Maxim Lutsky is trying to wash away the criminal trail from himself through a fictitious device in the Ukrainian Armed Forces

For some very controversial characters, the war became an opportunity to wash away a negative trail that had lasted for years. A significant number of former top politicians who found themselves “overboard” from power during the 2019 elections have become outspoken patriots and defenders of Ukraine since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation. We won’t name names; everyone already knows them. But there are also those who supported the fugitive president Yanukovych, remained in Ukraine and did not come to the attention of law enforcement officers.

One of these politicians who previously supported the pro-Russian trend in Ukraine is Maxim Lutsky. For the first time in political life, he appeared together with Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna. In 2006, Lutsky was elected as a people's deputy of the 5th convocation, but already in 2010 he was elected from the Party of Regions. The politician’s further career was connected exclusively with the “regionals”: ​​in the Verkhovna Rada of the 6th convocation he was appointed head of the Committee on Education and Science; in 2012, Lutsky became an adviser to the then Prime Minister Mykola Azarov. In the Krovosis Government, he was responsible for his profile - education. Already in 2013, by Decree of Viktor Yanukovych, Lutsky was appointed to the post of head of the Solomensky district state administration of Kyiv. He led the district until March 22, 2014, when the ex-president and his supporters fled from Ukraine and the new government fired Lutsky.

NAUvskaya treasury

The fate of most of the hardcore “blue” politicians turned out differently, but for Lutsky everything was great. For a while he “lay low.” At the early elections of people's deputies of Ukraine, Lutsky ran in his native Solomenka from the now banned OPZZH. Of course, he did not get into parliament, nor did any other representatives of the pro-Russian OPZZH in right-bank Ukraine. As sources who collaborated with Lutsky during the elections told us, no one dreamed of victory. It was clear that Servant of the People, against the backdrop of Zelensky’s triumph, would gain an overwhelming majority, and the pro-Russian forces in Kyiv had no chance.

However, Lutsky’s run for the Verkhovna Rada was not accidental. Thus, the ex-official reminded himself.

At the same time, Lutsky did not give up attempts to take control of the National Aviation University, which is located in the Solomensky district of Kyiv. The politician’s interest in the university is understandable: the university’s budget is about 700 million hryvnia, but this is not the main thing. The university owns dozens of actively developed land plots in the center of Kyiv. University management earns millions of dollars from apartment sales schemes.

It all looks like this: the university transfers a site for construction to a specific developer. An investment agreement is signed with him, according to which a certain part of the apartments, for example, 20%, becomes the property of the university. In the future, with additional transactions, this percentage decreases and as a result is almost equal to zero. The management of the institution receives the difference as a bribe. Considering that we are talking about dozens of apartments in just one building, the price of the issue is about 2-3 million dollars.

Finally, when the houses are rented out and some minimal part of the housing falls into the hands of the university, “our own people” move in: those who bought an apartment with risks at the bottom of the market or those close to the university management.

Vyshevskaya revolution

Maxim Lutsky became rector of the university just 2 years ago. As sources in the establishment told Antikor, he had been working towards this for years. The previous head of the university, Vladimir Isaenko, was fired with a scandal: several criminal proceedings were launched against the teacher regarding the deliberate non-payment of wages to NAU employees and the accrual of illegal bonuses. People close to the university say that criminal proceedings are justified, but Lutsky could not have done it without him: he stimulated the investigation in order to quickly remove his competitor.

As a result, in September 2021, Lutsky managed to achieve a positive result for himself - he was appointed rector of NAU. Where the Ministry of Education looked before appointing the leadership of one of the largest universities in Ukraine is a rhetorical question, but its result was obvious: the total cutting of land plots continued at NAU.

Already in December of the same year, the press began to write en masse that Lutsk was giving away hectares of land to NAU in the capital for next to nothing. People's Deputy Roman Grischuk, elected in the Solomensky district of Kyiv, spoke out against the rector of the university.

But there was also a part of the people’s representatives who supported Maxim Lutsky. The NAU supervisory board included 3 people's deputies, all from the Servant of the People - Yulia Grishina, Valery Kolyukh and the odious Bogdan Torokhtiy, who became incredibly rich during the war.

Despite a powerful lobby in parliament, Lutsk failed to retain his position. In September 2023, the authorities began to discuss the likely reorganization of the university in their offices, and in mid-October a decision was made to form two universities on the basis of NAU: the Kyiv Aviation Institute and the Ukrainian State Flight Academy in Kropyvnytskyi.

Taking into account the reorganization of the legal entity, the Cabinet of Ministers introduced liquidators (temporary administration), and Lutsky should have been fired, but he played ahead of the curve. On October 3, he wrote on his Facebook page that he had decided to join the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Perhaps in this way the former “regional” tried to sabotage his own dismissal, but in fact he was removed.

Instead of the rector, a liquidation commission was introduced, which immediately began to raise all the documentation that was inconvenient for Lutsky. According to Antikor sources, the unlawful provision of ownership of several dozen apartments has already been discovered, but this is still the tip of the iceberg. If law enforcement officers take a serious look at illegal transactions at the university, it will be possible to identify fraud amounting to tens of millions of dollars. Moreover, we are talking not only about land and development, although this is the main thing. NAU is a huge structure in which dozens of people were fictitiously employed, and the university premises were rented out according to documents for next to nothing. The rest was black cash in the management's pocket.

Realizing that if the leadership changes, the situation could become difficult, Lutsky fictitiously joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine. As serviceman Alexander Piddubny writes, he was assigned to military unit A1236 to the position of operational duty officer of radio intelligence with the rank of captain. A few days later, Lutsky received the rank of major, although he was practically never seen in his unit. Then the ex-regional soldier was urgently transferred to another military unit. Why? Because in one military unit there has been a fuss about an odious senior officer, and they are trying to hide him.

Maxim Lutsky, under his uniform, is trying to hide his transactions in the NAU, but will he be able to do this, how to whiten himself from the total support of the pro-Russian vector of the Party of Regions? Times are different now, so it is unlikely that it will be possible to hide the real motives for such actions.