Ukraine’s top prosecutor falls on sword amid fake disabilities scam

KYIV — Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin resigned on Tuesday in the wake of a lurid scandal in which public officials allegedly used bogus disability certificates to get more generous pensions from the state and possibly evade being drafted to fight Russian troops.
In Khmelnytskyi region in western Ukraine, for example, some 50 prosecutors reportedly obtained fraudulent disability certificates from an official with the state medical board, shielding them from induction into the country’s hard-pressed military. The official was arrested and charged with corruption — the draft-evasion scheme allegedly earned her hundreds of thousands of dollars.
After Ukrainian media broke the scandal last week, the Office of the General Prosecutor launched an internal investigation that led to a wave of inspections throughout Ukraine’s public sector.
The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), a domestic intelligence body, caught another medical official from Mykolaiv region with $450,000 in undeclared cash. She had also issued disability certificates to herself and to her son, who carried a Russian passport, the SBU said.
Overall, some 64 state medical commissioners have been issued with “notes of suspicion,” the Ukraine equivalent of criminal charges that have not yet been tried in court. Some 4,000 disability certificates were canceled after the audit, SBU head Vasyl Malyuk said Tuesday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy demanded Kostin take political responsibility for the scandal. The prosecutor general duly threw himself under the proverbial bus.
“Many shameful facts of abuse have been established in the system of the prosecutor’s office of Ukraine,” Kostin said in a statement Tuesday. “The President is correct … not only should all illegal decisions regarding the granting of disabilities, corresponding pensions and other payments be canceled. [But] clear legislative and organizational changes should [also] come, as well as political responsibility.
“I am grateful to the President of Ukraine and to the [parliament] of Ukraine for their trust. But in this situation, I think it is correct to announce [my] departure from the position of Prosecutor General,” he added.
Kostin resigned after a meeting of the National Security and Defense Council, at which Zelenskyy vowed scrutiny of all disability certificates as well as the process of granting disabilities.
“These decisions include the digitalization of procedures for all stages of medical and social expert commissions; a thorough inspection of the declarations of members of medical commissions; the verification and revision of unjustified decisions on the disability status of officials; and an audit of the relevant pension accruals,” Zelenskyy said.