currently available on an archived copy of its original web page.
The story quotes him as saying that 90 percent of the Kharkiv population who didn’t want to “bow down to Nazi murderers” were waiting for the coming of “tanks of Russian liberators.”
It stated that Polyakh had moved to the city of Orel with most of his family and made a decision to acquire Russian citizenship and serve the Russian police, while the Russian authorities ordered to preserve his Ukrainian police rank of colonel and his decorations.
Vadym Polyakh, who was fired as security director at a Kharkiv tank factory. The photo of him illustrated his interview to a local news website in Orel in Russia in 2014. (web.archive.org)
Besides, the interview mentions that Polyakh met with Yuriy Saveliev, the chief of the Department of Internal Affairs in Russia’s Orel Oblast, who was said to have agreed to accept Polyakh for service. It appears that at some point after that, Polyakh returned to Kharkiv.
According to Ukrainian journalist and chief editor of Censor.Net website Yuriy Butusov, Polyakh was appointed as the chief security director at the Malyshev Tank Factory, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of armed vehicles, in the city of Kharkiv, in early 2020. Upon his nomination, Polyakh successfully passed in-depth checks, including a lie detector test, by the SBU security service and was granted access to classified information.
Hours after the publication, the factory press service reacted by stating that “the security director was fired… due to newly revealed information regarding the former employee’s biography that had not been known or revealed by special background investigation upon the nomination to the post.”
The factory added that a commission was formed to investigate the enterprise’s departments formerly led by the compromised official.
