When Viktor Remskyi appeared in the entourage of presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelensky during the 2019 presidential campaign, the public grew tense. There was talk that Remskyi might be rewarded for his assistance in a challenging region with the top position in the Donetsk Oblast Administration.
Until mid-2018, Remskyi served as the deputy head of the Donetsk Oblast Administration under Pavlo Zhebrivskyi, responsible for critical areas such as infrastructure restoration and passenger transportation. Most notably, he was a key figure, if not the architect, of the region's largest corruption scandals involving smuggling and passenger transport at crossing points along the contact line in the Donetsk oblast. Likely in response to public outcry, "Zelensky's team" removed Remskyi from the spotlight.
Instead, they appointed a then-unknown young prosecutor, Pavlo Kyrylenko, as head of the Oblast Administration. The public breathed a sigh of relief. Kyrylenko's biography was spotless, his career path raised no questions, his financial disclosures appeared clean, and he was a local. He had left Crimea, where he had worked during the annexation, and severed ties with his brother, a committed separatist who continued to serve the so-called "Donetsk republic". Kyrylenko seemed honest and "one of us".
His four years in office were uneventful. Kyrylenko avoided self-promotion with "patriotic" spectacles, unlike Zhebrivskyi; he generally shunned cameras, rarely gave interviews, and seldom gathered journalists. There were no questions about his behavior, lifestyle, or financial status. He did his job without any wow factor, but also without any major failures. He satisfied both the locals and Kyiv, where he was eventually considered for promotion. In September 2023, Pavlo Kyrylenko was appointed head of the Antimonopoly Committee, reportedly at the president's invitation. By 2024, rumors began circulating that he was being considered for the role of Prosecutor General.
This likely caused the failure. In March 2024, Radio Liberty published a report about undeclared properties owned by Kyrylenko, which were acquired between 2020 and 2023, during his time in the Oblast Administration. All the properties — a house in the Kyiv oblast, several "elite" apartments in Kyiv and Uzhhorod, cars, and more — were registered under the names of Kyrylenko's in-laws and his wife's grandmother. The explanations he provided for the origin and use of these assets seemed absurd and contradicted the statements made by his mother- and father-in-law.
However, the article text itself left mixed impressions: at times, it appeared that the author faced significant difficulties in substantiating the information they had. It seemed like they tried but couldn't fully verify the "leaked" information.
Nevertheless, this was enough for the anti-corruption agencies to initiate an investigation against Kyrylenko, uncover even more hidden assets, and push for his arrest.
Presidential Office personnel
Since 2014, Donbas has had poor luck with its leaders. The first ones after the russian invasion — Serhiy Taruta and Oleksandr Kikhtenko — clearly struggled with the challenges. Their successor, Pavlo Zhebrivskyi, almost openly profited from the opportunities created by the gray legal zone the war had established.
When he was finally dismissed in 2018 — not due to numerous journalistic investigations, but because of failed local elections — the then President Petro Poroshenko tried to secure a position for his protege in Kyiv, much like Zelensky did for Kyrylenko. Poroshenko appointed Zhebrivskyi as an auditor of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, but it seems international partners didn't appreciate the irony, and Zhebrivskyi never started working at NABU.
And in Kramatorsk, his position was taken by a man who had led the local SBU throughout his governorship and could not have been unaware of his schemes or uninvolved in them. But Oleksandr Kuts, Zhebrivskyi's successor, behaved just as quietly as his successor, Kyrylenko. Moreover, as an SBU officer (he was not dismissed from his position as a result of the appointment), Kuts took advantage of the opportunity to avoid disclosing his property declarations. However, journalists discovered expensive properties in the capital belonging to his close relatives.
The opportunities for rapid illegal enrichment in a region suffering from war were always there, but they changed over time. Zhebrivskyi and his team came up with humanitarian-logistics centers, which were used to bring goods into the parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts not controlled by Ukraine, and also created opaque conditions for passenger transportation between crossing points along the demarcation line and to/from them.
There were rumors about Kyrylenko "covering" illegal alcohol trade in the Donetsk oblast, where legal alcohol sales had been banned since 2022. There is no confirmation of these rumors, but the existence of illegal trade was common knowledge. In any case, as we already know, the young regional head began accumulating assets before 2022.
If anti-corruption bodies conducted any investigations into Zhebrivskyi, Remskyi, or Kuts, they led to no measures being taken.
Pavlo Zhebrivskyi, after his appointment to the NABU fell through, threatened to return to political activity and fight corruption. Instead, he began writing books "about Ukrainian identity as a source of energy for the successful development of society, about the idea of happiness as a criterion for development and evaluation of modern politics, about the Ukrainian political nation as a tool for building a strong state and a guarantee of its victory".
Viktor Remskyi (whose declaration still raises unanswered questions) is still the head of the regional branch of the National Olympic Committee.
He also runs a "security risk management agency" and a related website, which declares its mission to be "helping citizens understand how organized crime and corrupt officials operate within the state, using governmental institutions for this purpose". Even after the elections, he remained within Zelenskyi's orbit; in 2021, he was seen celebrating the birthday of the notorious Deputy Head of the President's Office, Oleh Tatarov.
Oleksandr Kuts has been heading the SBU in the Kharkiv oblast since 2022.
By Yuliia Abibok, OstroV