Details of the charges against MP Alexander Dubinsky

In the fall of 2019, Alexander Dubinsky, then a newly elected MP from the Servant of the People, at a press conference in Kyiv, together with his parliamentary colleague Andrei Derkach, said that Hunter Biden, the son of US presidential candidate Joe Biden, allegedly received dishonest funds in Ukraine.

Four years later, Ukrainian law enforcement officials claim that Dubinsky and Derkach organized that press conference on instructions from Russian military intelligence. The investigation believes that both people's representatives were part of an agent network that was supposed to discredit the leadership of Ukraine, primarily in front of the United States, and prevent further Euro-Atlantic integration.

On November 13, SBU officers informed Alexander Dubinsky of suspicion of high treason, part 1 of Article 111 of the Criminal Code , and participation in a criminal organization, part 1 of Article 255 of the Criminal Code . The Pechersky District Court of Kyiv arrested him for two months. Dubinsky faces up to 15 years in prison. He does not admit his guilt.

Read more about the case of the people’s deputy and the GRU intelligence network in Ukraine in the article “Grat”.

"Pinocchio"

Judge Galina Matiychuk arrested Alexander Dubinsky after midnight on November 14. By that time, there was not a single journalist left in court, so Dubinsky told the team of his telegram channel about his arrest.

The court chose the preventive measure for Dubinsky behind closed doors, so the content of the suspicion is not known. However, even before the court hearing, the SBU and the State Bureau of Investigation published details of the investigation into the people’s deputy.

The SBU claims that Alexander Dubinsky had the pseudonym “Buratino” and was an agent of Russian military intelligence. He was part of a network created by Vladimir Alekseev, Deputy Chief of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU). Operational management was carried out by his subordinate Alexey Savin. In Ukraine, in addition to Dubinsky, they recruited non-factional people's deputy Andrei Derkach and former military prosecutor Konstantin Kulik. The latter had the call sign “Bird”.

Another member of the network, Igor Kolesnikov, a former assistant to Andrei Derkach, is called by the SBU as its coordinator and notes that he worked in the GRU back in Soviet times and had the call sign “Veteran.”

The investigation does not indicate when exactly Dubinsky became a GRU agent, but the GBR reported that in October 2019, while a people’s deputy, he flew to Moscow. Returning to Ukraine, Dubinsky organized a press conference at which, law enforcement officers believe, he disseminated false information about the interference of Ukrainian officials in the US presidential election.

It was the spread of disinformation that was the task of the Russian military intelligence network. The SBI claims that in this way the GRU sought to discredit Ukrainian-American relations and slow down Ukraine’s integration into the EU and NATO.

The investigation notes that according to the Russian curators, as a professional “media killer”, Dubinsky was supposed to “disperse” pro-Russian narratives at press conferences and place the necessary emphasis, primarily for the Western audience.

In addition, Derkach and Dubinsky registered in parliament draft resolutions on the creation of a temporary investigative commission of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine to investigate the “facts” that they exposed at their press conferences. Ex-prosecutor Konstantin Kulik publicly substantiated their fakes from a legal point of view.

Law enforcement officials note that, according to preliminary estimates, Russian intelligence services spent at least $10 million on the activities of this intelligence network.

According to investigators, after the full-scale invasion, Andriy Derkach and Konstantin Kulik left Ukraine. SBU investigators detained Derkach’s former assistant Igor Kolesnikov on March 3 last year. He made a deal with the investigation, admitted guilt and testified.

Two months later, on May 5, 2022, judge of the Shevchenkovsky District Court Lidiya Shchebunyaeva found Kolesnikov guilty of high treason and sentenced him to five years in prison without confiscation of property. This punishment is milder than that provided by law.

The Criminal Code states that high treason is punishable by imprisonment of 12 years. Kolesnikov received less because the judge applied Article 69 of the Criminal Code. It allows a more lenient punishment in the presence of several circumstances that significantly reduce the severity of the criminal offense committed.

"Veteran"

A month and a half after the verdict against Igor Kolesnikov, on June 24, 2022, the SBU reported that it had exposed the GRU intelligence network, which included Andrei Derkach.

The head of the SBU press service, Artem Dekhtyarenko, noted that the operational development of the network had been going on for a long time, but the intelligence service finally neutralized it at the beginning of the war, detaining Kolesnikov. Indeed, the verdict against Kolesnikov states that the SBU opened criminal proceedings against him back in September 2020.

According to investigators, Kolesnikov was a signalman and financial courier between the Russian special services and Derkach.

Reporting the exposure of a network of Russian intelligence agents, the SBU released a video confession of Igor Kolesnikov, as well as fragments of recordings of his telephone conversations with his Russian curator.

