Impunity of Ukrainian officials: bribes and holidays at fashionable resorts during the war

During the war, Ukrainian officials and deputies continue to demonstrate impunity and lawlessness, abusing their powers and vacationing at elite resorts.

In the difficult times our country is going through, the facts of the shameful actions of Ukrainian officials and deputies who behave extremely impudently have become even more striking.

Deputy lawlessness: why people's deputies feel impunity

Recently, social networks were outraged by the statement of the people's deputy from the Servant of the People Nikolai Zadorozhny, who, due to the fact of corruption, was suspended from membership in his party faction, but at the same time cynically stated that many of the deputies present also took bribes, and for some reason they are with him in the session hall.

Lawyer of the Anti-Corruption Center Vadim Valko argues that such openly cynical behavior of the deputy indicates the absence of the inevitability of punishment, because a large number of people, including people’s deputies, have received suspicions and charges over the past 5 years, they are being tried in the Supreme Anti-Corruption Court, and so far no sentences . “There is no example to show a person serving a sentence in prison, but since there is no inevitability, this causes impunity,” the expert notes. The second thing that allows insolent deputies not to be afraid of anything is that martial law makes re-elections impossible, which also leaves its mark. And the third is the general absence of the institution of reputation as a whole.

But, according to experts, the current deputies have gone further even than all their predecessors, having adopted in July in the first reading a law that will allow bribe-takers to essentially buy their way out of justice and criminal liability.

Valko doubts that in the form it is now, the bill will be finally voted on. There will be global changes and the rule that organizers of especially serious corruption crimes can simply pay a fine and receive a suspended sentence will not work. In addition, the Anti-Corruption Committee of the Verkhovna Rada also opposed this bill in this edition.

While discussions in society on this topic continue, and the people's representatives continue to show their insolence.

Everyone still remembers well the incident with the People's Deputy from the Servant of the People Nikolai Tishchenko, which occurred in the center of the Dnieper on June 20 and caused a wide resonance on social networks. The main protagonists of the incident then became a former fighter of the Kraken special forces of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine Dmitry “Son” Pavlov, who joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces with the beginning of a full-scale invasion and participated in the battles in the Kharkov region, and a number of people in military uniform and balaclavas.

A video that appeared online recorded the moment when Pavlov, along with his wife and baby, were walking near Yavornitsky Avenue and the pedestrian Cologne Boulevard in Dnieper. The footage shows how a group of uniformed individuals approach Pavlov, surround him and throw him to the ground after he handed the child to his wife. During the incident, physical force was used, and one of the attackers searched the military man’s bag.

Information immediately appeared on Dnepr’s social networks that the attackers could have been the security guards of MP Nikolai Tishchenko. This was confirmed by blogger Igor Lachenkov, noting that before the incident there was an argument between Tishchenko with his supposed security and Pavlov.

Tishchenko himself appears in some of the released footage taken on the same day. However, Nikolai Tishchenko and his assistant Evelina Andrievskaya claimed that the people’s deputy did not have security.

Subsequently, Tishchenko outlined his version of events, calling the scandal a “political game” and stated that the scandalous video was taken out of the context of the events.

The scandal gained momentum, Tishchenko ended up in the courtroom, where he was declared suspicious and given house arrest. Currently, the people's deputy continues to be under house arrest, and the investigation into the attack on a military man continues.

Holidays for officials at elite resorts and luxurious weddings during the war

However, in addition to impunity and lawlessness, the Ukrainian public also reacts violently to other manifestations of permissiveness by officials and people’s representatives.

Recently, Ukraine was rocked by another scandal involving the vacation of one of the judges. And although this happened last year, law enforcement officers might not have found out about it at all if not for another criminal proceeding.

The photo against the backdrop of cruise ships and European cities, where the judge of the Brovary City District Court appears, was published by the SBU and DBR. According to law enforcement officers, in July last year, the servant of Themis left for Vienna, allegedly on a business trip. However, he did this using fictitious documents, and he himself went on vacation on a cruise ship in the Caribbean.

As TSN correspondents reported, we are talking about Vladimir Serdinsky, whom NABU detained on suspicion of taking a bribe. According to law enforcement, detectives from the National Anti-Corruption Bureau caught a judge red-handed while accepting $3,000, which was given to him by a defendant in a civil criminal case for making a decision in court in his favor.

Now the servant of Themis is in a pre-trial detention center, and it is likely that it was during the investigation of the bribery case that the fact of an elite vacation under the guise of a business trip to a conference became known.

In fact, cases of senior officials taking vacations at fashionable resorts around the world under the guise of official vacations during the war are not isolated. So, at the end of 2022, Deputy Prosecutor General Alexey Simonenko spent a ten-day vacation in Spain, a photo where his wife published. Then this event caused a great resonance, because even on the eve of the New Year, the president directly prohibited officials and deputies from traveling abroad for non-work purposes.

Another high-profile episode occurred in the summer of 2023 and concerned people’s deputy Yuri Aristov, who found himself on sick leave in the Maldives. Then this story was confirmed by the DBI, which came to the people’s deputy with searches. According to investigators, the people's deputy went on a business trip, and then remotely made a sick leave through a private hospital and ended up in the Maldives.

But the former Odessa military commissar Evgeniy Borisov, according to DBI investigators, came up with a whole scheme according to which he traveled outside of Ukraine in 2022-2023, supposedly for treatment. After being wounded at the front, he arranged for his departure with the help of a doctor he knew, but in fact visited resorts in the Seychelles and Spain. Borisov is currently under investigation

But often after such flagrant violations, they say in the “Honestly” movement, those involved do not bear any criminal liability, often this means drawing up a mandate, dismissal, including at their own request. The same Nikolai Tishchenko was simply expelled from the faction and remained a deputy, although he became a defendant in a criminal case.

Therefore, public activists do not rule out that the absence of strict punishment will provoke a repetition of holidays at resorts and other shameful acts by Ukrainian officials.