Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko has been implicated in a protection racket for fraudulent call centres run from inside his own office, according to recordings released by the country’s anti-corruption agencies.
The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) published the material on September 5 as part of an operation codenamed Carthage. In it, the man said to have led the ring, referred to as “Chancellor”, answers to a figure called the “boss”.
NABU has not named that figure but has left two markers. His patronymic is Andriiovych and he is described as a former head of the State Tax Service.
Ruslan Andriiovych Kravchenko ran the tax service from December 2024 until June 2025, when he was appointed Prosecutor General. The Kyiv Independent reported that an earlier statement by the Prosecutor General’s Office itself treated the reference to the “boss” as meaning Kravchenko.
The two agencies said a senior official of one of the office’s departments had created and led a criminal organisation in mid-2025, recruiting serving prosecutors and people close to him. Members took regular payments in return for leaving alone call centres that defrauded Ukrainians and citizens of European countries.
Five people are suspected of creating, leading or taking part in the organisation and of laundering more than 30 million hryvnia (€580,000). Investigators said more than 20 million hryvnia (€387,000) of the proceeds had gone on property, jewellery and other valuables.
Ukrainska Pravda reported that Serhiy Kropyva, a deputy head of the office’s international legal cooperation department, was detained on September 4. It also reported searches at premises linked to Kravchenko, his deputy Mariia Vdovychenko and the head of the Odesa regional military administration, Oleh Kiper.
A spokeswoman for the Prosecutor General’s Office, Mariana Haiovska, said no searches had been carried out at Kravchenko’s home or office. Kravchenko has said he never instructed anyone to assist illegal call centres and did not use the powers of his post to shield them.
He said the employee under investigation had been suspended and that dismissal procedures had begun, and ordered polygraph tests for staff handling call centre cases.
NABU said the case would probably never have come about had the agencies’ independence not been defended in 2025, when President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a law placing them under the control of the Prosecutor General before reversing course after street protests and pressure from Brussels.
The case is the latest to reach into Zelensky’s circle, after the Energoatom scandal and the money-laundering case that brought down his chief of staff Andriy Yermak. Ukraine’s anti-corruption record remains a European Commission benchmark for its EU accession bid.
