Runaway Syndrome: How Not to Turn the State Into a Meme

Ruslan Kravchenko, now prosecutor general no longer, set the country on its ear. Not only did he suddenly become so independent that the president promptly cleared his path to the exit; he also went ahead on his own (unless, of course, the script was written in the presidential office, which is also possible) and launched another attack on NABU and SAPO, announced in the media long ago.

Its center, though, was not SAPO head Oleksandr Klymenko—the argument against him, the traitor MP Fedir Khrystenko, has long been kept ready in the SBU’s “dungeons”—but NABU director Semen Kryvonos. Over two days Kravchenko emptied a fair bucket of compromising creativity over his head. From accusations of fictitious paternity in pursuit of an amnesty and involvement in a corrupt land scheme to colorful code names and what is said to be the director’s voice on the tapes. Fight fire with fire, as the saying goes. You give me the ruinous Operation Carthage against call centers—I give you a two-faced “Janus” with land.

Everything moved at speed, including the reactions of the president, the heads of the anti-corruption agencies and even Ukrposhta chief executive Ihor Smilianskyi, who grew bold enough to suggest in a post on Facebook that the outcome of this national drama might depend on him: on whether his employee delivered the notice of suspicion Kravchenko had sent to Kryvonos. The public had two days of fun with it.

Kravchenko was also reminded of the family ties with SAPO he had announced last summer while explaining his future relations with the enslaved anti-corruption crowd (the family, evidently, never worked out), and of the “stolen” government car in which he sped through the Shehyni crossing at two in the morning on a five-day mission to France for a PACE event where, as it turned out, nobody was expecting him. PACE subsequently confirmed that neither Kravchenko nor his representatives had taken part in the event.

Journalists also put Kryvonos and Klymenko through it at a briefing they came out to give on Monday evening. But having confirmed yet another attack on the anti-corruption agencies, the NABU director chose not to comment on the “fakesю” Not that day, and not the next either, when Kravchenko released the episode alleging corruption during Kryvonos’s time as head of the registration service at the Obukhiv justice department in Kyiv oblast.

The president showed no great courage either: after stating that “this prosecutor general” had to go, he distanced himself from his own political appointee. And yet Kravchenko was part of the very law-enforcement machine—the Security Service, the State Bureau of Investigation and the Interior Ministry—through which Zelensky has held power all this time. What is more, as Kravchenko himself revealed, the prosecutor general had tolerated “Kryvonos’s crimes” purely under pressure from the president. (Now there's a plot twist—and all this time we thought it was Bankova that had it in for the anti-corruption crowd.) All in all, Kravchenko overdid the “Kyiv regime” line without meaning to. In every joke of Davyd Arakhamia’s, only a fraction of it is a joke.

All of this would of course be very funny. If there were no war.

While men stand to the death at the front, in the rear they run. One runs to Paris from a notice of suspicion that might come today, another from an inconvenient past into a glittering present, and a third from responsibility for the country’s future.

It is this runaway syndrome that deserves a closer look.

Flight to Paris. What Kravchenko left behind

“Carthage” was destroyed after all. On 4 September, NABU and SAPO arrived with searches at the Prosecutor General’s Office in the case concerning protection racketeering for fraudulent call centres. The first man detained was Serhii Kropyva—an official from the Office of the Prosecutor General close to Kravchenko, the “Chancellor” of the NABU tapes.

According to the investigation and ZN.UA sources, this was not about individual call centers but about an entire system. More than a thousand “protected” call centers paid around $20,000 a month each for cover. The money was collected through a so-called single window and then distributed among the security and law enforcement agencies. The prosecution service’s share came to about $3,000 per call center. After Kravchenko arrived, it was allegedly to be raised to $7,000, with the overall “subscription fee” rising from $20,000 to $24,000. But where, in that case, did the remaining $17,000 from each call center go? Look behind that “single window,” ZN.UA’s interlocutors say, and you will find representatives of the SSU, military intelligence, the National Police’s Strategic Investigations Department, the prosecution service, the financial monitoring service and individual officers of the State Border Guard Service.

The precise mechanism for dividing the money and the role of each agency’s representatives still require verification. But it may have been an attempt to redivide an already established market that led NABU to the prosecutorial branch of the scheme. The disgruntled talked.

