The War Inside the Ukrainian State: The Fall of the Prosecutor General
By Matthew Parish
Tuesday 15 September 2026
Ukraine is fighting two wars. The first is obvious and brutal. It takes place along hundreds of kilometres of front line, in the skies above Ukrainian cities and increasingly against the country’s economic, transport and energy infrastructure. Russia is attempting to exhaust Ukraine militarily, financially and psychologically until continued resistance becomes impossible or politically unsustainable. The second war is less visible but may ultimately prove almost as important. It is the struggle over the Ukrainian state itself: who controls its prosecutors, investigators and courts, whether public officials are accountable to genuinely independent institutions and whether the habits of patronage, political protection and selective prosecution inherited from the post-Soviet era can finally be broken.
The extraordinary events surrounding Ukraine’s outgoing Prosecutor General, Ruslan Kravchenko, have brought this second war spectacularly into public view. Kravchenko submitted his resignation earlier this month after the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) launched what they called Operation Carthage. Investigators say they uncovered a criminal organisation involving officials from the Prosecutor General’s Office which systematically received illicit payments for protecting fraudulent call centres and laundered the proceeds. Five people were identified as suspects, with one of the principal figures named in Ukrainian reporting being Serhii Kropyva, an official in the Prosecutor General’s Office.
The sums alleged are substantial. According to investigators, the organisation received money in return for leaving fraudulent call centres undisturbed and laundered tens of millions of hryvnias through property and other assets. Kropyva was remanded in custody with bail reportedly set at UAH 120 million, while other alleged participants have also been detained. Kravchenko has not been charged in Operation Carthage and has emphatically denied involvement in protecting illegal call centres or laundering their proceeds. That distinction is important. An investigation involving people close to a public official is not proof that the official participated in their alleged crimes, and Ukraine’s struggle to establish the rule of law will not be advanced by abandoning the presumption of innocence whenever it becomes politically convenient to do so.
Nevertheless, the circumstances revealed by the investigation have produced uncomfortable questions, among them questions concerning a house in Kozyn, the wealthy residential district south of Kyiv associated with some of Ukraine’s political and business elite. Investigative journalists identified a substantial property used by Kravchenko and his family. Kravchenko says the house is rented and that his family moved there on 1 May 2026. Evidence discussed during proceedings in the High Anti-Corruption Court reportedly indicated that Kropyva was involved in arranging work at the property, including installation of equipment and dealings with contractors. None of this establishes criminal conduct by Kravchenko, but it helps explain why the investigation rapidly acquired a political importance extending considerably beyond the alleged protection of fraudulent call centres.
The confrontation intensified after NABU detectives conducted searches at premises associated with senior officials of the Prosecutor General’s Office. Initial official accounts were contradictory. The Prosecutor General’s Office first denied reports that Kravchenko’s premises had been searched before subsequently acknowledging searches of official premises used by him, while Kravchenko himself later confirmed that his office and home had been searched. At this point, what had begun as an investigation into an alleged criminal organisation inside the Prosecutor General’s Office started developing into an open institutional war between that office and the bodies responsible for investigating high-level corruption.
The Prosecutor General’s Office alleged that NABU investigators had used the Carthage searches to obtain access to unrelated criminal files concerning NABU and SAPO personnel. Kravchenko went further, alleging that Operation Carthage had been intended partly to obtain those files, remove him from office and prevent prosecutorial decisions against senior anti-corruption officials. NABU and SAPO reject this account, leaving Ukraine in the remarkable position of having some of its most important law-enforcement institutions publicly accusing one another of abusing their powers for improper purposes.
On 14 September, the confrontation became more extraordinary still. Kravchenko announced that he had signed a notice of suspicion against NABU director Semen Kryvonos, accusing him of falsifying official documents to obtain an unlawful benefit. He also announced another case involving a person allegedly close to SAPO chief Oleksandr Klymenko and claimed that President Volodymyr Zelensky had previously restrained him politically from taking these steps. NABU and SAPO responded that Kryvonos had not been formally served with such a notice and described Kravchenko’s statements as part of a systematic attack upon Ukraine’s independent anti-corruption institutions. Kryvonos, for his part, called the case fabricated.
