He is only the latest prosecutor general to leave the office in disgrace, and the office is the reason.
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The High Anti-Corruption Court (HACC), created in 2018 through the same kind of expert council, reaches officials the courts never could: it convicted the highest-ranking judge in the country, Vsevolod Kniaziev, over part of a $2.7 million bribe. Before it existed, all of Ukraine’s general courts together had delivered roughly 40 verdicts in NABU and SAPO cases; in seven years the specialized court has delivered 431, against 601 people, and for the first time a sitting MP drew a real prison term.
The foreign vote is not a hypothetical safeguard. At an August hearing for Olha Stefanishyna, the former deputy prime minister for European integration, a SAPO prosecutor read out messages in which, they say, she steered the very commissions that select Ukraine’s watchdog agencies. To the head of the 2022 panel choosing the NABU director: “Do what you want, I need numbers 60 and 62 from the list. Postpone the sessions, I shouldn’t have to think for you.” Her influence reached three commissions at once.
She calls the case a storm in a teacup, and the charges are unproven. But it is the reformers’ own argument: the Ukrainian half of a commission can be captured. The foreigners with a decisive vote are the part no Ukrainian official can phone up and instruct.
The model is no panacea, Korzhenkova warns:
“The international experts are not the motor of reform. They are a circuit breaker. They can keep out the worse candidate. They cannot make those in power want to do better.”
The anti-corruption court convicts, but whether the guilty serve time is another matter. Of its 398 convictions in seven years, more than half were settled by plea bargain, others ended in fines or suspended sentences, and a stack of cases had simply run out the clock before any verdict. As of the last public tally, in spring 2026, only about 80 of the convicted had actually drawn real jail time.
For years, the court sat short of judges, which Ekonomichna Pravda read as quietly convenient for those in power: an understaffed court slows cases and lets them lapse without the visible fight of dismantling it. Most of the vacancies were only filled in August 2026, when the EU tied the appointments to money Ukraine needed.
What the bill would do, and the perennial objection
Full depoliticization would mean amending the constitution, which martial law rules out, and the EU mandates no specific route. So the reformers’ instrument is an ordinary law, bill 15343.
It adds a filter to the current system: the president would pick not freely, as now, but from candidates pre-selected by an open competition run by a six-member commission, three of them vetted by Ukraine’s international partners. Four votes choose a candidate, two of them the internationals’.
And it moves the power to discipline and dismiss a sitting prosecutor general to the High Council of Justice, the body that governs Ukraine’s judges, itself reformed in 2021 through the same international-expert vetting, and the one disciplinary body not under the prosecutor general’s own control.
If the mechanism works, and Ukraine has used it for its anti-corruption prosecution, bureau, and court, the obvious question is why the prosecutor general was left out.
The answer is not constitutional, though a constitutional objection has been raised. A legal analysis on the site Sud.ua argued the model has no analog in most of the EU and breaks the constitution: the president is reduced to a technical executor of the commission’s choice, and the judges’ council is handed power over the head of the prosecution, which is not the judiciary. Foreign experts with a veto over a constitutional office, one commentator wrote, are a gift to any populist and to Moscow.
But this is the argument Ukraine’s powerful always reach for when the anti-corruption bodies get close.
In 2020, when NABU accused the judge Pavlo Vovk of running a scheme to seize control of the courts, the same sovereignty-and-separation-of-powers reasoning was deployed to shield him, and EP reported at the time that the prosecutor general’s own office was accused of moving to disrupt the case against him. The office meant to prosecute the powerful was protecting them instead, which is the whole reason reformers want it taken out of political hands.
There is no legal reason the reform cannot be done, Korzhenkova says. The same constitutional objections applied to the Constitutional Court and the High Council of Justice, both reformed through international vetting; the filter was added anyway.
“The constitutional argument suddenly appeared only for the prosecutor general,” she said.
The real reason for the stall is political: the prosecutor general is the last great lever that decides who gets prosecuted, and the majority that would have to give up control of it is the same majority those prosecutions would reach.
The Rada’s own tempo shows it. To save the system from a scandal, it found 317 votes to dismiss Kravchenko in a single day and installed an acting prosecutor general by decree. To limit the system, it has left the bill untouched for three months; in early September the relevant committee declined even to put it on the agenda, and moved only after individual MPs pushed.
At least 50 members of the current parliament, Chesno documents, are themselves under criminal suspicion.
What happens now
The interim answer is Anton Kovalskyi, the Khmelnytskyi Oblast chief prosecutor, appointed acting prosecutor general by decree on 17 September, chosen the old way: hand-picked, from at least four candidates, with no public account of why him.
The Anti-Corruption Action Center laid out the rest in a dossier: property registered to relatives, a wife from Russia whose year-old sole proprietorship reported earnings of over UAH 500,000 ($11k) a month, a deputy whose father-in-law fled to Russia and was convicted in absentia of collaboration.
Asked whether the reform bill would have produced a different result, Korzhenkova declined to guess, and said the guessing is the problem. “I don’t know, and neither does anyone else, and that is exactly it.”
Under an open competition, his selection would have been vetted by international experts; everyone could have submitted data on the candidates.
The bill would not have guaranteed a good prosecutor general, but it would at least have made the appointed one checkable. This is what the Rada majority is, for now, declining to allow.
The case that finally reached Kravchenko had a name. NABU and SAPO called it Carthage: a scheme, run out of the Prosecutor General’s Office itself, to shield a network of fraudulent call centers, with five officials handed suspicions.
Carthage put investigators inside his building, and Carthage he was answering when, on his way out, he turned the office’s power to prosecute the man using it against him and signed a suspicion against Semen Kryvonos, the NABU director.
Kryvonos says it never reached him; the office itself later conceded that the suspicion was legally void.
Kravchenko’s last act as prosecutor general was a business trip he wrote for himself, five days in Paris for a hearing of the PACE parliamentary network, and he left by car on 13 September. He was due back on the 18th. He did not return, and his former office says it does not know whether he has asked for asylum in the EU.
Ukraine has spent a decade building institutions that reach the powerful. The prosecutor general’s office is the one it never got to. The man who ran it signed his own exit papers and was across the border by half past two in the morning.
IMO this kind of crap needs to stop especially during a time of war and as we are asking for money from our partners. Doesn’t Zelensky and the RADA get this?
Ukraine is so f*cked. Attacked by putin’s hordes, abandoned by many allies, and ruled by corrupt mafiosi. It’s heartbreaking and makes me very pi$$ed off! No other people, except for the jews, had to suffer so much in their younger history. Shameful.
Such despicable, contemptible behavior can be as dangerous to the country as the enemy himself if left to go unchecked.