Raids on senior Ukrainian security officers have turned a call-centre fraud case into a fight for the survival of the anti-corruption agencies, according to Olena Trybushna of EMPR's Ye Pytannia programme.
Which side comes out standing counts for more than any single arrest. "Whether NABU and SAPO themselves survive this investigation could, I fear, determine the overall direction of our country's development," Trybushna said in her November 4 episode.
Detectives of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) searched homes and offices of senior Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) officers on November 4 in the second stage of Operation Carthage, which NABU and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAPO) say concerns bribes paid to law enforcement officials to protect fraudulent call centres and other illegal businesses.
NABU said an unnamed senior SBU official threatened detectives with a firearm and blocked a court-authorised search, and that SBU special forces then arrived. Ukrainska Pravda, citing law enforcement sources, named him as Major General Serhii Duka of the Department for the Protection of National Statehood. NABU has not named him, and no response from him could be found.
The agencies said on November 5 they had served five suspicion notices: on the alleged organiser and an associate, a first deputy head of an SBU department and two police officers. The agencies did not name them in that announcement. All are presumed innocent. The High Anti-Corruption Court remanded Volodymyr Tsenov, a first deputy head of the National Police's Strategic Investigations Department, with bail of UAH15mn ($330,000), Interfax-Ukraine reported. SBU chief Oleksandr Poklad dismissed two senior officials implicated in the case, without naming them, and pledged co-operation.
The thread may have started with the phone of Andrii Osipov, described by the investigative outlet Slidstvo.Info as a crime figure, whom NABU and SAPO detained in the summer on suspicion of extorting $1mn from a Russian citizen to prevent his extradition. Prosecutors told a court that $200,000 was said to be meant for Vasyl Maliuk, then a top SBU official and later its head, though investigators never established that any money reached SBU staff. Ukrainska Pravda's sources in law enforcement said the question after his arrest was whether detectives could unlock his phone. Sources at Dzerkalo Tyzhnia said it led investigators to the senior officers.
Dzerkalo Tyzhnia had predicted the shape of the case in August. "There is a strong likelihood that a criminal clan-based system has taken shape within the state, with a significant part of the law enforcement sector serving not the institutions themselves, but the preservation of the existing power structure," wrote its domestic politics editor Inna Vedernikova.
Duka and Colonel Anton Kravchuk, head of the SBU's internal security directorate, whose premises were also searched according to Ukrainian media, are named in Ukrainian media as the men who led last July's operation against NABU and SAPO, which came as parliament voted to strip the agencies of their independence before backing down after street protests. The Anti-Corruption Action Centre, a watchdog, says both were in effect rewarded with promotion this year. NABU's own recordings add a sense of what the suspects thought of scrutiny: in one, a suspect codenamed Mexican proposes throwing acid on the investigative journalist Denys Bihus.
Former Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko, who left Ukraine in September and has not been charged, called the raids political revenge on Telegram, and anonymous channels are repeating the charge that NABU is working against the state in wartime. "The people undermining the state are those who cannot stop stealing, not those who cannot stop investigating theft," Trybushna said. Dzerkalo Tyzhnia's sources also spoke of "a real physical threat to those who are now trying to unravel this web".
A theory circulating in Kyiv holds that the riot at an Azov unit's base in Petropavlivska Borshchahivka on November 2 was staged to distract from the coming raids. It remains speculation: Trybushna says there is no evidence beyond a distorted account amplified on Telegram channels she links to the SBU and the service's failure to stop the violence.
Democrats won both chambers of the US Congress in the midterms, and the new Congress sits from January 3. That is a blow to Putin's hope that Donald Trump's America would help press Kyiv into a settlement, and it means "our chances of surviving this war as a country have improved thanks to external factors", according to Trybushna.
The next tests are in court and in the Presidential Office. Notices for the other suspects are being prepared, and none of the first five is a prosecutor although NABU says officials of the Prosecutor General's Office were drawn in. "I believe Budanov will get to the bottom of what the hell is going on here," Trybushna said of Kyrylo Budanov, who heads the office. Other cases are pressing on the same institutions: the anti-corruption court has also ordered prosecutors to register a crime report on ruling party leader Davyd Arakhamia, and clean-up of high-level graft remains a condition of Ukraine's EU accession bid.
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