And then the “boss” appeared. On the tapes, Kropyva said: “Funny, what an empire the boss has built. I should try it myself.” NABU did not name the “boss,” but specified that he had previously headed the State Tax Service and had retained influence there after leaving. Kravchenko, then. The prosecutor general himself had no procedural status in the investigation, and still has none.

His toxicity for the president, however, went off the scale. And that on 7 September, the very day before his resignation, when Kravchenko gathered journalists for an off-the-record briefing and assured them that he had nothing to fear and was going nowhere. Unless the president said so. The president said so. Despite the prosecutor general’s categorical argument, as he saw it, in his own favor: “It is not budget money, after all.” Indeed. After a line like that, we feel like crawling under the table ourselves.

After his conversation with Zelenskyy, Kravchenko announced his resignation, explaining that he did not wish to compromise the institution. By then, Zelenskyy had already met the heads of NABU and SAPO, Semen Kryvonos and Oleksandr Klymenko. The anti-corruption chiefs later said at a briefing that they had discussed with the president the scale of the call centres and the damage they cause. According to Kryvonos, Zelenskyy reacted to what he heard “very calmly.”

Though by then there was precious little calm left around the president. The case of former deputy head of the President’s Office Iryna Mudra, over the laundering of UAH 150 million for former minister Herman Halushchenko’s bail, had only just died down. Another senior official of the president’s office had surfaced in the case file—“Kyrylo.” And the transcript of one conversation stated plainly: “K.O. Budanov is taking part in the conversation.” It was to him that Mudra, talking to her partner in the schemes, Mykytas, attributed the line about corruption needing to be led and controlled.

And then “Carthage” went off. Now it was the prosecutor general. Another of Zelenskyy’s political appointees whose name could be read in the markers of an investigation. And the call centers in question were using young people to defraud not only their own—people in a country torn apart by war—but citizens of European states. The very states that give Ukraine the money to survive and the weapons to fight. Whose representatives have pointed this problem out to the Ukrainian authorities more than once. So it is unlikely that Kryvonos and Klymenko were breaking news to the president.

Kravchenko tendered his resignation. But the resignation did not happen. That required a decision of the Verkhovna Rada, and until then Kravchenko legally remained prosecutor general, with all his powers.

And we now know that this week did not pass in an information vacuum. According to sources quoted by Ukrainska Pravda, as early as the evening of 7 September Davyd Arakhamia warned the heads of NABU and SAPO, in the president’s presence, that Kravchenko had either already signed or was preparing notices of suspicion against Kryvonos and Klymenko. Nor did the materials themselves appear over that week. ZN.UA sources say they had long been in preparation at the SSU, and we recall that individual episodes had been leaked earlier through anonymous Telegram channels. The SSU understood that NABU was on the trail and would come for them next. ZN.UA sources therefore regard the current attack on Kryvonos and Klymenko as a pre-emptive strike from the outgoing prosecutor general. Kravchenko, of course, had been in on it for far longer than a day: from July 2025, he had taken part in preparing attacks on the anti-corruption agencies and knew about the materials being gathered against their heads.

And so a week passed. A man whose toxicity had already prompted a conversation with the president and a resignation letter went on running the Prosecutor General’s Office. (Zelenskyy suspended him only after he had fled.) What is more, on 13 September, Kravchenko signed his own order for a five-day mission to France. And that same night he left the country. By then, according to sources quoted by Ukrainska Pravda, Kravchenko knew that a “flag” had been placed on him in the border guards’ database. Crossing the border was supposed to trigger a notification to NABU and SAPO. Those at the top knew about the “flag” too: on 13 September, Arakhamia was asking why it had been placed and whether it meant Kravchenko could be served with a notice of suspicion if he tried to leave. But Kravchenko crossed the border. The question is: did he do it on his own?

And this is where the news actually begins. On 14 September, Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko announced that he had signed a notice of suspicion against NABU director Semen Kryvonos. And another against a person close to SAPO head Oleksandr Klymenko. Kravchenko called NABU and SAPO what amounted to a separate center of political power and accused them of attempting a usurpation.

But the most interesting part came next: “Until these decisions were taken, the president was restraining me politically.” What changed over that week? Did the president stop restraining Kravchenko politically? Did Kravchenko stop yielding to political restraint? Or was this precisely the departing prosecutor general’s final assignment?

By then, Kravchenko was no longer in Ukraine. He stated that he was on a foreign mission and intended to inform international partners about the “real state of affairs” in the anti-corruption agencies.

