Scandal on a subject as sensitive as the equality of citizens in the face of mobilization could not go unpunished. The prosecutor general of Ukraine, Andriy Kostin, was swept up in the revelation of corruption cases involving dozens of prosecutors from the central Khmelnytskyi region, accused of acquiring false disability certificates enabling them to obtain pensions in addition to their salaries and, potentially, avoid conscription. This energetic man, who enjoyed a good reputation as a professional and is not personally involved, announced his resignation on Tuesday, October 22, at the end of a meeting of the National Security and Defense Council, chaired by Volodymyr Zelensky.
The case first came to light in the Ukrainian media at the beginning of October, when investigators in the Khmelnytskyi region revealed that the head of the local medical and social expertise commission, Tetiana Kroupa, who is also an elected member of the regional council, and her son, who heads the regional pension fund, had enriched themselves by illegally supplying false disability certificates. Agents of the SBI, the state investigation office, announced that they had found €100,000 in the commission's offices, along with a number of forged medical documents, client lists and fictitious diagnoses. Searches of the two officials' homes also revealed a considerable fortune: $6 million (over €5.5 billion) in various currencies, jewelry and evidence of a huge real estate portfolio in Ukraine and elsewhere in the world.
The story took on a whole new dimension on October 16. On that day, the journalist and editor-in-chief of the investigative website Censor.net, Yuri Butusov, published an article revealing the involvement of numerous prosecutors in the Khmelnytskyi region in this system of corruption. According to the journalist, who is widely followed in the country, 49 local civil servants have been in possession of a pension certificate since 2016. Among them are regional prosecutor Oleksiy Oliynyk and his wife, who received a total of 2.5 million hryvnias (around €56,000) through this system.
In response to the scandal, the Ukrainian president announced a meeting of the National Security and Defense Council to deal with the subject of the corruption of these officials. "Unfortunately, there are things going on here, in the rear of Ukraine, that make external enemies seem unnecessary," he declared on Sunday. Two days later, at the end of this long-awaited meeting, he issued a decree announcing the liquidation of all medical and social expert commissions from December 31, to be replaced by a "digital, transparent, European model." The decree also stipulated an audit of all decisions by these commissions on obtaining disability certificates for civil servants. According to the president, "there are hundreds of instances of clearly unjustified disabilities" among customs, tax and local government officials.
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