It is a new corruption scandal which finally got the better of Andriy Kostine, the Ukrainian prosecutor general. The latter announced his resignation in the evening of Tuesday, October 22, after the revelation of a system allowing certain privileged people to escape military mobilization, illustrating in itself many of Ukraine’s ills.
On October 16, 2024, the Ukrainian journalist Yurii Butusoveditor-in-chief of the online media Censor.netthus revealed that 50 prosecutors from the Khmelnytskyï region, in the west of the country, had been falsely declared disabled and therefore unfit to be mobilized on the front. All this, while obviously receiving extremely advantageous pensions. At the heart of this system, the president of the region’s medical-social commission and member of the regional council for the “Servant of the People” party – that of Volodymyr Zelensky -, Tatiana Krupa, who allegedly issued false disability certificates in exchange juicy bribes.
Following these revelations, Prosecutor General Andriy Kostine ordered the opening of an investigation. This revealed that the number of disabled prosecutors in the region was 61, of which 50 had been registered as such even before the start of the war. “It is very important to find out why they were granted the status of disabled people, because the proportion of such employees in the Khmelnytskyi region is very high,” he said then.
During searches carried out by local authorities in Tatiana Krupa’s apartment, nearly 6 million dollars were allegedly found, as were false medical documents and lists of patients with fictitious diagnoses. “Law enforcement officers found money in almost every corner of the apartment – in closets, drawers, niches in the walls. Documents confirming the illegal activities of officials and their money laundering through various commercial projects were also seized,” says a note from the Ukrainian State Investigation Bureau, reported by Ukrainian media Slovo i Dilo (Word and Action), specializing in the investigation of the country’s politicians and civil servants.
A system of “large-scale” corruption
This case is particularly representative of the endemic corruption that still persists in Ukraine, and which is obviously not limited to simple prosecutors in the Khmelnytskyi region. Volodymyr Zelensky himself assured this in his traditional daily message this Tuesday evening: “There are hundreds of cases of manifestly unjustified disabilities among customs and tax officials, in the pension fund system and in the local administrations.
A finding corroborated by the SBU, the Ukrainian secret services, which claimed this Tuesday evening to have discovered a “large-scale” corruption system to escape military mobilization by issuing false disability certificates. In 2024, 64 officials were suspected of these crimes, and nine others were convicted, says the SBU. In addition, nearly 4,100 disability certificates were canceled because they were based on “false documents”, they further detailed.
Several cases in recent weeks have already highlighted this type of scandal. Also on Tuesday, the SBU announced that it had arrested a medical official from the Mykolaiv region in possession of $450,000 in undeclared cash, as well as disability certificates for herself and her son. On October 8, it was also the head of one of the medical expert centers in kyiv who was arrested for having also issued false medical documents.
But the revelation of an affair of this magnitude within the Ukrainian judiciary itself – under his responsibility, therefore – was the last straw for the Ukrainian Prosecutor General, who accepted Volodymyr Zelensky’s request for resignation. The Ukrainian president assured that he “must take political responsibility for the situation within Ukraine’s judicial bodies.” A clear message, which Andriy Kostine avoided without blinking an eye. “Many acts of shameful abuse have been discovered within the prosecution. […] In this situation, I consider it right to announce my resignation,” declared the man who had become one of Ukraine’s main figures in the fight to have Vladimir Putin and Russia judged and convicted before of the International Criminal Court.
The running out of steam in Ukrainian society
If these scandals are representative of the personal enrichment of some on the back of the war, they also reflect a real loss of steam in Ukrainian society, more than two and a half years after the start of the Russian invasion. Because beyond these senior civil servants and other influential officials taking advantage of their status and wealth to escape the same efforts as the rest of the population, many ordinary young men also seek to escape the call to the front by all means. possible. This Tuesday, the Ukrainian authorities reported that a man, wanted for evading mobilization, found and taken to an enlistment center, had… killed himself there, showing “obvious signs” of a suicide.
But while Ukraine still lacks so many soldiers on the front, and the feeling of injustice between the impunity of the elites and the sacrifice of others is increasingly felt, there is no doubt that these scandals risk fueling even more tensions in the country. And while Volodymyr Zelensky had dismissed all the officials in charge of mobilization in 2023, strongly criticized for their corruption, the Ukrainian president will once again have to fight hard to maintain the sacred union in the face of the Russian enemy.