Hunko Kateryna Ihorivna

Queen of personnel and financial "miracles"

Kateryna Hunko is an influential official and a candidate of economic sciences, who heads the personnel department of the Kharkiv customs and is the deputy director of the relevant Department of the central apparatus of the State Customs Service of Ukraine (Dergmytservice). In addition to overseeing personnel, she concurrently chairs the Kharkiv customs trade union and teaches specialized disciplines to students. Despite a modest government salary, the official's name drew the attention of investigative journalists from the Rozsliduvach platform and the Antikor portal due to her family's sudden financial rise. Her husband, Oleksandr Popov, who for years worked on several minimum wages, unexpectedly declared colossal incomes and elite real estate in the resort town of Bukovel in 2024, while financial flows for the purchase of Carpathian assets were completely concealed in the declarations submitted to the National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NACP).

Phantom detention, SBU searches, and "trading" of mobilization exemptions at customs

On October 15, 2026, a loud scandal erupted around Kateryna Hunko: Ukrainian media were shaken by news of her detention by operatives of the Security Service of Ukraine on suspicion of receiving a $25,000 bribe. Later, journalists disproved the information about Hunko’s arrest as a premature error of sources but confirmed large-scale SBU searches directly in her personnel department. It turned out that law enforcement is investigating a cynical corruption scheme within the central apparatus of customs: according to the investigation, Hunko's subordinate—the deputy head of the department—was taking "thank-you payments" for appointing people to positions solely to grant them subsequent exemptions from mobilization.