Last weekend and the first working days of this week were full of sensational reports of personnel rotations in the Presidential Office and were marked by the detention of senior officials.
Almost at night, on 29 March, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dismissed Andriy Smirnov and Oleksiy Dniprov from their positions as deputy heads of the Presidential Office. The next day, on 30 March, First Assistant to the President Serhiy Shefir, advisers Mykhailo Radutskyi, Serhiy Trofimov and Oleh Ustenko, as well as freelance commissioners for volunteer activities Natalia Pushkariova and for the protection of the rights of defenders Alyona Verbytska lost their positions.
Before journalists had a chance to fully understand these personnel rotations, which undoubtedly indicate a rather serious reset on Bankova Street, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office reported a new scoop: an organised group led by Artem Shyl, a former adviser to the Presidential Office and until recently a senior official of the SBU, was exposed.
On 2 April, the NABU press service announced the exposure of an organised crime group that had seized almost UAH 95 million from Ukrzaliznytsia JSC for the purchase of transformers at inflated prices. However, this happened more than two years ago. Law enforcement, meanwhile, did not name the suspects. At the same time, according to the NABU Daily TV channel (associated with journalist Oleh Novikov), it was allegedly the former adviser to the President’s Office, an official of the Security Service of Ukraine, Artem Shilo, who had been heading the organised group since 2021, and in the second half of 2022, through his people at Ukrzaliznytsia, “ensured the victory of a well-known supplier of power transformers at an inflated price”.
Not long ago, Artem Shyl was dismissed from the post of the SBU’s Main Directorate for Counterintelligence Protection of the State’s Economic Security. At the same time (according to Kommersant’ s 
sources) he became an officer on special assignments in the Presidential Office. So far, the editorial office has not been able to officially confirm this information.
Even now, in the wake of Shyla’s immediate detention by anti-corruption authorities, Kommersant’ s interlocutors are voicing several versions of the reasons that preceded these events.
Firstly, according to one of the newspaper’s sources, Shilo was considered a person close to Andriy Yermak.
Secondly, the news of Shilo’s sudden detention came as an unpleasant surprise to both the OP and the leadership of the Security Service of Ukraine. The day before yesterday, Shilo and Malyuk allegedly had a personal meeting, and “nothing indicated” the likelihood of yesterday’s “raid”.
Thirdly, as the source adds, it is highly likely that the sudden “exposure of schemes” from two years ago by NABU officers may be a kind of congratulations from the recently dismissed deputy head of the OP Andriy Smirnov.
This hypothesis is justified by the fact that, being personally “on the hook” for the NABU, Smirnov has long played the role of an informant for anti-corruption bodies, receiving certain temporary guarantees of immunity in return.
An indirect confirmation of this version is the fact that the Bureau has been investigating Smirnov’s alleged illicit enrichment for a year now, but has not served him with any suspicion.
It is also worth recalling that Smirnov was brought to the Presidential Office by the former head of the Prosecutor General’s Office, Andriy Bohdan. In addition, the former deputy head of the OP was a close associate of the former official Andrii Portnov.
There has been no understanding between Andriy Yermak and Smirnov for a long time, the sources add. And the issue of Smirnov’s dismissal was “only a matter of time”.
Another version of the sudden arrests, which was shared with Kommersant Ukrainskyi is that there is a long-standing conflict between NABU Deputy Head Gizo Unlava and Deputy Head of the Prosecutor General’s Office Oleg Tatarov. Since Shilo was a member of the Yermak-Tatarov team, Unlava decided to detain him in the wake of another escalation of his interpersonal conflict with Tatarov.
Sources within the anti-corruption agencies themselves confirm to Kommersant Ukrainskyi – that the Ukrzaliznytsia case did not arise yesterday: “The papers for it were folded in the desk and were waiting for their time.” The source also confirmed Uglava’s personal involvement in the criminal proceedings.
At the time of publication, the editors were unable to contact either Gizo Uglava, Andrey Smirnov or Artem Shilo.
Kommersant Ukrainsky reserves the right for each of the above-mentioned officials to express their opinion on the information presented.
If the versions voiced by the interlocutors of the publication have a real basis, we can predict further escalation of the so-called “interagency relations”. In this case, it has nothing to do with the impartiality of law enforcement agencies in the country during the war. And it is not about justifying certain officials who may indeed have been involved in various illegal schemes, but about the practice of abusing criminal justice for personal or political reasons. Unfortunately, there is a lot of evidence of this. After all, some cases lie dormant for years, others appear instantly and are piled up in courts, and some are waiting for their political time….