The bail system is undergoing a dangerous transformation. Under the Criminal Procedure Code, bail is an independent pre...

The bail system is undergoing a dangerous transformation.

Under the Criminal Procedure Code, bail is an independent preventive measure or an alternative to detention. Its purpose is to ensure a person’s proper procedural behavior, not to create a financially insurmountable condition for release from custody.

In July 2026 the Constitutional Court specifically emphasized: the amount of bail must be determined taking into account the person’s real financial situation, cannot be manifestly excessive, and must leave the suspect a real possibility to use bail as an alternative to deprivation of liberty.

In practice, everything is exactly the opposite.

In the same “Muza” case — Ivakhnenko in the “Carthage” case — bail was set at 20 million UAH. That is roughly six times her lawful annual income. She does not have the funds to post bail — accordingly, she remains in pretrial detention.

But, as it turns out, today we have even reached a situation where having funds accumulated in a bank does not guarantee the ability to post bail.

In the “Midas” case, Kryvonos publicly reported that financial monitoring blocked funds intended for posting bail.

In the “Femida” case, the High Anti-Corruption Court set bail for Stolar at 300 million UAH as an independent preventive measure — without detention. An accomplice in the “Carthage” case is in custody, while the organizer in “Femida” is out on bail and wasn’t even detained beforehand. Virtuous, you might say.

By the way, Stolar currently claims that he has the necessary funds and is ready to comply with the court ruling, but banks refuse to carry out the relevant payments.

Thus, between the court order setting bail and its actual payment, another barrier appears — the bank’s financial monitoring, which can block a payment due to so-called reputational risks. But whose risks are being considered in that case — Pyshny’s or the bank manager’s? And what reputational risks could possibly outweigh a person’s freedom? None of this has anything to do with the law.

Of course, bail and the companies posting it should be checked. But that should not be turned into acts of public shaming.

There is another problem — the guarantor companies.

Recently, certain deputies and so-called anti-corruption activists have been publishing the names of guarantor companies, investigating their owners, related persons, turnovers, and effectively creating a reputationally toxic environment around them.

As a result, even a company that has legal funds, confirmed their lawful origin, and is fully willing to act as a guarantor is forced to take into account the risk of information attacks and the appearance of its name in another post by Zheleznyak or other members of the “reformers” tribe.

This creates an obvious deterrent effect for potential guarantors.

Under such conditions, bail ceases to serve as a real alternative to detention, and the person effectively finds themselves in a state of inescapable isolation.

Prolonged pretrial detention under this arrangement objectively creates significant procedural pressure and forces people to give any testimony favorable to the investigation, cooperate, or enter into a plea deal as the only real way to change their situation.

If bail exists only formally and the person is effectively deprived of the possibility to be released from custody, then it should not be called an “alternative preventive measure.”

Call things by their names — captivity.

All of this should be viewed through the lens of a serious violation of human rights and the guarantees enshrined in the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.

Among the main public drivers of the deconstruction of the bail institution have been Shabunin, Kalenyuk, Zheleznyak, Nikolov, Radina, Tkach and others — it is their rhetoric and public pressure that have largely contributed to forming a practice whereby a legally provided preventive measure increasingly loses its real purpose.

It would be interesting to see them if they themselves found themselves in the position of people subject to such preventive measures.

Then we would surely hear a chorus of howls about democracy, human rights, the presumption of innocence, and the rule of law.