In March 2024, Radio Liberty published a text about Kirilenko’s undeclared property acquired in 2020-2023, that is, when he served in the regional administration.
When in 2019, during the presidential campaign, Viktor Remsky was seen surrounded by presidential candidate Vladimir Zelensky, the public became tense. They started talking about the fact that Remsky’s gratitude for his help in a difficult region would be the main position in the Donetsk regional administration.
Until mid-2018, Remsky was deputy chairman of the Donetsk regional administration Pavel Zhebrivsky, responsible for the most important areas such as infrastructure restoration and passenger transportation. The main thing is that he was involved in, if not the architect of, the largest corruption scandals in the region related to smuggling and passenger transportation at crossing points of the demarcation line in the Donetsk region. Probably reacting to various disturbances, “Zelensky” removed Remsky from sight.
And the then unknown young employee of the prosecutor’s office, Pavel Kirilenko, was appointed head of the regional administration. And everyone breathed a sigh of relief. There were no blemishes on Kirilenko’s biography, there were no questions about his career path, his declarations did not seem to contain any contradictions, he was local. He left Crimea, where he worked during the annexation period, and broke off relations with his brother, a convinced separatist who remained to serve the Donetsk “republic.” Kirilenko seemed decent and “one of us.”
His four years in office passed quietly. Kirilenko did not engage in self-PR with “patriotic” special effects, like Zhebrivsky: he generally avoided cameras, almost never gave interviews, and rarely gathered journalists. There were no questions about his behavior, lifestyle, or property status. It did its job - without the wow factor, but without any serious failures. He suited both the locals and Kyiv, where they eventually began to promote him. In September 2023, Pavel Kirilenko headed the Antimonopoly Committee - as he himself said, at the invitation of the president. In 2024, rumors began to circulate that he was preparing to become attorney general.
This is probably why the crash occurred. In March 2024, Radio Liberty published a text about Kirilenko’s undeclared property acquired in 2020-2023, that is, when he served in the regional administration. All property - a house in the Kyiv region, a number of “elite” apartments in Kyiv and Uzhgorod, a car, etc. — was registered to the parents and grandmother of Kirilenko’s wife. The explanations of its origin and use that Kirilenko gave looked ridiculous and were at odds with the explanations from his mother-in-law and father-in-law.
But the media text itself left mixed impressions: in places it looked as if its author was experiencing insurmountable difficulties in providing confirmation of the information he had. That is, I tried, but could not confirm the “drain”.
However, this was enough for anti-corruption authorities to launch an investigation against Kirilenko, find even more hidden property and seek his arrest.
Personnel OP(G?)
Since 2014, Donbass has had no luck in finding leaders. The first after the Russian invasion - Sergei Taruta and Alexander Kikhtenko - clearly could not cope with the challenges. Their successor, Pavel Zhebrivsky, almost openly capitalized on the opportunities provided by the legal gray area that the war created.
When he was finally fired in 2018 - not as a result of numerous journalistic investigations, but through failed local elections - President Petro Poroshenko tried to install his protege in Kyiv in the same way as Zelensky Kirilenko. Poroshenko appointed Zhebrivsky as an auditor of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, but, probably, international partners did not appreciate his wit, and Zhebrivsky never began working for NABU.
And in Kramatorsk, his place was taken by a man who headed the local SBU for the entire period of his governorship and could not help but be aware of his schemes and, in one way or another, not participate in them. But Alexander Kuts, the same successor of Zhebrivsky, behaved as quietly as his successor, Kirilenko. Moreover, as an employee of the SBU (he was not fired from his position as a result of his appointment), Kut took the opportunity not to make his property declarations public. But journalists found expensive property in the capital from his closest relatives.
The opportunities for quick illicit enrichment in a war-stricken area have been there all along, but have changed. Zhebrivsky and his team came up with humanitarian logistics centers that were used to deliver goods to parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions not controlled by Ukraine, and also created opaque conditions for passenger transportation between and from/to crossing points of the demarcation line.
There were rumors about Kirilenko about “protecting” the illegal trade in alcohol in the Donetsk region, where legal trade in alcoholic beverages has been prohibited since 2022. There is no confirmation of these rumors, but everyone knew about the illegal trade. In any case, the young head of the region began to acquire property, as we already know, before 2022.
If anti-corruption authorities conducted any investigations against Zhebrivsky, Remsky, Kuts, this did not lead to any measures.
Pavel Zhebrivsky, after the failure of his appointment to NABU, threatening to return to political activity and fight corruption, moved instead to write books “about Ukrainian identity as a source of energy for the successful development of society, about the idea of happiness as a criterion for the development and assessment of modern politics, about Ukrainian political nation as an instrument for the development of a strong state and a guarantor of its victories.”
Viktor Remsky (questions to whose declaration remained unanswered) is still the head of the regional branch of the National Olympic Committee.
It also has a “security risk management agency” and an associated website, which declares its mission to “help citizens understand how organized crime and corrupt officials operate within government institutions.” Even after the elections, he remained in Zelensky’s orbit: in 2021, he was seen celebrating the birthday of the odious deputy head of the president’s office, Oleg Tatarov.
Alexander Kuts has been heading the SBU in the Kharkov region since 2022.
