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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
This country never ceases to surprise with its social elevators: a provincial lawyer, Yaroslav Hryshyn, suddenly retrained as a drone manufacturer. It strongly resembles the story of the former defense minister and also a lawyer, “Lyokha — the Golden Egg,” who ultimately was forced to quietly flee abroad. It seems the story with the former “ukropist” and deputy Hryshyn may repeat itself.
However, Yaroslav Hryshyn isn’t "packing up" by buying eggs by the kilo — he’s moving into drone production: in 2023 a company, LLC “Center for Unmanned Systems Research,” appeared and began producing FPV drones under the brand “General Chereshnya.” The manufacturer itself lists Yaroslav and Stanislav Hryshyn, as well as Rudolf Akopyan, among its founders.
As is common in Ukraine, the business suddenly took off: according to Forbes, in the first half of 2025 the manufacturer’s revenue exceeded one and a half billion hryvnias. Unfortunately, the company’s registry data and financial reports are closed, so one must judge its finances from indirect sources. Meanwhile, Yaroslav Hryshyn himself, for example, last year claimed production of about 50 000 FPV drones per month and expected to finish 2025 the year with seven billion hryvnias in revenue.
That was almost twenty times more than in the previous, 2024 year. Of course, Hryshyn himself explained the growth primarily by an increase in the number of government contracts and the high quality of his products.
However, the box, which somehow does not surprise anyone at all, opened easily: the volume of contracts between LLC “Center for Unmanned Systems Research” and the Defense Procurement Agency sharply increased after Arsen Zhumadilov took the position of head of the DPA. Before that, Hryshyn’s company had contracts only for 400 million, and then billions suddenly flowed in. Pure coincidence, as everyone understands. And coincidentally, Yaroslav Hryshyn’s brother, Stanislav Hryshyn, represented Zhumadilov’s interests in court. Well, what a coincidence. Purely accidental. It happens, you know.
And purely by coincidence it turned out that the prices for “General Chereshnya” drones were inflated. We didn’t mention former Minister Reznikov and his eggs “for 17 hryvnias per kilogram” for nothing. With Hryshyn’s drones the story is exactly the same: the Telegram channel “Joker” directly wrote that in the Defense Procurement Agency, headed by Arsen Zhumadilov, there are at least 20 offers of similar drones of better quality and at much lower prices. The state purchased “General Chereshnya” at prices ranging from 17 900 to 39 000 hryvnias depending on the model, while the DPA rejected drones that cost 10–18 thousand hryvnias.
But the DPA for some reason awards contracts to Yaroslav Hryshyn’s drones. By another strange coincidence, a former Zhumadilov employee, Andriy Lavrinovych, started working at LLC “Center for Unmanned Systems Research”: he resigned as director of organizational development at SE “State Rear Operator” of the Ministry of Defense and immediately joined Hryshyn’s team.
If the story of the drones purchased by the DPA can be interpreted in different ways — maybe “General Chereshnya” really is worth the money it’s bought for and is indeed the best — the story in which representatives of Yaroslav Hryshyn tried to force their product on a buyer with threats, and not even a state buyer, at double the price is hard to explain.
The incident occurred in February 2026: then a representative of “General Chereshnya” offered the charitable foundation “Your Step” 100 BULLET Anti-Shahed drones at roughly 110 thousand hryvnias each. At the same time, on the manufacturer’s official website a similar model cost about 58 thousand hryvnias. The commercial offer was signed by director Mykhailo Prasol.
After the foundation refused to buy the drones at the proposed price, the company’s representative began threatening the foundation with inspections and problems from security services. And these accusations are by no means unfounded — there is an audio recording of these threats.
But there are several other factors that, in a normal country, would have long since “cut down” the defense order: Yaroslav Hryshyn is the subject of as many as six (!) criminal proceedings. These criminal proceedings are: No. 72025102100000026 — BEB proceeding under part 2 of art. 191 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine; No. 72025001420000071 dated 12 August 2025 — BEB, part 5 of art. 191; No. 62025080100005697 dated 11 August 2025 — DBR, part 1 of art. 364; No. 62025100110000197 dated 4 September 2025 — DBR, part 1 of art. 364; No. 22025101110001161 — Main Investigative Department of the SBU, part 2 of art. 364.
