EXPLAINED: Zelensky’s Headaches Increase as Prosecutor General Flees Ukraine

On the morning of Sept. 14, Ukrainians woke up to news that shocked many: Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko, who a few days earlier had submitted his resignation because of a corruption scandal involving one of his subordinates, had recorded a video address himself. In it, he stated that he had signed a notice of suspicion against the heads of the anti-corruption bodies whose detectives had exposed his own subordinates for corruption. (According to the Ukrainian legal system, a “notice of suspicion” is the official procedural step, prior to indictment or arrest, indicating the status of a person as the subject of a criminal proceeding.)JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. In particular, according to Kravchenko, the notice of suspicion was signed against Semen Kryvonos, head of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), and a “person close” to the head of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), Oleksandr Klymenko. The Schrödinger’s prosecutor general: Why he fled and how events unfolded The nervous and rather uneven tone with which Kravchenko addressed the public suggested that the statement had been recorded hastily. Then information emerged that Prosecutor General Kravchenko had left the country. He allegedly crossed the checkpoint on the Ukrainian-Polish border at 2 a.m. Kyiv time on the morning of Sept. 14. An hour earlier, his wife had allegedly crossed at the same location. For Ukraine, this is not unprecedented. In late 2024, lawmakers Artem Dmytruk and Andrii Odarchenko had left the country. Both were former members of the “Servant of the People” party who had appeared in anti-corruption investigations. They joined another figure – former National Bank Governor Kyrylo Shevchenko, who had fled in September 2022. Other Topics of Interest Zelensky Signs a Decree Ousting Kravchenko as Prosecutor General The decree was issued under martial-law provisions after Zelensky urged parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, to support Kravchenko’s removal without delay. Kyiv Post sources in the Prosecutor General’s Office say that Kravchenko’s disappearance and his statement had come as a surprise to everyone there. “We only found out ourselves while we were driving to work,” one of the employees told us. And throughout the morning, they were allegedly all “running around in a frenzy,” trying to understand what was happening. But plans to “dig something up” on the heads of the anti-corruption institutions had been known to everyone for a long time. In fact, the notice of suspicion, the text of which Kravchenko later published on his Telegram channel, contains information that journalists and members of the selection committee for the NABU director’s position had asked Kryvonos about 10 years ago – and it was precisely this information that prompted him to withdraw from the competition for the NABU director’s position at the time. Specifically, Kravchenko accuses Kryvonos of forging official documents in order to obtain illegal benefits. Kryvonos is also accused of fictitiously adopting a child in order to avoid liability in court. The question is: how was he able to send the notice of suspicion to the leadership of NABU and SAPO? Most likely, by mail: the state-owned Ukrposhta allows the delivery of important documents. Kryvonos himself said he had not officially received the notice of suspicion signed by Kravchenko and had not seen the paper document. During a briefing with journalists on the afternoon of Sept. 14, Kryvonos described the published document as an “informational genre of Telegram suspicion.” A fierce debate erupted among analysts and politicians over why Kravchenko had left the country. One widely held theory is that he is simply unstable and became afraid that his subordinates, who have already been detained as part of Operation “Carthage,” might “give him up,” leaving him facing a notice of suspicion himself. “I personally know the Prosecutor General and have seen a lot of his work in court. I’ll say this: from what I observed, he is extremely unstable, emotional, capable of being aggressive and vindictive,” prominent journalist Iryna Romaliiska wrote on Facebook. Another theory, held by anti-corruption activists, is that the authorities – and President Volodymyr Zelensky – deliberately allowed Kravchenko to flee, after first giving him the opportunity to announce suspicion against the leadership of the anti-corruption agencies. “Obviously, the video recorded by Kravchenko has nothing to do with genuine procedural work or evidence. Instead, it is an act of revenge and an attempt to divert attention from his own involvement in protecting call centers. A year ago, it was precisely Kravchenko and his already-dismissed associate Maria Vdovychenko who personally signed procedural documents in criminal proceedings against NABU detectives that are now collapsing or have already been closed,” said a statement from the Anti-Corruption Action Center, a civil society organization that has conducted anti-corruption investigations for 15 years. It should nevertheless be noted that Parliament is only due to vote on the prosecutor general’s dismissal today, Sept. 15. Kravchenko therefore crossed the border entirely legally, while still officially serving as the country’s chief prosecutor. He could not have been prevented from leaving. Zelensky’s headache Meanwhile, President Zelensky said that Kravchenko should be dismissed by parliament as quickly as possible. Kravchenko himself said that he had supposedly traveled to Paris to attend a session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). The Prosecutor General’s Office published a corresponding document. However, the event’s program was quickly found, and Kravchenko was not listed among the participants. But The authorities had little time to make decisions. By the afternoon, President Zelensky, without waiting for any further actions by Kravchenko in Europe, suspended the prosecutor general from office by decree. Martial law allows the president to do so. This reinforced the belief that, in all likelihood, Kravchenko’s actions had not been coordinated with the authorities and had genuinely come as a surprise to officials in the Office of the President. Now the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, must vote on the prosecutor general’s dismissal. Late in the evening an official