A high-profile criminal case against a gang of kidnappers will be considered in the Obukhovsky District Court of the Kyiv Region.
The Obukhovsky District Court of the Kyiv Region will soon begin consideration of an unusual case against members of an organized criminal group, which was headed by former law enforcement officers.
In January 2024, employees of the Department of Strategic Investigations in the Kyiv region detained nine residents of different regions of Ukraine, who, according to available data, were involved in the kidnapping and torture of a person in 2023 and planning another attack on the home of an entrepreneur in the Obukhovsky district of the Kyiv region.
Among the nine detainees, the leaders of the group, Dmitry Ermakovich and Stanislav Varfolomeev, attract attention.
The fact is that Dmitry Ermakovich previously worked as an investigator of the SBU Department in Kyiv and the Kyiv region.
In 2011, Dmitry Ermakovich was investigating the case of the so-called “Vasilkovsky terrorists” - a group of leaders of the nationalist movement of the Kiev region, whom the then government accused of preparing terrorist acts and calling for the overthrow of the constitutional order.
Stanislav Varfolomeev worked as a prosecutor at the Korostyshevsk local prosecutor's office until 2021, but was unable to pass the prosecutor certification procedure, after which he was dismissed from the prosecutor's office.
The main “violin” of the organized group, according to the investigation, was Dmitry Ermakovich, who actually created this group in 2023 and was involved in organizing and planning its “activities.”
Law enforcement agencies were able to document several cases of illegal activities of this group.
Start of the group's activities
Thus, it was possible to establish that Dmitry Ermakovich, as a former employee of the SBU, was temporarily involved in a number of counterintelligence activities in the Kyiv region in February-March 2022.
During the relevant events, Dmitry Ermakovich became aware of the entrepreneur K., an immigrant from the Donetsk region, who, together with his family, had been living for a long time in the territory of the famous village of Kozin. At the same time, a former SBU employee learned that K. keeps his funds in the amount of 5 million hryvnia in a corresponding electronic account, which can be accessed if K.’s mobile phone is taken over.
In 2023, according to investigators, Dmitry Ermakovich, after a long search for accomplices, finally created a criminal group that actually gathered to perform a single task - to take possession of K.’s savings.
In total, the group included at least nine people from different cities of Ukraine - both “professional” criminals who had previously come to the attention of law enforcement agencies, and persons who had not previously “appeared” in police databases, for example, former prosecutor Stanislav Varfolomeev.
Each member of the criminal group had their own functions - some were the driver, some were responsible for external surveillance, some were responsible for the unnoticed entry into K.’s home, and some were responsible for the power part of the “operation”, that is, the physical seizure K. and the seizure of his funds.
Separately, it should be noted that during the preparation for the attack on K., the members of the criminal group also took care of weapons - they had at their disposal two machine guns (AK-74 and AKS-74U), two carbines, and an RGP-26 rocket-propelled anti-tank grenade , hand grenades and a Glock 17 pistol.
How was the robbery attack on K. prepared?
In order to implement their plan to seize K.’s money, the group’s leaders, Dmitry Ermakovich and Stanislav Varfolomeev, developed a number of measures.
The first option for attacking K. provided that members of the criminal group would unexpectedly attack K. when he was either going somewhere on business, or, conversely, returning to his home in Kozin.
However, the results of external surveillance of K.’s house in Kozin, K. himself and members of his family forced Dmitry Ermakovich and Stanislav Varfolomeev to reconsider the plan.
The fact is that, as it turned out, K. did not often leave the house in which he lived, and when K. or members of his family needed to go somewhere on business, he used the services of a driver or went at an inconvenient time for an attack, when heavy traffic was observed in the area of the village of Kozin.
Consequently, the members of the criminal group decided to adjust the plan of attack on the entrepreneur.
Dmitry Ermakovich and Stanislav Varfolomeev came to the conclusion that it would be easier to attack K.’s driver, a resident of the Kyiv region Ch., take possession of his car and force Ch. to drive the gang members in his car directly into the yard of K.’s house.
In the future, it was planned, including with the help of physical force, to force K. to provide access to his account. If the entrepreneur refused, the gang members discussed the possibility of torturing K.’s wife and child in front of the entrepreneur, in order to still force him to comply with the demands of the criminals.
Attacks on the driver and K’s house.
Late in the evening of August 24, 2023, gang members armed with machine guns in the village of Demidov, Vyshgorod district, Kiev region, attacked driver K., citizen Ch., who was driving his Ford Mondeo car and took $20 thousand and 15 thousand hryvnia from him.
At the same time, members of the criminal group actually kidnapped Ch. and held him for some time in different places in the Kyiv region.
