Apartments for the Price of a Smartphone. How the SBI Director’s Brother Received 143 Properties from a Developer the Bureau Would Later Investigate

This text is published as part of Initiative 143—an act of solidarity by Ukrainian journalists who have chosen to stand by their colleagues from Slidstvo.Info and AntAC, whom the Pechersk court barred from publishing this investigation. Even before the court injunction, journalists Alina Stryzhak (AntAC) and Maksym Savchuk (Slidstvo.Info) had gathered all the information, and the investigation was ready for publication. One of the co-authors, who is not covered by the ban, passed the text to our newsroom. Since such an injunction looks like an outright act of censorship, we, together with the other participants in the initiative, consider it necessary to make the investigation public.

Family portrait

If you go looking for relatives of the director of the State Bureau of Investigation, Oleksii Sukhachov, on the Russian social network Odnoklassniki, you are bound to come across this photo. Five men stand in front of a green fence. The picture was posted in 2011 with the caption “my husband and his brothers.”

You will recognize Oleksii Sukhachov at once—he is at the center of the frame. And on the far right is his brother, Oleksandr Sukhachov, a far less public figure than the SBI director.

Oleksandr is a little over six years older than Oleksii. Open sources have little on him: judging by social media, he is originally from Kharkiv and was a registered sole proprietor from 2007 to 2015, his declared line of business being the rental of real estate. Oleksandr Sukhachov has also served as a company director and, from time to time, held stakes in private firms. According to Nashi Groshi, in 2023 he worked in the security service of the Ukrainian Railways in Kyiv. Oleksandr can also be found in a 2025 photo of employees of the state-owned Ukrgasbank. In phone contact lists, his number was saved as that of a representative of various banks.

At first glance, there is nothing out of the ordinary. But if you go to an administrative services center and order an itemized statement of Oleksandr Sukhachov’s real estate from the State Register of Property Rights to Immovable Property, be prepared to be handed a stack of 155 pages. That is the size of the statement listing the property registered to the SBI director’s own brother.

An apartment for the price of a smartphone

According to the register’s records, in 2018 Oleksii Sukhachov’s brother became the owner of 40 percent of the units in an apartment building at 13 Yulii Chyhyryn Street in Kharkiv. The address is home to the IT-Park Manufactura residential complex built by the developer Stroy City. And over 2018–2020, the SBI director’s brother assembled a collection of 143 units in two Kharkiv residential complexes at addresses that property listing sites describe as Stroy City projects.

“A unique project for Kharkiv’s real estate market. It manages to combine office space and residential apartments within a single ecosystem. The plans include a hundred compact one-room apartments, an apart-hotel and open-plan space,”—that was how one property sales site described IT-Park Manufactura.

In 2019, the developer was offering apartments in the complex at an average price of almost $800 per square meter. So it would be logical to assume that Oleksandr Sukhachov spent millions of dollars acquiring all this property. But that is not the case.

According to documents in the authors’ possession, he was buying up property in IT-Park Manufactura at book value, far below market prices. So low, in fact, that it bears comparison with the price of a smartphone.

For example, on July 9, 2018, in two purchase agreements, Oleksandr Sukhachov acquired 30 apartments in this Kharkiv complex. The price per apartment ranged from 24,600 to 48,900 hryvnias—at the exchange rate of the day, between $932 and $1,856 each. For these 30 apartments, the brother of Oleksii Sukhachov, then a deputy head of a department at the Prosecutor General’s Office, paid a total of just over a million hryvnias (at the time, $39,300). Two days later, Oleksandr Sukhachov repeated the feat, buying another 28 apartments for less than $33,000. The cheapest cost 26,500 hryvnias, the most expensive—38,700.

It was the details of these transactions that proved highly sensitive for the seller—a company called Parkovyi-2 LLC. On receiving an inquiry from journalist Alina Stryzhak, the company turned to Kyiv’s Pechersk District Court. And Judge Serhii Vovk barred Stryzhak, Slidstvo.Info, and the Anti-Corruption Action Center from disseminating information about Oleksandr Sukhachov’s assets, deals and investments. On July 13, Parkovyi-2 filed a lawsuit insisting that “information about real estate and concluded transactions is part of an individual’s private life and contains the developer’s trade secrets.”

But the story of the Kharkiv real estate of Oleksii Sukhachov’s brother is not only about “trade secrets” and “an individual’s private life.” It is also a story about the relationship between a Kharkiv developer and the SBI, which investigated its activities.

When you investigate one of “your own”

At the time of the 2018 apartment purchases, Parkovyi-2 LLC belonged to Ivan Kozikov, who then was an attorney and is now linked to Stroy City—the company whose projects include IT-Park Manufactura and a complex on Heroiv Kharkova Avenue where Oleksandr Sukhachov owned property.

The connection can be traced through Liudmyla Riabykh—the sister of the wife of Stroy City’s former owner, businessman Yehor Maslennikov. You may have heard of him thanks to the pricey Rolls-Royce spotted by Ukrainska Pravda journalists in Monte Carlo in December 2024. From Maslennikov personally, Oleksandr Sukhachov bought another 11 apartments. And again—for a token sum.

But discounted apartments are not the only thread linking Oleksandr Sukhachov to the developer. According to the register of court rulings, in 2021, while investigating suspected illegal construction following a report from the Security Service of Ukraine, officers of the National Police conducted searches of Stroy City’s offices and found the seals of firms that belong, or previously belonged, directly to Oleksandr Sukhachov, as well as the financial records of a company he owned.

One might assume, then, that Oleksandr Sukhachov may have been involved with the developer not only as a buyer but as an investor. But did he have the money for it? Reaching Oleksandr Sukhachov directly proved impossible—he did not respond to calls or inquiries.

In that same year, 2021, the police and prosecutors opened criminal proceedings over Stroy City’s unauthorized construction. Put briefly and simply, the developer would put up fences in the middle of Kharkiv, bring in the excavators, and start building residential complexes.

In particular, the case concerned the buildings at whose addresses Oleksandr Sukhachov was acquiring property. That is what law enforcement set out to examine.

But the police did not investigate the case for long. In December 2022, a deputy prosecutor general handed the investigation to the SBI’s main investigative directorate. For a time, the bureau looked into a case featuring a company likely linked to the brother of its own director—but in the end, no notices of suspicion were served on anyone.

Stroy City’s owner Yehor Maslennikov, as reported by Bihus.Info journalists, signed his old construction business over to his wife’s sister and opened a new one—in Dubai. After that, the unauthorized-construction case the SBI had been investigating landed back with the police in August of last year (this time in Chernihiv Oblast), where it was eventually closed. And that, in all likelihood, would have been the final word on the unauthorized builds.

But by a strange—or, on the contrary, perfectly predictable—coincidence, the proceedings were reopened after the people mentioned in this investigation received information requests from journalists.

As of today, Oleksandr Sukhachov no longer owns nearly all of the 143 apartments and offices.

In response to the journalists’ inquiry, the State Bureau of Investigation replied that neither the bureau nor its director possesses “information concerning the participation of Oleksandr Sukhachov in any economic activity, including with the developer Stroy City, or his acquisition of any real estate.” Asked about the pretrial investigation into the developer’s actions, the SBI said that no decision to close the proceedings had been made, and stressed that assigning a pretrial investigation to investigators from other agencies falls within the competence of the prosecution service.