Volunteer worth billions: how the gray eminence of the “Great Construction” Yury Holyk fled NABU abroad

After a series of high-profile scandals and criminal proceedings related to the presidential “Great Construction” program, in which its curator from the Office of the President, Yury Holyk, was implicated, he suddenly disappeared not only from the information space but also from the country.

The most interesting thing in this story is not how much Yury Holyk stole and with whom he shared it, but where and how he disappeared. Although the criminal cases involving Holyk have not been closed, his whereabouts are reliably unknown to anyone — neither the investigative authorities nor investigative journalists. That leads to various theories — from the idea that Yury Holyk was hidden from NABU so detectives would not reach key persons in the OPU, to the suggestion that Holyk is already physically gone from this world and can no longer tell anyone about the theft schemes for obvious reasons.

However, the latter version seems somewhat hasty, since traces of Yury Holyk have been found in several countries — Poland, Israel, Austria — but in any case his exact location could not be reliably verified. After Yury Holyk left Ukraine using the “Shlyakh” system as a volunteer, he disappeared.

Chronicle of scandals

To understand why considerable danger hung over Yury Holyk, it is worth briefly recalling who he is and at least schematically going through the scandals that accompanied his name since the current leaders of the country took power at the Bankova.

Yury Holyk appeared in the public sphere in 2019 as one of the close associates of the head of the Dnipropetrovsk Regional State Administration, Valentyn Reznichenko. From there he quickly moved and became part of President Zelensky’s inner circle, first as an advisor to Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk (the latter was remembered only for the scooter and the torn-down walls in the Cabinet building), but very quickly he rebranded as a public figure of the heavily advertised presidential program “Great Construction,” which people aptly renamed the “Great Theft” program.

Although Yury Holyk did not hold any official position in that program, his role in it was quickly identified as that of a “gray eminence.” Indeed — without Holyk’s approval no tender was won, and we are talking about hundreds of billions of hryvnias. At the same time Holyk managed to take the position of one of Zelensky’s closest advisers on infrastructure projects.

Yury Holyk’s position was secured by Kyrylo Tymoshenko, now-forgotten deputy head of the Office of the President of Ukraine in 2019–2023. He was considered one of Volodymyr Zelensky’s closest allies and oversaw information policy, the regional agenda, and the presidential “Great Construction” program.

It was thanks to Kyrylo Tymoshenko that Yury Holyk was able to become the “gray eminence” who sat on the allocation and subsequent “cutting up” of state funds allocated from the budget to the “Great Construction” — by various accounts, kickbacks reached a staggering 40%. How they were distributed and in whose pockets they ended up remains an open question, but Yury Holyk was precisely at the point where all those colossal sums converged.

To understand the scale — in 2021 alone, about 106 billion hryvnias were invested in road construction, and the state’s total road expenditures reached 132 billion hryvnias; including local budgets — about 178 billion. It is unnecessary to remind readers of the Russian tanks that rolled on these roads the following year — those images are still fresh in the memory of the surviving Ukrainians. Even more was planned for 2022, but for obvious reasons road repairs had to be urgently halted. Overall the state directed at least 240–250 billion hryvnias to implement the program, the bulk of which went to road construction.

After Kyrylo Tymoshenko left his post as deputy head of the OPU in January 2023 amid scandal, the star of the “gray eminence” Yury Holyk dimmed. Although for some time he was still unofficially considered one of the architects of Zelensky-era infrastructure policy. Despite holding no official position, journalists recorded his visits to the Office of the President and assumed he retained influence over infrastructure processes.

But it was during this period that numerous press publications about Holyk’s role in embezzlement on the “Great Construction” began to convert into full-fledged investigations by NABU. The most high-profile episode was the “Skhemy” investigation, which established that billions of hryvnias in contracts were received by Budinvest Engineering, a company linked to Yana Khlanta — a close companion of the head of the Dnipropetrovsk OVA Valentyn Reznichenko. Journalists described Yury Holyk as one of the coordinators of the processes around road contracts and reported his close contacts with participants in the scheme.

After that publication, NABU reluctantly had to carry out searches at Reznichenko’s premises, and searches were also conducted at Yury Holyk’s. This was the first time Holyk became a direct subject of investigative actions. Soon Bihus.Info journalists reported that Holyk’s correspondence with representatives of a contracting company that received state contracts worth billions of hryvnias was found in the investigation materials. According to the investigation, discussions concerned issues related to the implementation of road projects and the distribution of money.

It was during this period that Yury Holyk crossed the Ukrainian border as a volunteer. The scandal caused by this fact also ended with nothing. As for Yury Holyk himself, despite numerous episodes in criminal cases in which he is implicated, apart from regular visits to the Office of the President in 2023, in 2025 his name unexpectedly surfaced as a coordinator of the development of Ukrainian STING UAVs. This while for several years no one could find Yury Holyk himself.

So where is Yury Holyk after all?

There is no answer to that question. Surprisingly, some media publications suggest Holyk continues to participate in the allocation of defense funds. How accurate that is is hard to judge. But recall that Holyk participated in allocating “Great Construction” funds without any official status. Which did not hinder him at all.

So it cannot be completely denied that Yury Holyk lost influence over Ukraine’s budget funds and their redistribution. Although it is clear he is no longer at the center of the “cutting up” of defense funds, but on the periphery, still it concerns at least hundreds of millions of hryvnias.

As for the version that Holyk physically disappeared, this is indirectly refuted by the fact that several months ago a large-scale cleanup of the internet was carried out to remove compromising materials connected to Yury Holyk. It is doubtful that anyone else would have done this if the key figure had died.

Moreover, as recently as 3 July 2026 he published a photo of a diploma issued in his name by the National University “Ostroh Academy.” This gives rise to the assumption that all the searches for Yury Holyk are an outright farce, and that he himself did not run away anywhere.

Therefore the attractive but clearly conspiratorial version that Yury Holyk was eliminated should still be considered unlikely. Although there are grounds for such a scenario — many at the very top of the power vertical are very interested in silencing him forever. Precedents for similar “solutions to the problem” have occurred, and everyone understands that. Including Yury Holyk. Therefore, most likely, he tries not to “expose” himself.