Then came another remarkable development: Kravchenko left Ukraine. He has confirmed that he is abroad, although he rejects any characterisation of his departure as flight and says that he is on an official foreign trip. He has stated that he intends to meet international partners and explain what he regards as the dangerous concentration of uncontrolled influence in Ukraine’s anti-corruption institutions. Ukrainian media have meanwhile reported that he crossed the border during the night of 14 September in an official vehicle, inevitably intensifying public speculation about the circumstances and timing of his departure.
The Anti-Corruption Action Center has made the considerably more serious allegation that Kravchenko signed documents against Kryvonos in exchange for being permitted to leave Ukraine. That allegation has not been established and must be treated accordingly. Kravchenko’s explanation remains that he is travelling officially rather than fleeing prosecution. President Zelensky, meanwhile, has taken an unusually uncompromising public position, asking the Verkhovna Rada to remove Kravchenko and indicating that dismissal is now the Prosecutor General’s only possible course. Parliament is consequently being drawn directly into an institutional confrontation already involving the Prosecutor General’s Office, NABU, SAPO and the Presidency.
This extraordinary sequence of events needs to be understood against a larger background. NABU was established after the Revolution of Dignity precisely because Ukraine’s traditional law-enforcement institutions could not reliably be expected to investigate the country’s most powerful officials. Its institutional independence was therefore not an administrative curiosity but part of the constitutional and political transformation of the Ukrainian state away from the post-Soviet model, in which prosecutors, security services, businessmen and politicians existed within overlapping networks of influence. The creation of independent anti-corruption bodies represented an attempt to introduce an institution capable of investigating power without first obtaining permission from power.
That independence has repeatedly generated political conflict. NABU has investigated parliamentarians and increasingly senior members of the Ukrainian political establishment, while attempts to constrain the anti-corruption institutions have generated both domestic protests and pressure from Ukraine’s Western partners. This is why Operation Carthage matters far beyond the allegations concerning fraudulent call centres. The fundamental question is whether Ukraine’s law-enforcement institutions exist principally to enforce law or whether parts of them remain instruments within competing networks of political and economic power. The distinction may sound theoretical, but in wartime Ukraine it is potentially existential.
Russia’s strategy towards Ukraine has never depended exclusively upon tanks, missiles and infantry. Moscow has historically sought influence through political parties, businessmen, media organisations, religious institutions, officials and agencies of the state. The purpose of such penetration was not necessarily to recruit every participant as an intelligence agent. It was often sufficient to cultivate systems of dependency, corruption and mutual protection that made Ukrainian institutions weak, manipulable and distrusted. This is why allegations of corruption during wartime acquire a national-security dimension even where there is no evidence whatsoever of Russian involvement.
A prosecutor who accepts money to protect criminals weakens Ukraine, just as a police officer who sells confidential information or a judge susceptible to improper political pressure weakens Ukraine. A politician who believes that prosecutors exist principally to destroy his opponents does the same. None of these people needs to be working for the FSB for the cumulative consequences of their conduct to benefit Russia. A dysfunctional Ukrainian state, paralysed by mutual accusations and characterised by public distrust of its institutions, is itself a Russian strategic objective.
This distinction is particularly important because sensational allegations are already circulating about the Kravchenko affair. Claims have appeared through social media and private channels that searches of premises associated with the Prosecutor General uncovered Russian communications equipment, direct links with FSB officials, files prepared for use following a hypothetical Russian occupation of Kyiv and dossiers intended for the coercion of senior judges. The Lviv Herald has been unable to find reliable independent confirmation of these allegations as of 15 September 2026. They must therefore be regarded as unverified claims rather than established facts, and it would be irresponsible to use them as the basis for asserting that Kravchenko or anybody else involved was working for Russian intelligence.
That does not make the verified story less disturbing. In some respects it makes it more important, because Ukraine does not need an FSB satellite telephone in a prosecutor’s basement to have a profound institutional problem. It is sufficient that the country’s Prosecutor General can find himself engaged in an open confrontation with the agencies investigating alleged corruption within his own office, resign, announce criminal suspicions against the head of NABU and a person allegedly close to the head of SAPO, then leave the country while the President publicly demands his removal.
