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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
In 2026 year, under the leadership of Ihor Strohyi, head of the High Anti-Corruption Court, every fourth search case in the anticorruption court passed through his hands — within 16 in a day. How many of them he rejected publicly no one knows.
A search is when the state enters your life without knocking. Detectives turn a house or an office upside down, seize phones, documents, money. That is why between the investigators at your doors stands a judge. His only job at this stage is not just to issue a permit 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 must issue more than twenty.
We analyzed the court registry data for 2026 year and found a paradoxical trend: every fourth permission for a search in the High Anti-Corruption Court passes through the hands of one person — the current head of the HACC Ihor Strohyi. But how many detectives did he deny? No one knows.
Every fourth search in the country is concentrated in the same hands
Statistics are a stubborn thing. According to data from the Unified State Register of Court Decisions for nine months 2026 year, the investigative judges of the HACC considered 678 motions for searches. A quarter of them — 170 cases — were handled by Ihor Strohyi. For comparison: with no other judge did this figure exceed 124.
If you take a broader period (2023–2026 years), Strohyi also ranks among the leaders: 579 cases on searches. This is almost a quarter of his entire work as an investigative judge. But the most interesting thing starts when we look at speed.
August conveyor: 17 minutes to a ruling
A telling month was August 2026 year. In just two weeks (from 12 to 26 August) Strohyi reviewed 102 motions for searches. The peak fell on 13 August. In that day the judge issued 28 closed rulings (13 searches, 14 temporary access to documents, 1 seizure of property). If you divide a standard 8-hour workday into 28 decisions, you get roughly 17 minutes per case.
Is it possible to determine whether all 102 motions belong to a single criminal proceeding, as the registry cannot establish: rulings are closed, numbers of proceedings are not visible in them.
Yes, one can 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 motions from NABU, verify grounds, delineate the limits of the search so investigators do not take more than necessary, and write a reasoned decision. Is it physically possible? The question remains.
Of course, peak days happen in others as well. The HACC record — 42 decisions per day. Yet it is precisely because of Strohyi that the tightest flow of sanctions on searches passes through now, and it is this person who leads the anti-corruption court today.
What is visible from open decisions
The search rulings themselves are closed. But a glimpse of what happened after the searches can be seen. In the year 2025 the Appellate Chamber of the HACC canceled arrests of telephones seized during searches that Strohyi had used. Here is how the appeal assessed his approach:
“The arguments of the prosecution and the investigator’s conclusion about the impossibility of copying the information on the mobile phone due to its technical characteristics without expert examination seem unconvincing to the panel of judges; the case materials contain no evidence of this.” AP HACC, 991/5533/25 — Unified State Register of Court Decisions.
In another case, the appeal stated “inconsistency of the investigative judge’s conclusions with the factual circumstances of the proceedings” — the phone was arrested, and the owner himself gave the password (991/4267/25).
Sometimes Strohyi explains his choice plainly:
“…the arguments of the prosecution seem more convincing to the investigative judge, which indicates that there are currently no grounds for canceling the arrest.”
Ruling of Strohyi, 991/263/26 — Unified State Register of Court Decisions.
As we wrote in the previous material, it is Strohyi almost single-handedly in the HACC who uses in property seizure decisions the formula by which “the factual refusal of the detective” from seizure by itself is grounds for its cancellation. That is, in these cases the detective’s position often determines the direction of the ruling.
For fairness: after cancellations in the appellate, his rulings on phone seizures began to include explanations of why copying is impossible. It happened that he returned unsigned motions (12 motions by SAP on seizure of property 25 December 2025 year) and refused NABU a stricter preventive measure (replacing bail with a warrant of guard duty, 991/1467/26). So to say that he signs everything detectives bring is not supported by the data.
The main unanswered question
How many detectives did Strohyi deny during searches? There is no answer. Public aggregated statistics do not exist for either the head of the HACC or other investigative judges. Without this number, discussions about independent judicial supervision are theoretical. If a judge approves 99% of motions for searches in a conveyor-belt mode, that is no longer supervision. It is an unwavering and blind trust in NABU. And the European Court of Human Rights explicitly states (case Bagiyeva v. Ukraine): judicial supervision before a search must be substantive, not formal.
Today Strohyi reviews the most cases about searches in the anti-corruption court, and does so at a pace that raises doubts about the physical ability to thoroughly study each document.
Until HACC shows real statistics — how many motions the judge rejected or narrowed — we will not know who truly sanctions searches in the country: an independent arbiter or simply a loyal to detectives notary.
Therefore we propose that the head of the HACC Ihor Strohyi come to a press conference and give society simple answers: how many motions by NABU and SAP for a search he granted, how many were denied, and how exactly he manages to ensure thorough judicial scrutiny with 17 minutes per case.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Сотні обшуків і 17 хвилин на рішення: голова ВАКС Ігор Строгий перетворив судовий контроль на формальність". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: Rozsliduvach.