In the video, Kolesnikov said that he was recruited by the GRU central office in Moscow, but did not specify when this happened. He said that GRU Deputy Chairman Vladimir Alekseev and Colonel Alexey Savin gave him the task of organizing communication and communication with Andrei Derkach.

“Andrei Leonidovich did not make contact for a long time. After about three or four months, he told me that he was ready. We went to Moscow, where this meeting took place,” Kolesnikov said in the SBU video and continued, “the first meeting was purely introductory, friendly, in the office of Vladimir Stepanovich [Alekseev]. Then, to get acquainted, after a while there was an acquaintance with the head of the GRU, Igor Olegovich Kostyukov.”

According to Kolesnikov, the GRU has been using Derkach for its own purposes since 2016. The SBU reported that the network included not only Kolesnikov and Derkach, but the intelligence service did not name its other members. Noting only that his son-in-law Dmitry Kovalchuk knew about Derkach’s cooperation with the GRU.

Law enforcement did not mention at the time that the network was disseminating disinformation. According to Kolesnikov’s testimony, Andrei Derkach was recruited by the GRU to prepare a full-scale invasion, namely the creation and financing of a network of private security companies in the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine. During the invasion, their employees were supposed to ensure the advancement of Russian armored vehicles.

“They were supposed to board the armor with Russian flags in their hands and thus ensure a peaceful entry into the cities,” Kolesnikov argued.

According to the SBU, Kolesnikov regularly transferred money to Derkach that he received from the Russians.

“The total amount is tens of millions,” said Artem Dekhtyarenko and noted that a significant part of this money “settled in the pockets of the people’s deputy” (Derkach - Ґ ).

The SBU claimed that during his cooperation with the GRU, Derkach acquired two luxury apartments in Moscow.

The Ukrainian intelligence service also released fragments of Kolesnikov’s telephone conversations with Alekseev and Savin from the GRU, as well as their correspondence.

- Is there something wrong there? “I can’t understand,” Kolesnikov asked Savin in one of the audio recordings released by the SBU.

- Well, not quite. The doctor said to wait a little, because he’s quite something... His condition is not very good,” answered Savin

- Doctor - that’s understandable. “I mean about the payment,” Kolesnikov continued.

- Well, it doesn’t work out. They offer other options,” Savin replied.

Artem Dekhtyarenko explained that the doctor mentioned in the conversation was the pseudonym of Vladimir Alekseev. Kolesnikov and the Russians also called Derkach a “doctor,” other GRU employees were “nurses,” and the materials the Russians were interested in were “pictures.”

In the SBU video, Igor Kolesnikov says that from Moscow he was paid in dollars, which he received in Kyiv through a conversion center, but he did not specify which one. At Derkach’s command, he transferred this money to the people’s deputy’s people. Kolesnikov did not name the names of these people.

In the case of Alexander Dubinsky, audio recordings are also mentioned. The SBI reported that it had recorded conversations between a GRU employee and a recruited agent, but did not specify who exactly they were talking about.

“They discuss the details of the operation and mention a participant in this scheme under the operational pseudonym “Buratino.” The investigation believes that it is the current people’s deputy (Dubinsky - Ґ ) who is hiding behind him,” the SBI said in a statement.

Probably, we are talking about the same conversations between Kolesnikov and Alekseev and Savin, fragments of which were previously published by the SBU.

Alexander Dubinsky himself spoke about the fact that his case is based on the testimony of a GRU agent, who a year and a half ago received five years for treason. He did not name the agent so as not to disclose the case materials.

The people's deputy noted that last year he testified in the Derkach case, and then law enforcement officers had no complaints against him. Since then, they have once again interrogated the convicted agent, and he said that Dubinsky received money and agreed on something with Derkach and the company.

“The prosecution does not have a single fact indicating that I committed high treason,” the people’s deputy said in a video published on his telegram channel, and added that all the evidence in the case was falsified and obtained under pressure.

However, Dubinsky did not refute one fact established by the investigation in his case: in the fall of 2020, he actually held a joint press conference with Derkach, at which he spoke, in particular, about Hunter Biden.

People's deputies reported that the son of US presidential candidate Joe Biden appears in criminal proceedings opened by the Office of the Attorney General.

Dubinsky and Derkach said that in 2014-2019, Hunter Biden was on the supervisory board of the gas production company Burisma. Its co-owner, Ukrainian businessman Nikolai Zlochevsky, paid $16.5 million to members of the supervisory board during this time. Moreover, Zlochevsky paid Hunter Biden with “laundered” money obtained by criminal means.

“Biden received money that was stolen from the Ukrainian people—that’s what the Prosecutor General’s Office believes,” Derkach said at a press conference.

He claimed that in 2016 Ukraine interfered in the previous US presidential election. According to Derkach, then the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, on instructions from the headquarters of the US Democratic Party candidate, released information that Paul Manafort, the head of the campaign headquarters of the Republican Party presidential candidate Donald Trump, received money as a political strategist for Viktor Yanukovych when he was the president of Ukraine.

