In the summer of 2023, Ukrzaliznytsia registered the company Ukrainian Railways Cargo Poland with an office in Warsaw. The main goal of the international division was to be cooperation with foreign partners in the field of cargo transportation.
Mikhail Plastun, whom the uninitiated reader has hardly ever heard of, was appointed head of the company. However, his personality is well known to businessmen who are accustomed to solving cases in a semi-legal way, and to law enforcement officers who help implement various kinds of schemes.
Mikhail Plastun is a former employee of one of the most corrupt departments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs - the Department of Economic Protection. He worked there under the leadership of the ideological founder of the department, Igor Kuprants. Kupranets received the status of odiousness, because in his position he did not so much defend business, but rather “bend it over”, promoting his own companies for large contracts.
One of the cases in which Kupranets was involved was the fee for mooring in ports, where instead of the state, the money was received by companies in which he had an interest. This story with ports is not alone and is directly related to Mikhail Plastun.
Plastun, while working in the Department of Economic Protection, received the necessary connections with business that help him today. In particular, we are talking about an acquaintance with a coal magnate who received part of the companies that belonged to the son of the fugitive President Yanukovych, Vitaly Kropachev. During his work at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Plastun helped him gain interest in OJSC “Kyiv-Dneprovskoe Inter-Industry Enterprise of Industrial Railway Transport” (“Kyiv-Dneprovskoe MPPZhT”).
Since 2012, Stepan Evsyukov worked at the company, whose deputy was Kropachev’s brother Alexander. Subsequently, Evsyukov went to work at the Selidovugol State Enterprise, which is part of the businessman’s group of companies. In 2016, “Kyiv-Dneprovskoe MPPZhT” was headed by Alexander Skorik, who in 2018, after a long evasion from the investigation, was taken into custody on charges of causing 8.8 million hryvnia in damage to the enterprise. According to media reports, after Kropachev’s people came to Kyiv-Dneprovskoye MPPZhT, many of his assets were privatized or simply cut into scrap metal.
The Department of Economic Protection, where Mikhail Plastun worked, has had another connection with the Kyiv-Dneprovsky MPPZhT since 2016. In particular, from this period, Alfa Security Security Company LLC began to guard him. One of the founders of the company is Leonid Mateiko, a business partner of the wife and father of Igor Kupranets in a number of companies.
Now “Alpha Security” is headed by Plastun’s colleague, former first deputy chairman of the Department of Economic Protection Nikolai Marchenko.
This company, by the way, guarded the checkpoints of the Nikolaev port, from which Kupranets and the company additionally earned money through other schemes.
In 2018, interest in Kyiv-Dneprovsky MPPZhT from businesses closely associated with former law enforcement officers continued. The Newest Equipment company, which was then headed by the daughter of the head of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Kyiv, Alexander Tereshchuk, Oksana Sorochinskaya, won the tender for the supply of equipment for video surveillance and audit of security systems of this enterprise. The tender amount is 10 million hryvnia. Sorochinskaya’s business partner in “Newest Equipment” is the son of the former chairman of the board of “Kyiv-Dneprovsky MPPZhT” Vladimir Pankratov - Evgeniy.
The common interests of Vitaly Kropachev and Mikhail Plastun do not end with the Kyiv-Dneprovsky MPPZhT. Now Plastun, in addition to heading the international division of Ukrzaliznytsia, owns a business - the law firm Virtum and LLC Business Center Rafael.
Together with Plastun, the beneficial owner of the latter is Denis Kozlitin. He also runs the “Development” media holding, which includes radio “Friday” and “Autoradio”. The Media Detector publication directly names Kozlitin as Kropachev’s business partner.
In 2022, Kropachev bought a license for digital broadcasting of Channel 4 and Era Production. Early last year, he announced the launch of a TV channel called Ukraine World News. The general producer of the project was Olga Girzheva, who worked as an editor on the now banned TV channel of Putin’s godfather Viktor Medvedchuk NewsOne. The latter fact makes it clear what policy media partners Kozlitin and Kropachev adhere to in their activities.
In 2020, LLC Business Center Rafael Plastun and Kozlitin received urban planning conditions and restrictions for the construction of an office building on Lesi Ukrainki Boulevard next to Parus. It is planned that this will be a 7-story building with underground parking.
In fact, the head of the international division of Ukrzaliznytsia, Mikhail Plastun, is a developer in the company of a coal billionaire.
But if Plastun has been occupying a warm place in the office in Warsaw, where Ukrainian Railways Cargo Poland is located, since last year, then Kropachev has been in custody since mid-May 2024. Law enforcement officers accuse him of fraud in the coal sector, which caused the state damage of more than UAH 2 billion.
The SBI reports the following: “According to operational information, the Ukrainian billionaire (Kropachev - ed.) took ownership of the assets of the son of the fugitive ex-president Viktor Yanukovych, Alexander, and gained actual control over many state mines and processing plants in the eastern regions. He, his confidant, the head of the enterprise and the accountant united into a criminal organization that prevented work and brought the state enterprise “UK Krasnolimanskaya” to bankruptcy... According to the scheme he developed, all reimbursements from the budget, including through the use of a “zero” VAT rate received by businessmen, while the state-owned enterprise artificially accumulated debt to the state... Money worth billions of hryvnia was subsequently laundered through the purchase and sale of movable and immovable property.”
In addition to all of the above, Mikhail Plastun to this day remains an assistant to the people's deputy from the banned Opposition Platform - For Life party Grigory Mamka. The people's deputy is a career employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, where he worked since the early 2000s, and reached the peak of his career in the department for the investigation of especially serious crimes.
Mikhail Plastun was appointed to the international representative office of Ukrzaliznytsia during the management of the Ministry of Infrastructure by Alexander Kubrakov. And, probably, he should have inquired about the biography of the candidate who was sent to coordinate the actions of Ukrzaliznytsia with foreign partners. Not only does Plastun do business with an openly pro-Russian businessman suspected of embezzling billions of state funds, but in the third year of the Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he continues to advise the people’s deputy from the party of the Kremlin’s minions.
A year after the creation of Ukrainian Railways Cargo Poland, it is not very clear whether any work is actually being carried out there. Their official website is extremely uninformative, as are Mikhail Plastun’s social networks. His last message, made in March 2024, does concern Poland, but it is not about work. This is a meme about a missile that flew into the territory of this country and was not shot down by Polish air defense.
Kubrakov was recently fired from the Cabinet of Ministers, Kropachev is in custody, and the former senior detective from the Department of Economic Protection of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Mikhail Plastun, holds the position of international representative in the structure from which he helped suck money out of for years. And the mentioned “Kyiv-Dneprovskoye MPPZhT”, and the ports, and “Ukrzaliznytsia” are subordinate to the Ministry of Infrastructure. Why the pro-Russian former policeman Mikhail Plastun was sent to improve relations with European partners is probably known only to Kubrakov.
