The court allowed Colonel Roman Chervinsky to return to service in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
His lawyer Kostyantyn Hloba wrote about this on Facebook. In a comment to Babel, Hloba shared the details of the courtʼs decision.
Today, May 7, at the request of the prosecutor, the court considered the extension of the nightly house arrest imposed on Chervinsky from July 2024. The defense was against this and, as a last resort, requested that Chervinsky be released on personal recognizance so that he could serve his sentence.
The court extended his nightly house arrest, but allowed Chervinsky to serve if there is a written order. That is, he can serve in the Armed Forces, but if he returns on leave, he must be under nightly house arrest.
Hlobaʼs lawyer called this decision the moment when "the scales of Themis tipped under the weight of the reality in which we live".
Who is Roman Chervinsky?
Colonel Chervinsky is a former employee of SBU, the Main Intelligence Directorate (known as GUR), and the Special Operations Forces (SOF). In 2020, Chervinsky was involved in an operation to detain “Wagnerians” in Belarus. In his statement to The Washington Post and Der Spiegel, Chervinsky said that he also “planned and implemented” operations to assassinate leaders of pro-Russian militants in Ukraine and “kidnap a witness” who could confirm that Russia shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014.
On April 21, 2023, he was suspected in the case of the failed hijacking of a Russian plane. According to the investigation, he and several other servicemen decided to carry out an operation to hijack a Russian plane without the consent of state bodies and special services. SBU believes that due to their actions, in particular Chervinsky, Russia received information about the placement of Air Force pilots and Ukrainian aircraft at the Kanatove airfield in the Kirovohrad region.
Chervinsky is also suspected of fraud and extortion. In December 2023, the prosecutorʼs office reported that it suspects Chervinsky of trying to seize $100 000 of an entrepreneurʼs funds by impersonating an influential official of the State Fiscal Service of Ukraine.
We are talking about the events of July 2020. Chervinsky allegedly promised the businessman to resolve the issue of returning the detained batch of tobacco products to him for a certain amount. The ex-spy denies involvement in this crime.
He was in pre-trial detention from April 2023 to July 2024, and since then has been under 24-hour and then nightly house arrest.
On April 1, 2026, the Constitutional Court of Ukraine upheld Chervinskyʼs complaint and declared the norm under which he was held in custody unconstitutional. Part 5 of Article 615 of the Criminal Procedure Code stipulates that if during martial law the court cannot convene on time for the first (preparatory) session, then a person already in a pre-trial detention center automatically remains there for a further period of up to two months. The court ruled that this norm contradicts the Constitution. It will expire three months after the decision, and the Verkhovna Rada must approve a new norm.
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