statement from the Prosecutor General’s Office appeared, prompting many in the country to breathe a sigh of relief: no notices of suspicion had been sent to the heads of NABU and SAPO. “Within the framework of this criminal proceeding, no person, including the head of an anti-corruption agency, was notified of suspicion in the manner prescribed by the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine,” the Prosecutor General’s Office press service said. Different groups received the news differently. Critics of the “anti-corruption establishment” saw it as President Zelensky “backing down,” particularly because, in their view, there are grounds for pursuing the leadership of NABU and SAPO. Activists, journalists and much of Ukraine’s engaged civil society, by contrast, saw it as a victory for the “good” side. But another question is now troubling everyone: What happens next to the Prosecutor General’s Office? The Prosecutor General’s Office is a crucial institution in Ukraine’s system of checks and balances. Under the Constitution, the Prosecutor General is appointed and dismissed by the president of Ukraine with the consent of the Verkhovna Rada. It is therefore unsurprising that the position has traditionally been regarded as part of the president’s chain of command. Formally, the Prosecutor General’s Office oversees compliance with the law in investigations conducted by state agencies and represents the interests of the state in court. But during the era of Ukraine’s “strong” presidents – particularly Leonid Kuchma, Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych – the office was an extraordinarily powerful state institution, at times functioning almost as a punitive instrument in the president’s hands. It could launch criminal proceedings against virtually anyone and for practically any reason. This was especially true under the post-Soviet transitional economy, where almost any business could potentially be found to have violated the law – for instance: a land plot had not been properly registered, taxes had allegedly been evaded somewhere, an export transaction had not been processed correctly across the border, and so on. This practice was dubbed “economic supervision.” “Economic supervision” was used to launch criminal cases against businesses. And not only against businesses belonging to opposition activists and politicians, but against businesses more broadly – so that those very criminal proceedings could later be closed in exchange for bribes. This was one of the reasons behind both of Ukraine’s Maidan revolutions – in 2004-05 and 2013-14. According to Ukrainian historians and analysts, support for the popular protests from a dissatisfied middle class played a key role in the victory of both revolutionary movements. After the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, the prosecution authorities underwent partial reform. The Prosecutor General’s “economic supervision” powers were finally taken away and transferred to a newly reformed institution – the Bureau of Economic Security. Nevertheless, even the reformed Prosecutor General’s Office remained – albeit no longer all-powerful — a fairly powerful instrument of state power in the president’s hands. The Prosecutor General, for example, has the authority to request any investigation from other law-enforcement agencies and, at his or her discretion, transfer it to one of the Prosecutor General’s Office departments. It is therefore unsurprising that many high-profile investigations conducted by various agencies during the presidencies of Petro Poroshenko and Zelensky were taken over by the Prosecutor General and subsequently “buried” or quietly stalled by the Prosecutor General’s Office. The most notorious case was the removal from the Department of Special Investigations of cases concerning the shootings of Maidan activists and the subsequent stalling of those investigations within the General Prosecutor’s Office. In 2017, this even triggered a political scandal and a confrontation within the Prosecutor General’s Office itself. At the same time, prosecutors themselves were not shy about speaking to journalists in a condescending manner. In November 2020, for example, Kyiv Post published a critical article about then-Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova. According to journalist Anna Myroniuk, Venediktova allegedly summoned the publication’s editor-in-chief, Brian Bonner, to her office and “threatened to sue.” A year later, Kyiv Post journalists published another critical article examining the progress of reforms and the work of the Prosecutor General, questioning her effectiveness. According to Myroniuk, Venediktova then opened – as Bonner allegedly told her – cases against the publication’s then-owner, the late Adnan Kivan, which she later closed, Myroniuk said at the time. The independence of NABU and SAPO, and their lack of accountability to the president-controlled Prosecutor General’s Office, was a new development that the authorities could not tolerate for long. In the summer of 2025, the government attempted to restore the anti-corruption agencies’ accountability to the Prosecutor General, granting Ruslan Kravchenko the right to intervene in NABU investigations and take them over even at the development stage. This was a rollback of the reforms, and it triggered large-scale protests, forcing the authorities to reverse course. Nevertheless, Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko, who had been appointed shortly before the attack on NABU and SAPO and, according to rumors circulating within the Prosecutor General’s Office itself, had been appointed specifically to lead an assault on the “anti-corruption activists,” did not abandon his efforts to target his colleagues. The notice of suspicion announced on Telegram on the day of his fleeing Ukraine may have been a last-ditch attempt to influence the situation. What will happen now to the president’s main “sword”? Activists and some observers believe that this “sword” should also be taken away from the president. Specifically, they argue that the Prosecutor General should be appointed not by presidential decision but through a competitive selection process – a move that would further reduce the president’s power. For now, it is possible that President Zelensky has not yet made up his mind. He has not said anything about a competitive selection process. But neither has he submitted a new candidate for Prosecutor General to parliament.