US sanctions

Ukrainian law enforcement officials are not the only ones who claim that Alexander Dubinsky is a Russian agent. Almost three years ago, in January 2021, the US Treasury Department came to this conclusion and applied sanctions to the Ukrainian people’s deputy.

Then Dubinsky was on a list of seven people whom the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control recognized as part of a network of external influence associated with Andrei Derkach. The network also included ex-prosecutor Konstantin Kulik, diplomat Anatoly Telizhenko, people’s deputies Alexander Dubinsky and Alexander Onishchenko, media manager Pyotr Zhuravel and Derkach’s assistants Anton Simonenko and Dmitry Kovalchuk.

In a statement announcing the sanctions, the U.S. Treasury noted that since at least 2019, Derkach and his associates have used U.S. media, social media platforms, and U.S. influencers to spread “deceptive and unsubstantiated” allegations implicating current and former U.S. officials in corruption and money laundering. political influence in Ukraine.

Thus, the Ministry of Finance noted in a message, Andrei Derkach tried to influence the US presidential elections in 2020.

“Russian disinformation campaigns targeting American citizens pose a threat to our democracy,” said US Secretary of State Steven Mnuchin.

Three months before the imposition of sanctions against Dubinsky in October 2020, the Ukrainian public organization Anti-Corruption Center addressed a corresponding request to the US Treasury. Since 2012, with funds from the US government and EU countries, as well as private international foundations, it has been fighting corruption in Ukraine.

The letter the CPC, signed by the organization’s executive director Daria Kalenyuk, lists cases of cooperation between Alexander Dubinsky and Andrei Derkach. In addition to the above-mentioned press conference between Dubinsky and Derkach, at which they talked about how Hunter Biden earned “dirty” money in Ukraine, the CPC noted that on October 10, 2019, Dubinsky and Derkach initiated the creation of a temporary parliamentary commission, which, among other things, was supposed to investigate the spending of 5 .3 billion dollars of American technical assistance to Ukraine. In the end, the commission was not created.

The CPC indicated that the two people's deputies criticized American technical assistance projects in letters to American Republican senators, Speaker of Congress Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump's chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney. In addition, they discredited their pro-Western colleagues in the Verkhovna Rada, who were called “grant eaters” and “Sorosites.”

The CPC letter also noted that in early December 2019, Derkach and Dubinsky met in Kyiv with Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s lawyer. He flew to Kyiv to collect information about possible offenses of Joe Biden. He subsequently published a video in which he claimed that $5.3 billion had disappeared in Ukraine during Barack Obama's presidency, but Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden blocked the investigation.

In response, Alexander Dubinsky held a press conference where he stated that the United States imposed sanctions against him on the basis of a “denunciation” by the CPC, which he called “corruption parasites.”

“I have never interfered in elections in other countries, including American elections. “I also never had anything to do with the release of the so-called “Poroshenko-Biden tapes,” Dubinsky said then.

Tapes and impeachment of the US President

The tapes that Dubinsky spoke about are not mentioned in the SBU and DRB reports about the case against him.

They were published by Andriy Derkach together with former prosecutor Konstantin Kulik: in two parts in May and June 2020 at a press conference in Kyiv. Dubinsky did not participate in them.

Derkach claimed that the recordings contained conversations between the fifth president, Petro Poroshenko, and Joe Biden, who was vice president of the United States at the time. In them, in particular, Poroshenko reported to Biden that he forced Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin to write a letter of resignation and asked permission to appoint Yuri Lutsenko to this position.

“The records indicate facts of international corruption and treason at the highest state level and clearly show... Ukraine was led by Biden,” Derkach said at a press conference.

Biden and Poroshenko's teams said Derkach's recordings were falsified and called them a Russian provocation. The day after the tapes were made public, President Vladimir Zelensky told reporters at a press conference that based on these recordings and Derkach’s statements, the Office of the Prosecutor General has registered criminal proceedings and will investigate possible high treason.

In 2019, the year before, Viktor Shokin said that Biden demanded that the president fire him from office because his subordinates were conducting five criminal proceedings against Nikolai Zlochevsky, in whose company Hunter Biden worked. Joe Biden himself did not deny that in 2016 he insisted on the dismissal of Shokin and had previously refused to sign guarantees of providing Ukraine with one billion dollars in aid from international organizations. Subsequently, American diplomats explained that Biden demanded Shokin’s resignation not because he wanted to imprison Zlochevsky, in whose company his son worked, but on the contrary, because the Prosecutor General was interfering with the work of the anti-corruption unit of the GPU.