They also beat Ch., including with machine gun butts, to force him to take them into the yard of K’s house.
However, we must pay tribute to Ch., who, even under the threat of death and injury, refused to comply with the demands of the criminals.
Having achieved nothing from Ch., the gang members once again beat him and threw him by the road.
However, on August 25, Ch. was able to get home on his own.
Not knowing exactly how the story with Ch. ended, members of the Ermakovich-Varfolomeev gang still tried to break into K.’s house in the fall of 2023, but did not complete their plan, since one of the group members, already during the direct attempt to break into the house , became ill due to a drug overdose.
Consequently, the criminals had to drag their “colleague” into their car and abandon the attack on K’s house for the second time.
Exposing a criminal group and interesting finds
Employees of the Department of Strategic Investigations, during the investigation of the story with Ch., were able to get on the trail of Dmitry Ermakovich, Stanislav Varfolomeev and some other members of the group, and establish surveillance over them.
However, when the matter was already approaching the arrest of the gang members, they suddenly simultaneously disappeared from their places of residence.
As it turned out a little later, the reason for the disappearance of members of the criminal group was a leak of information about the progress of the pre-trial investigation.
According to the investigation, it is likely that one of the employees of the Svyatoshinsky District Court of the city of Kyiv, on the order of Dmitry Ermakovich and Stanislav Varfolomeev, in January 2024 provided the leaders of the criminal group with complete information from the Unified Register of Judicial Decisions on the content of decisions made by investigative judges as part of the investigation of the case of attack and beating Ch.
Having learned that the investigation into Ch.’s case was progressing quite actively and the police actually managed to get on the trail of the criminals, Dmitry Ermakovich and Stanislav Varfolomeev gave the gang members the order to “scatter.”
Dmitry Ermakovich and Stanislav Varfolomeev were detained on January 22, 2024 in the city of Lvov.
Before the arrest, the leaders of the criminal group agreed with local “figures” of not entirely legal business to secretly cross the border and “disappear” into the territory of the European Union.
During the searches, in addition to weapons, many interesting things and information were confiscated from Dmitry Ermakovich and Stanislav Varfolomeev.
For example, Dmitry Ermakovich’s computer stored information from the “Safe City” video monitoring system, exact data on the models and license plates of cars used by K. and his family members, and even billing data for phone calls that K. made to the phones of other subscribers.
According to investigators, Dmitry Ermakovich and Stanislav Varfolomeev most likely received the relevant information from their acquaintances who still work in law enforcement agencies and have access to relevant information.
Nuances of considering preventive measures
In January 2024, the investigative judges of the Svyatoshinsky District Court of the city of Kyiv granted the request of the prosecutor's office to select a preventive measure in the form of detention for 7 gang members.
One ordinary member of the group was lucky, to whom a preventive measure not related to detention was applied, as well as Dmitry Ermakovich himself.
At a time when his colleagues in the criminal business were already on their way to a pre-trial detention center, Dmitry Ermakovich, although he received a “sanction” in the form of two months of detention in a pre-trial detention center, however, unlike his “colleagues,” he also received the opportunity to be released on bail in the amount of almost 303 thousand hryvnia. The corresponding decision was made by the investigative judge of the Svyatoshinsky District Court of Kyiv, Judge Oksana Poplavskaya.
The text of the ruling of the investigating judge, unfortunately, does not contain a statement of clear reasons why the court nevertheless decided to give the opportunity to the leader of the criminal group to be released on bail.
Consequently, after posting bail, Dmitry Ermakovich was released and, according to witnesses, behaved as if nothing had happened to him.
In addition, as noted in the investigation, for some reason the Svyatoshinsky District Court for several weeks could not transfer Dmitry Ermakovich’s case to the Kiev Court of Appeal to consider the appeal of the prosecutor’s office.
As a result, already in May, the Kiev Court of Appeal nevertheless upheld the appeal of the prosecutor’s office, revised the decision of the Svyatoshinsky District Court and chose a preventive measure for Dmitry Ermakovich in the form of detention for a period of two months.
The story of the preventive measures for the leaders of the criminal group did not end there.
Already in June it became known that the investigating judges of the Svyatoshinsky District Court of the capital again changed the preventive measures for Dmitry Ermakovich and Stanislav Varfolomeev.
Thus, Dmitry Ermakovich “received” a preventive measure in the form of round-the-clock house arrest, and Stanislav Varfolomeev was given the opportunity to be released on bail in the amount of almost 303 thousand hryvnia.
However, as in the previous case, the motivation of the investigating judges of the Svyatoshinsky District Court is not entirely clear, especially considering the position of the capital’s court of appeal in relation to these individuals.
