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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
⁉️ The Khmelnytskyi Airport case: why the investigation stalled and who was covering the land scheme
I sent an official appeal to acting Head of the Security Service of Ukraine Oleksandr Poklad regarding the fate of a strategic facility in the Khmelnytskyi region. This concerns the illegal removal of more than 6 hectares of land from the communal enterprise “Airport Khmelnytskyi.”
This judicial and land fraud dates back to 2023. At that time, the Rozsoshanska village council, without the legally required approval of the Khmelnytskyi Regional Council as the governing body, adopted a decision to divide the airport parcel. As a result, more than 6 hectares of land were leased to LLC “Southwest Transport Company” allegedly to service property totaling only 0,42 ha, meaning the parcel’s area exceeded the real estate size by 20 times. Although the prosecutor’s office won the commercial courts all the way to the Supreme Court and ordered the land returned to the community, the criminal side of the case has effectively been put into an artificial “coma.”
As it turned out, no investigative actions were taken in this proceeding for over a year. The reason for such sabotage became clear after the events of 3 August 2026, when officers of the SBU Internal Security and the Alpha special unit carried out procedural actions against the head of the SBU Department in the Khmelnytskyi region, Oleksiy Prokopenko, and the head of the economic department, Ruslan Skubskiy, in a case concerning alleged extortion of bribes.
SBU official Ruslan Skubskiy is the son of Vyacheslav Skubskiy — director of LLC “Khmelnytskyi Expanded Clay Gravel Plant,” who is a long-time business partner of People’s Deputy Serhiy Labaziuk (the husband of the chair of the Khmelnytskyi Regional Council, Violeta Labaziuk). The deputy himself privately boasted in narrow circles that the proceedings on the airport would never be completed because he had arranged everything with his business partners, whose children hold senior positions in the Khmelnytskyi SBU.
Under these circumstances, the proceeding had no chance of being properly investigated by local law enforcement. That is why in my appeal I ask SBU head Oleksandr Poklad to take the pre-trial investigation of this case under his personal control, to give proper criminal-legal assessment to the prior inaction of the investigators who themselves are now under suspicion. I also ask that the case materials be removed from the regional department for further investigation directly by the Central SBU Directorate.
In addition to the land case of the communal enterprise “Airport Khmelnytskyi,” I also provided materials regarding other recorded violations under several articles of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.
❗️ I note that the airport situation is not an isolated case, but part of a continuous law enforcement “recycle of excuses” in the region. Previously, appeals regarding Labaziuk’s activities were confidently “sent back” to the local SBU Department, where the deputy had his people in key positions for years. A similar picture is unfolding around the head of the Territorial Department of the State Bureau of Investigations in Khmelnytskyi, Roman Bohdanov: when I sought comment about the Bowling Respublika bowling club and the FILMAX cinema chain worth over 32 million UAH, the matter was “kicked” to the central office. Although later the National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NACP) and the State Bureau of Economic Security (SBES) officially confirmed that Bohdanov and his wife held general powers of attorney to manage all that property and forwarded the violation materials to the Office of the Prosecutor General and NABU.
The paradox and the closed circle of this system are evident even today. After receiving my report about the activities of a criminal organization running a network of fraudulent call centers in the Khmelnytskyi region, acting head of the 2 Department of the Main Investigative Directorate of the SBU Oleksiy Pikh chose the easiest path — and on 5 August 2026 simply sent these materials “by jurisdiction” to the Territorial Department of the SBI in Khmelnytskyi. In other words, a complaint about abuses by local law enforcement was handed over for investigation to Roman Bohdanov himself, who, according to available information, may himself be providing shadow “protection” to such call centers in the region.
The result is an absurd picture, isn’t it…