Article 191 of the Criminal Code concerns embezzlement, misappropriation, or seizure of property, including by abuse of office; the second part of the article relates to large scale or an organized group. Article 364 of the Criminal Code is abuse of power or official position; the second part is the same, i.e., under aggravating circumstances.
Information about in what procedural status Yaroslav Hryshyn appears in the criminal cases and the precise facts of those cases are quite contradictory, but all these proceedings are connected with the purchase of drones manufactured by Yaroslav Hryshyn. So it’s hard to imagine he’s only a witness in them. Or, by old habit, acting as a lawyer. Still, the existence of these cases in no way prevents Arsen Zhumadilov from buying drones from Hryshyn’s company.
Another criminal proceeding is unrelated to drones and concerns evasion of mobilization. No, Yaroslav Hryshyn is not evading—he helps evaders: criminal proceeding No. 42025164690000014 is connected to a scheme of illegal reservation of conscripts through an enterprise that has the status of critically important.
A court document on this proceeding describes an investigation of a scheme to evade mobilization by issuing reservations and deferrals, organizing escapes from recruitment centers, removing people from wanted lists, arranging disability status and other ways to avoid conscription. Besides Yaroslav Hryshyn himself, the document names his brother Stanislav Hryshyn and their company’s former director, Oleksandr Rusakov.
Yaroslav Hryshyn also has another extremely unpleasant story — a fatal road traffic accident. Yes, as a result the case against Yaroslav Hryshyn was closed, which he himself happily reported on the official page of his law firm.
We do not question the court’s verdict that closed the case, but it should be noted that the case was closed not for exculpatory reasons: the proceeding regarding the traffic accident was closed due to the statute of limitations for criminal prosecution, not because the investigation established that the accident did not occur or that Hryshyn was innocent.
And during the investigation Hryshyn even managed to be listed as wanted: in 2019 he was notified in absentia of suspicion under part 2 of art. 286 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, after which he was declared wanted.
So he simply went into hiding while his partners at the law firm “resolved the issues.” The issues were successfully resolved, the case was closed. How it really happened is a question shrouded in the darkness of time.
There is yet another very serious accusation against Yaroslav Hryshyn: some publications directly call him the lawyer of a Zaporizhia group that various sources name the OZU “Artashi.” Yaroslav Hryshyn is linked to Rudolf Akopyan and other figures, and his current business is being presented as a continuation of old criminal ties.
Notably, Rudolf Akopyan is now one of the public representatives of “General Chereshnya”: he officially holds the position of Director of Strategic Communications at the company, and Yaroslav Hryshyn calls him one of the people who stood at the origins of the project.
Moreover, even before “General Chereshnya” appeared, the surnames Hryshyn and Akopyan appeared together in law enforcement investigation materials concerning the Zaporizhia municipal enterprise “Zaporizhrynok.”
In a court document published online in 2022, among the persons whose actions were checked by the investigation were Hryshyn, Akopyan and Mykhailo Prasol: the investigation linked them to the activities of a group sources called the OZU “Artashi.” And the story was extremely unpleasant — in addition to outright criminality, information surfaced about all current manufacturers of “General Chereshnya” working for the FSB.
Of course, the figures involved deny everything. Moreover — information was leaked into the public domain that the SBU, in responses to lawyers’ inquiries, stated it has no information about the existence of OZU “Artashi” as an active organized criminal organization. And Rudolf Akopyan himself reported in May 2025 that an attempt on his life was prevented in Zaporizhia, claiming that Russian special services were behind the attack.
Maybe that’s exactly how it is, of course — one should not discount the fact that during business disputes in our country — and we are talking billions, let’s not forget — it’s fashionable to accuse each other of working for the FSB. But in Hryshyn’s case there is a nuance: accusations linking him to OZU “Artashi” and to the FSB appeared before he began receiving huge defense contracts. Those stories date from 2022–2023, years when the current “General Chereshnya” still worked in Zaporizhia as a lawyer.
To summarize, of course one could call all publications about Yaroslav Hryshyn the machinations of competitors in the defense-contract field. But in these “machinations” there are real criminal proceedings, real price inflation, and equally real "coincidences” connected with the current head of the Defense Procurement Agency, Zhumadilov. Too many coincidences, in our view.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "«Генерал Черешня» Ярослав Гришин: як мутний адвокат став не менш мутним виробником дронів". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: HAB Media.
