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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
Despite this, the agency did not independently initiate an investigation into any single crime, the Center for Combating Corruption (CCC) reports, citing documents that confirm this information.
The report concerns the response of the Office of the Military Ombudsman to a request by members of parliament, with copies of eight letters that the Office sent to the State Bureau of Investigation (DBR) from March to June. They reported complaints from servicemen or their relatives, as well as requests to investigate what is happening.
The letters refer to beatings, failure to provide medical aid that led to victims’ deaths, threats with weapons, torture and violence, illegal detention, and other abuses by officials of the “Rock”/“Skaelia” (the Skala) against military personnel.
However, these cases were not investigated by the DBR, but were referred to the Military Police (VSP) and other law enforcement agencies.
CCC cites as an example the case where 30 in March the DBR received a letter from a serviceman’s sister, in which she said her brother had been beaten and died in the hospital because he did not receive medical help after the beating.
In response, the department’s investigator said that there were “no sufficient grounds to enter the information into the Unified Register of Pre-trial Investigations (URPRI).”
The complaint was referred to VSP allegedly for additional verification of the facts, although by law the investigator was to immediately commence an inquiry into the facts set out in the complaint.
“As a result of the review of the specified materials, it was established that they do not contain complete and objective data that could indicate the commission of a criminal offense within the competence of the Investigative Bodies of the State Bureau of Investigation, and therefore there are currently no sufficient grounds to enter the above-mentioned information into URPRI,” wrote the DBR investigator in response to the Office of the Military Ombudsman.
A similar result, i.e., no reaction, was also the case after appeals to the former General Prosecutor Ruslan Kravchenko and his prosecutors, sent by the ombudsman back in July 2025.
The case only moved from a dead point after the publication by the newspaper Bonbon (Babbel) about numerous violations of servicemen’s rights in the Skaelia. The article appeared 23 in June and had the effect of a bomb.
Subsequently, it turned out that the Office of the Military Ombudsman had informed the DBR about similar crimes long before the publication.
When the scandal spread across the country, the Bureau filed a statement in URPRI and began investigating the violations.
Executive Director of CCC Daria Kaleniuk notes that, although complaints about lawlessness by commanders in certain units had already been submitted to investigators, the investigation began only after publication in the media:
“In Sukhachov (Oleksiy Sukhachov — head of DBR) they can report thousands of cases, but the real result is to stop abuses by inadequate commanders toward subordinate military personnel. When the DBR forwards statements instead of investigating the facts set out in them, it does not fulfill its main task. And for this inefficiency, our military personnel and their families pay with their health and lives.”
At the time of writing the article, DBR had not commented on the information released by CCC in any way.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "ДБР було обізнане про порушення прав військовослужбовців у полку «Скеля», однак не ініціювало жодних розслідувань, — ЦПК". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: Rozsliduvach.