American law enforcement officials saw no reason to open an investigation against Joe Biden or his son, but Donald Trump’s team, on the eve of the election, decided to use Hunter Biden’s story against his father. In 2019, Trump froze financial assistance to Ukraine and, in a telephone conversation with Zelensky, demanded that he say that Ukraine was investigating Biden’s corruption.

This became the basis for starting impeachment proceedings against the president in the US Congress on charges of abuse of office, but American legislators failed to dismiss Trump: the Senate did not vote for it.

Zelensky refused for a long time to comply with Trump’s demand, but in 2020 he voiced the theses that the US President demanded of him. This did not help Donald Trump win the election. His opponent Joe Biden, who ran for the Democratic nomination, became president.

A month before the US presidential election and four months after Derkach published the recordings, in October 2020, the US Treasury applied personal sanctions to him. The report says that Derkach was an active Russian agent for more than ten years and maintained close ties with Russian intelligence services.

Later, the US Treasury indicated that the edited “Poroshenko-Biden tapes” were provided to Derkach by ex-People’s Deputy Alexander Onishchenko. At that time, he was wanted in Ukraine in connection with investigation into theft of funds. He was also stripped of his parliamentary immunity. Subsequently, the SBU opened proceedings for treason against Onishchenko.

“Andrei Derkach and other Russian agents are using manipulation and deception to try to influence elections in the United States and other countries around the world,” Secretary of State Steven Mnuchin said in commenting on the sanctions, adding, “The United States will continue to use every tool at its disposal.” to counter these Russian disinformation campaigns and maintain the integrity of our election system.”

The US Treasury also recalled the press conferences at which Derkach spoke about NABU and Hunter Biden, and the fact that he released tapes of alleged conversations between Poroshenko and Biden. US Treasury officials concluded that Derkach had brought unfounded charges against American and international political figures.

“The application of sanctions against Derkach is another example of the Treasury Department helping to hold accountable individuals associated with the Kremlin who seek to undermine confidence in the democratic processes in the United States,” the US Treasury said in a statement.

In response, Andrei Derkach called the sanctions against him the revenge of Joe Biden and other representatives of the US Democratic Party and promised new revelations.

After the introduction of sanctions, Alexander Dubinsky tried in every possible way to dissociate himself from Derkach, but in January 2021 he was expelled from the Servant of the People faction. In response, Dubinsky stated that the Office of the President pushed him to cooperate with Derkach, but did not specify who exactly.

According to Dubinsky, it was the OP who demanded that he participate in the creation of a temporary parliamentary commission of inquiry on the topic of the “Poroshenko-Biden tapes.” Also, the Office of the President allegedly demanded that he take part in a press conference at which Derkach released these tapes.

“Especially for the swindlers and swindlers from Bankovaya Street, I remind you that I then refused to participate in this scam. And then the head of the Servant of the People faction in parliament, David Arakhamia, had to create an investigative commission personally,” Dubinsky said.

After the verdict against Igor Kolesnikov and the exposure of the GRU intelligence network in Ukraine, the SBU, together with the NABU, informed Andrei Derkach of suspicion of high treason   , part 1 of article 111 of the Criminal Code and illegal enrichment,   article 368-5 of the Criminal Code . Then, in September last year, the people's deputy was put on the wanted list. A month later, the High Anti-Corruption Court arrested Derkach in absentia. This decision is closed in the unified register of court decisions. On November 13 of this year, the SBI also suspected Derkach of participating in a criminal organization.

In January 2023, President Vladimir Zelensky deprived Derkach of his citizenship and the Verkhovna Rada of his status as a people’s deputy.

Dubinsky continued to distance himself from his former press conference partner. In August of this year, he said that Vladimir Zelensky and people close to him, including the head of the Presidential Office Andriy Yermak, pushed him to cooperate with Derkach. In addition, Dubinsky insisted that for the publication of the “Poroshenko-Biden tapes,” the president’s team appointed Derkach’s people to the management of NNEGC Energoatom.

After the Shevchenko District Court arrested him, Dubinsky again mentioned the President of Ukraine in his statement. According to the people's deputy, the investigation against him was falsified on the orders of Vladimir Zelensky's team so that he would stop criticizing the authorities.

Meanwhile, on November 17, the Pechersky District Court arrested Dubinsky’s property. The decision indicated that the arrest was imposed as part of another criminal proceeding - an investigation by the State Bureau of Investigation into the people’s deputy’s possible legalization of proceeds from crime, part 1 of Article 209 of the Criminal Code , and tax evasion, part 1 of Article 212 of the Criminal Code . Like the proceedings on high treason and Dubinsky’s participation in a criminal organization, the State Security Service began an investigation after a statement by the executive director of the Anti-Corruption Center, Daria Kalenyuk.

The court arrested 24 apartments, 17 cars and 70 acres of land belonging to Dubinsky and his relatives.