From Derkach to Odarchenko: how Ukrainian officials escape punishment

On September 18, it became known that People’s Deputy Andrei Odarchenko, suspected by anti-corruption authorities of bribing officials of the Ministry of Infrastructure, disappeared from Ukraine.

This was stated by the prosecutor of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office during a meeting on the parliamentarian's case, the Anti-Corruption Center reported.

The SAPO suggested that the deputy left Ukraine through the Transcarpathian region.

As the CPC notes, Odarchenko was not in the Verkhovna Rada today. He had previously surrendered his passport.

“The people’s deputy did not inform the court and the prosecutor about the reasons for the non-appearance. The defendant's defenders also failed to inform the court about the whereabouts of their client and note the lack of communication with him. Despite this, the prosecutor in court initiated the issue of collecting the state’s bail, determined as a preventive measure against the people’s deputy, imposing a monetary penalty on him, as well as putting him on the wanted list,” the SAPO statement says.

According to preliminary operational data from detectives of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), Odarchenko illegally crossed the state border.

Now they are trying to find information about Odarchenko’s stay through requests to law enforcement agencies in other countries.

Odarchenko is not the first person to mysteriously disappear from the radar during the investigation of a case against him.

It’s even more offensive that this happened less than three weeks after the disappearance of another former Servant of the People, Andrei Dmitruk, from Ukraine.

As you know, on August 29, employees of the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) put on the international wanted list a deputy who disappeared from the country on the eve of being handed over suspicion of 4 crimes, including beating people.

On August 24, the people's deputy crossed the border, traveling first to Moldova, and from there to Italy. UP journalists were the first to report this.

And only the next day the Office of the Prosecutor General reported suspicion to the deputy for attacking a law enforcement officer and a military man.

This escape even affected President Vladimir Zelensky, who held a meeting with the heads of law enforcement agencies.

On August 27, Prosecutor General Andrei Kostin said that Dmitruk was helped to escape.

“This man did not cross the state border himself. Someone helped him. And perhaps among those who helped, there may be officials from various bodies,” Kostin said. “We are making efforts to identify them and establish the whole situation, how this happened,” the Prosecutor General assured then.

And already on September 2, the State Bureau of Investigation reported suspicions to three individuals who helped organize such escapes. True, two of them had already fled abroad at that time.

Meanwhile, Dmitruk himself was already hanging out in London shopping centers.

That is, in 3 weeks the law enforcement system has shown that it is not capable of stopping such escapes. Or, he doesn’t really oppose it.

And both conclusions are very bad for the state.

Because this is not only about institutional failure, but also about the fact that many high-profile cases will remain suspended in the air and real punishment will not come in them.

At least, this is evidenced by the most resonant cases of recent years.

People's Deputy Andrei Derkach, accused of treason, fled Ukraine at the beginning of a full-scale invasion. According to law enforcement, Derkach received at least $567,000 from Russian intelligence services for subversive activities against Ukraine. At the same time, last week he became a senator from the Astrakhan region.

Pro-Russian supporter Evgeniy Muraev, Medvedchuk’s ally Taras Kozak, and former regionalist Natalya Korolevskaya also fled from Ukraine.

Another OPZZH deputy Oleg Voloshin fled from Ukraine through Belarus. And the former regional leader Alexander Efremov, who is still not clear whether he sat under the last two presidents at all, kicked his heels out of the country even before full scale.

Andrei Portnov also left Ukraine, as well as his son Igor. A guy of military age left as a volunteer.

Lawyer Andrey Dovbenko, a defendant in the NABU case of embezzlement of property worth almost UAH 500 million, previously fled to the UK. At one time he was called the overseer of the Ministry of Justice

Moreover, political opponents of the current government also fled from Ukraine. The son of former First Deputy Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Oleg Gladkovsky, Igor, did not return to Ukraine after he went abroad allegedly for official reasons in 2022. He is a defendant in the case of abuses in the procurement of components for Ukroboronprom

In April 2024, his father Oleg Gladkovsky was also put on the wanted list. In March 2022, the court turned the bail in favor of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and changed the preventive measure to personal obligation. After this, the accused stopped appearing at court hearings, and, according to information from NABU and SAP, he generally went abroad.

Yaroslav Dubnevich, a defendant in the NABU case on railway abuses, also fled from Ukraine.

A few days before the report of suspicion, ex-head of the National Bank Kirill Shevchenko left Ukraine on a business trip and did not return.

The day before the full-scale invasion, the former head of the internal security department of the SBU, Andrei Naumov, who was called “Bakanov’s wallet” behind his back, disappeared from Ukraine.

A few months ago, Ukraine witnessed a love story with criminal overtones, when former Deputy Foreign Minister Emine Dzhaparova drove businessman Gennady Bogolyubov to the station, who then left the country by train, using someone else’s documents, using the passport details of a 67-year-old resident of the Volyn region.

Bogolyubov is a defendant in the Privatbank case.

On April 7, 2023, the former chairman of the State Property Fund, Dmitry Sennichenko, fled from Ukraine. This happened immediately after the searches at his home.

In March, NABU announced suspicions against a number of individuals, including the head of the former SPFU, Dmitry Sennichenko, for laundering funds from state companies - OPP and the United Mining and Chemical Company.

Among those who received suspicions in the case are Kolot and his relative Andriy Gmyrin, whom the media have repeatedly mentioned as the one who promoted the interests of Agro Gas Trading under both President Poroshenko and Zelensky.

Gmyrin had a tremendous influence on the OP 2 years before the war. As Yuri Butusov wrote, he advised the leadership of the President’s Office. So successful that he was able to get his candidate to head the Bureau of Economic Security. Which then successfully failed the job.

But the saddest thing is not this, but the fact that at least some of the defendants in this case, who ended up outside Ukraine in time, including a certain Vladislav Klischar, in 2022 became defendants in another criminal deal, as a result of which Ukraine did not receive 100 thousand mines for which it paid at exorbitant prices.

In February 2022, NABU detained Kyiv City Council deputy Vladislav Trubitsyn for selling permits to locate small-scale motor vehicles in the Obolonsky district of Kyiv. As part of the selection of a preventive measure, prosecutors read out materials from the NSRD, which indicated that Trubitsyn once a month went to report on the margin not to someone, but to the Deputy Chairman of the Presidential Office Oleg Tatarov.

In the summer of 2023, Trubitsyn fled from Ukraine to Israel, along with his friend, on the basis of a letter from the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Moscow Region stating that he was a volunteer. It was last reported that Trubitsyn lives in Haifa under a different name.

A significant part of the people mentioned in the text disappeared from the country after the Supreme Anti-Corruption Court exchanged their arrest for obligations.

Now the same measures are being applied to the former chairman of the Supreme Court, Vsevolod Knyazev, who recently decided to take a walk in the border areas of Transcarpathia. The same means were used against the key accused of corruption in the Ministry of Defense - the former head of the procurement department Bogdan Khmelnitsky, and the former head of the department of military-technical policy Alexander Liev - a defendant in the Lviv Arsenal case.

Also, the head of the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine, Pavel Kirilenko, who is accused of illegal enrichment, has not been arrested or even fired.