In a fresh shakeup to Ukraine’s top law enforcement ranks amid ongoing Russian invasion and a growing domestic anti-corruption push, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has named 42-year-old Anton Kovalskyi as the country’s new acting prosecutor general. This appointment follows the sudden resignation of former top prosecutor Ruslan Kravchenko, who stepped down last week after Ukrainian anti-corruption authorities executed search warrants at his offices in connection with an investigation into unregulated illegal call center operations across the country.
The country’s two leading anti-corruption watchdogs — the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAP) — have uncovered what they describe as a sophisticated money laundering network operated by a senior official within Kravchenko’s former department. According to official investigators, the network accepted large bribes to shield fraudulent call centers that run global phone scams, and in the process laundered millions of dollars in illegal proceeds. Those illicit funds were then converted into high-value assets including residential and commercial real estate, luxury jewelry, and other high-end goods, investigators confirmed.
Kravchenko has forcefully pushed back against all claims of personal involvement, dismissing the allegations against him and his department as entirely unsubstantiated. A day after issuing his denial, Kravchenko resigned from his post and subsequently departed Ukraine. He has levelled counter-accusations, claiming that critical documents were stolen during the office search in a plot to frame anti-corruption officials and cover up separate criminal wrongdoing within NABU and SAP. He also accused NABU Director Semen Kryvonos of forging documents in a decades-old legal case.
All the allegations put forward by Kravchenko have been uniformly rejected by the two anti-corruption agencies. Kryvonos dismissed Kravchenko’s claims as nonsense, labeling them part of a coordinated, fierce campaign to derail ongoing high-stakes corruption investigations. In a statement, the NABU chief said the current push against his agency’s work is part of an unprecedented effort to disrupt the agency’s active probes, adding that anti-corruption detectives, their personal and official properties, and work vehicles have been placed under covert surveillance, though he did not name any specific parties behind the monitoring.
“What we are seeing is a deliberate attempt to obstruct the work of NABU and SAP by gaining unauthorized access to sensitive details about upcoming planned investigations,” Kryvonos added. Currently, the two agencies are conducting corruption probes into several of Ukraine’s most high-profile public figures, including Zelensky’s former chief of staff Andriy Yermak, multiple former cabinet ministers, and other influential political actors. A lawyer representing Yermak has already dismissed all allegations against the former official as baseless.
This latest scandal comes amid long-running tension between Zelensky’s administration and Ukraine’s independent anti-corruption bodies. In 2025, widespread nationwide protests erupted across Ukraine after Zelensky proposed reforms that would have reduced the institutional independence of NABU and SAP. Zelensky ultimately backed down from the plan and restored the agencies’ autonomy, but lingering questions have persisted about the Ukrainian government’s full commitment to rooting out systemic corruption at the highest levels of government — a key requirement for Ukraine’s ongoing integration with European institutions amid its war with Russia.