NABU and SAPO replied that no notice of suspicion had been officially served on Kryvonos, that they regarded Kravchenko’s statements as public rather than procedural acts, and as a continuation of the systematic attack on the anti-corruption agencies. And almost instantly came Zelenskyy: “This prosecutor general has only one road ahead: dismissal from office. That is exactly what I told him.” Plus a call on the parliament to back the dismissal without delay.

According to ZN.UA sources, Zelenskyy telephoned Kryvonos after Kravchenko’s statement. The president sounded somewhat at a loss. Which is to say the element of surprise may well have been genuine.

For the moment, there are two explanations for all this.

The first. The president was stopped by the reaction of society and of partners. Not necessarily because he suddenly saw the line beyond which this ceases to be another turf war between security agencies and becomes the direct rollback of anti-corruption independence and the breaking of the legal system. Perhaps he simply took fright at that reaction and did not want to become the political face of the process. But then a question arises: why, after the decision on his resignation, did Kravchenko retain the full powers of prosecutor general for another week—and manage to use them?

The second. What we are watching is a performance. Kravchenko, on his way out, does the dirtiest part of the job: he delivers a direct political strike against the heads of NABU and SAPO and leaves behind notices of suspicion, criminal proceedings and a toxic trail in the information space. The president, meanwhile, publicly distances himself from the man who carried it out.

But here is the unpleasant part: both explanations are bad for the president. And Kravchenko’s own line about the president having previously “restrained him politically” from procedural decisions survives in this story under either version.

Before turning to the president’s responsibility, though, it is worth examining the position of NABU director Semen Kryvonos, who took the main reputational blow. Because this is no longer only about Kryvonos; it is about NABU.

Flight from the past. Why Kryvonos’s silence works against him and against the institution

The notice of suspicion Kravchenko signed against the NABU director contains two episodes. Both are very old.

The notice itself, however, did not live long: according to Ukrainska Pravda, at 17:26 on 14 September the deputy prosecutor general for Crimea, Maksym Krym, marked it in the Unified Register of Pre-Trial Investigations as annulled and entered in error. But since it was precisely these two episodes that Kravchenko took into the public domain, let us deal with them.

The first dates to 2009. Semen Kryvonos was then on trial in a case concerning the bribery of voters in elections to the Kyiv city council. According to the present notice of suspicion, in order to avoid possible punishment, he acknowledged paternity of another man’s child and submitted the birth certificate to the court as grounds for an amnesty. He received the amnesty. A DNA test later showed a zero probability of his biological paternity, and in 2019, on a claim brought by Kryvonos himself, the record naming him as the child’s father was removed. Kravchenko has now classified these actions as the use of a knowingly forged document. The statute of limitations on this episode, however, expired long ago.

The second episode dates to 2014, when Kryvonos headed the registration service of the Obukhiv justice department. According to the notice of suspicion, he was party to a scheme in which $72,000 was demanded for the allocation and registration of a quarter-hectare plot, and he arranged for the plot’s official valuation to be understated. The case has been under investigation since 2014. Kryvonos himself previously gave evidence in it as a witness and as long ago as 2016 maintained that not one of the facts put to him had been confirmed. As the media point out, the current notice does not specify what benefit Kryvonos himself was to receive, nor does it offer evidence that he knew a bribe was being demanded.

Are you shocked? We are not. Let us try switching our memory on.

When Semen Kryvonos won the competition for the post of NABU director, there was little enthusiasm in the anti-corruption community. That’s putting it mildly. There were questions about his background. Information about the land case was already in the public domain. There were questions about his time at the State Architectural and Construction Inspectorate too, including complaints from experts about an episode they read as a concealed “bribe in land” for the National Agency on Corruption Prevention.

All the more so because Kryvonos was seen at the time not only as the president’s man but as the man of NABU’s first deputy director, Gizo Uglava. The informal leader of the selection commission was the international expert Drago Kos, and it was his vote that proved decisive in Kryvonos’s favor, while the former FBI agent Karen Greenaway, for instance, voted against. According to ZN.UA sources, it was Uglava who played a part in swaying Kos.

In other words, Kryvonos began with little benefit of the doubt. The hopes rested rather on the institution itself, which was being built on principles entirely new to Ukraine. The NABU director is first and foremost an administrator, who cannot simply tell a detective whom to investigate and whom to leave alone. So the detectives we spoke to at the time—who were themselves less than delighted at the prospect of an outsider arriving—said roughly this: even if someone comes in with a brief to hack NABU, it cannot be done quickly. It is a story that stretches over years: personnel decisions, trip-ups, the gradual draining away of people, until strong detectives grow disillusioned and start leaving of their own accord.