There may be legitimate questions about NABU and SAPO themselves, and institutional independence must never be allowed to become institutional infallibility. Anti-corruption agencies wield formidable investigative powers and those powers require legal supervision. If there is genuine evidence that officials within NABU or SAPO committed criminal offences, they must be investigated according to law. An anti-corruption institution cannot credibly demand accountability for everyone except itself, and Ukraine would merely be replacing one privileged law-enforcement caste with another if the independence of anti-corruption institutions were interpreted as immunity from scrutiny.
Yet precisely the same principle applies to the Prosecutor General’s Office. Allegations against investigators cannot become an automatic defence whenever investigators approach politically powerful people. Otherwise accountability becomes impossible because every investigation of authority can simply be answered by authority investigating the investigators. Ukraine would then find itself trapped in a circular contest between competing institutions, each claiming that the criminal allegations against its opponents are legitimate while those directed against itself are politically motivated.
This is the institutional trap into which Ukraine must not fall. There is also an international dimension that Kyiv cannot ignore, because Ukraine’s European integration and continuing Western financial support rest partly upon confidence that the country is constructing institutions capable of restraining political power rather than merely redistributing it. Western governments understand perfectly well that corruption cannot disappear overnight from a country carrying the institutional inheritance of the Soviet Union while simultaneously fighting Europe’s largest war since 1945. What they are considerably less likely to tolerate is the deliberate destruction or political subordination of institutions created to expose high-level corruption.
There is, however, another side to this argument. The discovery of corruption should not itself be regarded as evidence that Ukraine’s reforms have failed, because sometimes it means precisely the opposite. A state without functioning anti-corruption institutions does not necessarily have fewer corruption scandals; it may simply have fewer discovered corruption scandals. The absence of arrests, searches and embarrassing revelations can indicate institutional cleanliness, but it can equally indicate institutional paralysis. A genuinely corrupt state is often one in which remarkably few important people are ever formally accused of corruption.
Operation Carthage therefore presents Ukraine with a paradox. The allegations are damaging to the reputation of the Ukrainian state, yet the ability of investigators to enter the offices and homes of some of the country’s most powerful law-enforcement officials is evidence that Ukrainian institutions possess a degree of independence that would have been difficult to imagine during earlier periods of the country’s history. The proper response is consequently neither triumphalism nor despair, but insistence upon procedure.
Ukraine should permit Operation Carthage to proceed wherever the admissible evidence leads. Kravchenko’s allegations concerning NABU and SAPO should likewise be investigated through procedures insulated as far as possible from the institutions and personalities involved. Parliament should demand a transparent explanation of the circumstances of the Prosecutor General’s departure abroad and of the legal status of the accusations announced against Kryvonos. The public should be told whatever can responsibly be disclosed without compromising active investigations, because secrecy beyond what an investigation genuinely requires will merely encourage the proliferation of increasingly extravagant rumours.
Above all, Ukraine must resist the temptation to transform the affair into another contest between political tribes in which one institution must be entirely virtuous because another is alleged to be corrupt. The principle at stake is considerably more fundamental: nobody gets to own the law. Neither the President nor the Prosecutor General, NABU nor SAPO, the Security Service nor parliamentarians, oligarchs nor foreign governments can be permitted to regard criminal justice as an instrument belonging to them. The purpose of institutional reform is to construct a system in which competing centres of power restrain one another sufficiently that evidence, procedure and ultimately independent courts determine what happened.
Russia has spent decades demonstrating the alternative. In the Russian model, the prosecutor, investigator, intelligence officer, judge and political executive ultimately form parts of the same hierarchy. There may be laws, prosecutors and courtrooms, but they remain subordinate to power. Ukraine’s historic project since 2014 has been to construct something fundamentally different while simultaneously defending itself from the state representing that alternative.
This is why the strange drama now unfolding around Ruslan Kravchenko matters. It is not principally a story about a house in Kozyn, fraudulent telephone operators or even one Prosecutor General. It is a test of whether the Ukrainian state can investigate itself without either collapsing into institutional warfare or allowing political authority to decide in advance who may and may not be investigated. If Ukraine can achieve that, she will have constructed something that no amount of Russian military force can easily destroy. If it cannot, Moscow may discover once again that the cheapest way to weaken Ukraine is not always to attack her institutions from outside, because a sufficiently dysfunctional state can eventually consume itself from within.
