Liashko Ruslan Volodymyrovych

From GPU investigator to top SBI official: career rise despite failed attestation and the family's "Austrian" trip

Ruslan Volodymyrovych Liashko is an experienced law enforcement officer who has dedicated over 10 years to the prosecution bodies. For a long time, he served as a senior investigator in especially important cases of the Special Investigations Department of the General Prosecutor's Office of Ukraine (GPU). However, in 2019 his career at the GPU ended in a loud fiasco—Liashko was dismissed from the prosecution bodies due to failing the mandatory professional attestation. Disagreeing with this decision, he immediately filed a lawsuit against the attestation commission in the Kyiv District Administrative Court.

Drunk driving in a Lexus, assault on a disciplinary commission, and European social benefits during war

At the same time, he remarkably found a position as an ordinary investigator at the State Bureau of Investigation. Already in September 2020, following a competition, Liashko made a stunning leap by becoming the head of the Territorial Department of the SBI in Lviv, which has jurisdiction over five western regions of Ukraine. During his tenure, his official wealth significantly increased: according to the official’s declaration, his personal salary in the bureau grew, and his family's total income for the year reached 4.1 million hryvnias.

The most notorious public scandal surrounding Ruslan Liashko erupted in April 2018, when the patrol police stopped his Lexus NX 200T on the Kyiv–Vyshhorod highway for driving under the influence of alcohol. Being a respected investigator of the GPU, he categorically refused to take a breathalyzer test or go to a medical facility and, moreover, arranged a brazen conflict with police officers, accusing them of "attempted provocation."

During the war, journalists discovered that against the backdrop of a top law enforcement officer's million-level salary, his wife Olga Liashko, while abroad, received nearly half a million hryvnias in social benefits in Austria as a refugee. In subsequent declarations, she began to report hundreds of thousands of hryvnias in monetary "gifts" from third parties and the rental of a luxury Lexus RX 450h.