First impressions tended to confirm those fears. In the early stage, Kryvonos looked like a player with very little agency. We remember meetings with the media at which either Uglava or the current deputy director, Polina Lysenko, was invariably at his side. Kryvonos himself seemed not especially competent in a system new to him, while being pushy enough and, for some reason, quite content to let other people sit in on interviews, even though the NABU director could perfectly well have been there alone.

The turning point came with the scandal over leaks from NABU. A phone belonging to Yurii Holyk, the well-known consultant of the presidential office on the Great Construction program, seized back in 2023, was found to contain deleted correspondence indicating that Holyk had regularly received inside information about the bureau’s investigations. An internal investigation began. Uglava, suspected of involvement in the leaks and flatly denying it, was first suspended and then dismissed. That was Kryvonos’s first genuinely tough decision—and it concerned the very man to whom his own arrival at the head of NABU had been attributed. And this, perhaps, was where Kryvonos first acquired agency of his own.

From that moment, a different pairing gradually took shape: Kryvonos and Klymenko. And then came results: Operation Clean City, the Kniaziev case, the “hacker lawyers” case, Operation Midas, Dynasty, Forrest Gump case, Themis, Operation Carthage. And whatever complaints may be levelled at NABU—and there are plenty—the institution delivered results. Little by little, that new reputation began to work for Kryvonos as well.

This is no longer the Semen Kryvonos who was met with enormous scepticism at NABU after the competition. This is the NABU director under whom the bureau’s investigations have reached the very top of the government. At the very least, the fears that he would start slowing investigations down, interfering in the detectives’ work, purging the staff or turning NABU into somebody’s captive agency have not been borne out.

And here the hardest part begins. Because the old Kryvonos has caught up with the new one.

One can argue at any length about the quality of Kravchenko’s notice of suspicion, the limitation periods, the elements of the offence, the recordings, the voices, the intonations and the whole body of evidence. One can ask why a land case known for years has gone off precisely now. Why all this happened a week after “Carthage,” and why the notice was signed by a prosecutor general already on his way out. All these questions exist. We are not putting them aside. But they do not cancel out others—including questions about the competition that Kryvonos won with all of this background behind him. Right now, though, the main question is not for the selection commission.

The main question now is for Kryvonos himself. The man has lived through a long stretch of life, has acquired a different agency, has made choices that earned him a new reputation—and now he has to answer the questions about his past.

So far, though, Kryvonos talks about fakes and a political attack. The political character of the current attack is obvious. But that is not an answer to the question of what happened back then. And his unwillingness to answer publicly for his past, to explain what he did at the time, is becoming a weakness. And no longer only Semen Kryvonos’s own. It is becoming the institution’s weakness. Because what is at stake is trust. Honesty. Values.

And here a test of adulthood begins. Not only for the NABU director but also for the anti-corruption institutions. For the civic organizations and media that work on anti-corruption. For all of us who understand perfectly well what lies behind the current attack on the anti-corruption agencies, who remember what happened a year ago, and who can see what nests of corruption NABU has stirred up in that time. Because this has long ceased to be only about the president’s inner circle. In some NABU investigations we see criminality, big money, officials and political power growing into one another (the Andrii Osypov case). Set against that, the fraudulent call centers are a sideshow. The detectives are working at the edge of risk to their own lives.

Can we, with all this, sort it out properly? Separate the wheat from the chaff. Not use the political character of the current attack as grounds for refusing to answer uncomfortable questions. But also not allow genuine questions about one man’s past to be used to turn the work of an entire institution into rubbish. Can we, in fact, be honest with ourselves?

Which is why not communicating now is not an option. Not speaking is not an option. Not explaining is not an option. Running is not an option. A bridge has to be built between the past and the present. And nobody but Semen Kryvonos can build it.

Flight from responsibility for the country. The next prosecutor general as a test for Zelenskyy

NABU’s investigations, one after another, show how shaky our system of government is, with a parliament that has no agency and a Cabinet that has none either, and no leaders in it. The cracks have now reached the president’s own supporting pillar: the security and law enforcement agencies—the SSU, the SBI, the Interior Ministry and military intelligence.

