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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
The prosecutor’s office noted that Ruslan Kravchenko submitted his resignation voluntarily.
Former Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko, who on the night of 14 September left Ukraine supposedly on a business trip, submitted a resignation from the prosecutor’s offices. After being relieved of the Prosecutor General post, he had remained a prosecutor, the spokesperson for the Office of the Prosecutor General, Maryana Haivska, told Suspilne.
According to the OPG spokesperson, after the business trip ended Kravchenko, as a prosecutor, did not return to perform his official duties. She noted that Ruslan Kravchenko submitted his resignation voluntarily.
As Haivska clarified in a comment to Hromadske, this gave the leadership of the Prosecutor General’s Office a legal basis to dismiss him as quickly as possible.
“Since other formats of dismissing Ruslan Kravchenko would have required a lengthy procedure before the Qualification and Disciplinary Commission of Prosecutors, while he would have formally remained a prosecutor of the OPG during that time, a decision was made to respond to this resignation,” the prosecutor’s office said.
It is reported that today Acting Prosecutor General Anton Kovalsky signed the order dismissing Ruslan Kravchenko.
Earlier, the OPG reported that Kravchenko never returned to work, although the foreign business trip he had arranged for himself ended on 18 September.
On the morning of 14 September, Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko announced that he had signed a suspicion notice to the NABU director Semen Kryvonos, whom he suspects “of forging official documents to obtain a bribe on an especially large scale,” as well as “stealing documents” related to cases against the leaders and staff of NABU and the SAP from the Prosecutor General’s office.
It later became known that Kravchenko left the country during the night. The Center for Civil Liberties stated that such a departure would have been possible only with the consent and permission of President Volodymyr Zelensky. At the same time, before leaving the country on the alleged business trip, Kravchenko apparently understood he might be leaving the country permanently — at one o’clock in the morning he refused state protection, and two hours later he crossed the border through the Shehyni checkpoint.
Zelensky immediately said that Kravchenko had only one option, and that was dismissal from his post; he later suspended him from performing his duties, and the following day the Verkhovna Rada promptly approved the resignation.
Meanwhile, the Office of the Prosecutor General officially stated that it had not notified the head of the anti-corruption agency of any suspicion, because there were no legal grounds to do so.
The events followed searches conducted on 4 September by NABU and the SAP at the Prosecutor General’s office, which announced the exposure of the “Carthage” case — the activities of a criminal organization headed by an official of the Prosecutor General’s Office that covered fraudulent call centers and money laundering.
Ruslan Kravchenko himself is not yet directly implicated in the case, but on the recordings someone called “Boss” is mentioned, whose name neither the NABU detective nor the SAP prosecutor have disclosed so far. They say that the “Boss” had previously been the head of the Tax Service, and the “Chancellor” during a phone conversation with one of his accomplices calls him “Andriyovych,” which matches the biographical details and patronymic of the current Prosecutor General.
What did the former Prosecutor General leave behind, and why can’t NABU Director Semen Kryvonos simply shrug off questions about his past, even if the suspicion against him is part of a political attack? And will Volodymyr Zelensky take the opportunity not just to appoint another “his” Prosecutor General, but to change the system itself — through a transparent competition and a reform of the prosecution service? Read more about this in Inna Vedernikova’s article “The Fugitive Syndrome: How Not to Turn the State into a Meme.”
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Ексочільника ОГП Руслана Кравченка у понеділок остаточно звільнили з прокуратури — ЗМІ". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: ZN.ua.
