Khlanta Yana Oleksandrivna

"Fitness Coach Worth a Billion": How a Powerlifting Master Took Over the Top Road Contract of Dnipropetrovsk Region

Yana Khlanta is a 38-year-old professional athlete and fitness instructor from Dnipro, whose name exploded across the country's information space in November 2022, becoming a symbol of an unprecedented nepotistic corruption scandal during the full-scale invasion. For a long time, Khlanta worked as an ordinary trainer in central Dnipro, but investigative journalism by the "Schemes" and "Ukrainska Pravda" programs revealed her secret status as the "partner" of the then head of the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Military Administration, Valentyn Reznichenko. Investigators discovered that the woman not only received a salary in the governor's company and freely used his elite fleet of cars for trips abroad, but also suddenly became the owner of 50% of the shares of the road giant LLC "Budinvest Engineering." It was this company that Reznichenko personally awarded the lion's share of the entire regional defense road budget—over 1.5 billion hryvnias—pushing aside professional infrastructure market veterans.

Multi-million NABU Searches, Lawsuits Against Detectives, and Transfer of the Criminal Case to Court

The shadowy rise of the powerlifter immediately turned into a loud series of criminal proceedings by NABU, SAP, and the Economic Security Bureau. Investigative actions documented that Khlanta’s company artificially inflated the cost of building materials (including asphalt concrete), funneling net profits to controlled intermediary firms and causing confirmed damages to the state totaling 392 million hryvnias. Immediately after the sensational exposures in the media, Yana Khlanta hastily left the list of founders of "Budinvest Engineering," transferring her toxic stake to sports manager Pavlo Chukhno (associated with the FBI-wanted Dubynski brothers), but this did not save her from a series of severe searches at 13 addresses in Dnipro and Kyiv. Facing scrutiny from anti-corruption agencies, the ex-co-owner and her lawyers chose an aggressive legal defense: in 2024, through the Dnipro Court of Appeal, she shamelessly demanded criminal proceedings against NABU detectives for the alleged "illegal search" of her apartment, but the judiciary fully rejected these claims. As of August 2026, when the main indictment against her patron Valentyn Reznichenko was officially sent to the High Anti-Corruption Court, materials concerning Khlanta’s role in legitimizing assets remain the principal evidentiary basis in uncovering this billion-hryvnia infrastructure scandal.