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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
Igor Strony — the “judge of searches”: every fourth petition in VAKS passes through him
In 2026 year, under the head of VAKS Igor Strony, every fourth case of a search in the anti-corruption court went through him — up to 16 per day. How many of them he rejected, publicly no one knows.
A search is when the state enters your life without knocking. Detectives turn the house or office upside down, seize phones, documents, money. That is why between your doors and the investigators stands a judge. His only job at this stage is not just to grant permission for such actions, but to carefully verify whether there are grounds for such a harsh intrusion into citizens’ private life, guaranteed by the Constitution. The question is only how to do it, when a judge has 17 minutes for one decision, and in a day he has to issue more than two dozen.
We analyzed the data of the court register for 2026 year and found a paradoxical trend: every fourth consent to a search in the High Anti-Corruption Court passes through the hands of one person — the current head of VAKS Igor Strony. But how many detectives did he reject? No one knows.
Every fourth search in the country is concentrated in one set of hands.
Statistics are stubborn. According to the Unified State Register of Court Decisions for nine months 2026, VAKS investigative judges considered 678 petitions for searches. About a quarter of them — 170 cases — were processed through Igor Strony. For comparison: no other judge’s figure exceeded 124.
If we take a broader period (2023–2026 years), Strony here also stays among the leaders: 579 cases on searches. This is almost a quarter of all his work as an investigative judge. But the most interesting part begins when we look at speed.
August conveyor: 17 minutes to issue a ruling.
A telling moment was August 2026 year. Only over two weeks (from 12 to 26 August) Strony considered 102 petitions for searches. The peak fell on 13 August. In this day the judge issued 28 closed rulings (13 searches, 14 temporary access to documents, 1 seizure of property). If we divide a standard 8-hour workday into 28 decisions, we get about 17 minutes per case.
Whether all 102 petitions belong to one criminal proceeding is impossible to determine from the register: rulings are closed, case numbers are not visible.
Yes, one may suppose that the judge read the materials at night, and wrote the rulings later. But behind these 17 minutes lies the need to study volumes of petitions from NABU, verify grounds, delineate the scope of the search, so investigators do not overstep, and write a reasoned decision. Is it physically possible? The question remains.
Of course, peak days occur in others as well. The VAKS record — 42 of a decision per day. Yet it is through Strony that the tightest stream of sanctions on searches currently passes, and it is this person who today leads the anti-corruption court.
What is visible from open decisions.
The searches themselves are closed. But something is visible from what happened after the searches. In 2025 year, the Appellate Chamber of VAKS overturned arrests of phones seized during searches, which Strony had applied. Here is how the appellate evaluated his approach:
“The prosecution’s arguments and the investigator-judge’s conclusion about the impossibility of copying data from the mobile phone due to its technical characteristics appear unpersuasive to the panel of judges; the case materials contain no proof of this.” AP VAKS, 991/5533/25 — reyestr.court.gov.ua/Review/128698933
In another case, the appellate determined “inconsistency of the investigator-judge’s conclusions with the actual circumstances of the proceedings” — the arrest of a phone, from which the owner himself gave the password (991/4267/25).
Sometimes Strony explains his choice directly:
“…the prosecution’s arguments to the investigator-judge seem more convincing, which indicates that there are no grounds to cancel the arrest at this time.”
Ruling of Strony, 991/263/26 — reyestr.court.gov.ua/Review/133600032
As we wrote in the previous material, Strony nearly single-handedly uses in asset arrest rulings in VAKS a formula by which “the factual refusal of the detective” from the arrest itself is, in itself, grounds to cancel it. That is, in these cases the detective’s position often determines which way the ruling goes.
To be fair: after cancellations in appellate, his rulings on phone arrests began to include explanations of why copying is impossible. It happened that he returned prosecutors’ unsigned petitions (12 petitions of SAP on asset arrest 25 of December 2025 year) and refused NABU a stricter preventive measure (replacing bail with house arrest, 991/1467/26). So saying that he signs everything detectives bring is not supported by the data.
The main question remains unanswered.
How many detectives did Strony refuse in searches? There is no answer. Public aggregated statistics do not exist either for the head of VAKS or for other investigative judges. Without this figure, conversations about independent judicial control are speculation. If a judge approves 99% of petitions for searches in a conveyor mode, then this is no longer control. It is an unconditional and blind trust in NABU. And the European Court of Human Rights explicitly points out (case Bagiyeva v. Ukraine): judicial control before a search must be substantive, not formal.
Today Strony considers the most cases on searches in the anti-corruption court, and does so at a pace that raises doubts about the ability to thoroughly study each document.
Until VAKS shows real statistics — how many petitions the court refused or at least narrowed — we will not learn who truly sanctions searches in the country: an independent arbiter or simply a loyal to detectives notary.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Ігор Строгий — «суддя обшуків»: кожне четверте клопотання у ВАКС проходить через нього". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: ANTIKOR.