Two weeks ago, we had a shoot-out between the SSU and military intelligence. Then came “Carthage.” And now a prosecutor general, on his way out of office, declares war on the anti-corruption agencies and states publicly that the president had been “restraining him politically.” What kind of relationship did the president actually have with a man who, under the Constitution, was supposed to act within his own powers rather than within presidential arrangements? And this is no longer information from sources or a journalistic hypothesis. It is the public testimony of a man who only yesterday was prosecutor general.

But the next test for Zelenskyy does not begin with Kravchenko’s dismissal. Kravchenko was dismissed on 15 September. It begins after Kravchenko. And it is far from the only test. At this very moment it is also being decided, for example, who will be handed the tax service. The prosecution service and the tax service are two very different but equally revealing personnel decisions. They will allow us to judge at least one thing: has the president understood anything at all about what is happening to the system? Or at least taken fright at something?

Our interest for now is the prosecution service. Because the simplest way out of this story is to appoint another man of his own. Kravchenko is finished? We will find a new one. One of ours. And carry on living in the same system that has more than once produced political appointees first and political crises afterwards. That scenario is entirely plausible. According to ZN.UA sources, the president has already been offered candidates who could be more independent at the head of the prosecution service. But among the names being discussed in the presidential office there are far more familiar options for Zelenskyy.

Among the pliable candidates, the media name the head of the Dnipropetrovsk regional prosecutor’s office, Valerii Prykhozhanov, and the head of the Khmelnytskyi regional prosecutor’s office, Anton Kovalskyi. Prykhozhanov, ZN.UA sources say, is a friend of the president’s family. But there is one wrinkle. Dnipro has long been the capital of fraudulent call centers—the very industry that has just blown up the Prosecutor General’s Office. It would therefore be very odd if Zelenskyy were now to appoint as prosecutor general the person whom one of our interlocutors called a “blind prosecutor” from Dnipro. Kovalskyi is linked by ZN.UA sources to the influential Chernivtsi businessman Illia Pavliuk, informal curator of the so-called Pavliuk group within the Servant of the People faction. Kovalskyi headed the Chernivtsi regional prosecutor’s office for four years and moved to run the Khmelnytskyi one in the summer of 2025. Our interlocutors describe him as not particularly tainted anywhere, but not particularly distinguished either.

Other options for the next appointment are also being discussed in the anti-corruption community today. A competition involving international experts. An ethics council. Bringing in international partners to a selection conducted by the president himself. Europe is demanding reform of the prosecution service and a more transparent and independent procedure for appointing a prosecutor general. But it is not communicating any specific condition about a competition for the post. What is more, ZN.UA’s interlocutors in the European Union say European partners have little appetite for getting mixed up in yet another Ukrainian nomination. Europe is tired of us.

Which means we will have to find the solution ourselves in any case. And the faster and firmer the right framework is set out, it seems, the better. First, at the entrance for a new prosecutor general: a transparent competition involving international experts (the corresponding bill, No. 15343, has already been registered in the parliament and placed on the agenda). And after that, the bills that will form part of the reform of the Prosecutor General’s Office itself.

Because the present prosecutorial farce has shown that putting this reform off is now a risk. The problem has long since ceased to be one surname. It is the system.

And everything that has just appalled society is only the visible part of it. In the estimate of ZN.UA’s interlocutors, everything we have seen in the recent investigations is not even 10% of the total rent that the authorities and the security services extract from the country’s economy. But if, against this background, NABU and SAPO are allowed not merely to be discredited but to be dismantled, it is the whole system that will go on rotting from here.

And here Zelenskyy will either acknowledge his responsibility or run. Not to Paris. Not from an inconvenient past into a glittering present. But from responsibility for the country into yet another convenient staffing decision. And it is no longer only about the procedure for appointing a prosecutor general (though it does need to be built so that the authorities cannot hack it once again). The point is that the Prosecutor General’s Office has to stop being a button that any president can press to keep everyone looking over their shoulder.

If Zelenskyy’s instinct for self-preservation really does kick in, if he wants to go down in history not only as the president who helped Ukraine establish itself as a nation and survive in 2022, when he began speaking to peoples over the heads of their rulers, but also as the president of 2026, when he finally began speaking to his own people over the heads of incompetent crooks—then we have a chance.

To change the system without having to change the authorities in wartime. Under fire.

 

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