Former Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko issued a statement a month after his dismissal. He claims that the GUR fighters were sent to Austria to follow him to commit “violent acts”.
He wrote about this in his Telegram.
These are Ukrainians suspected of espionage in Austria. They were detained in early October, and later, on the same suspicion, journalist and cameraman of the Ukrainska Pravda (UP) Mykhailo Tkach and Yaroslav Bondarenko were detained. The latter were later released — the Austrian prosecutorʼs office admitted that they had no connection to the previously detained Ukrainians.
Kravchenko claims that the heads of NABU and SAPO requested that a group of intelligence officers be sent after him, and that “the orders to this group came from the President’s Office”. He also mentioned the UP journalists. He claims that an investigation into them is still ongoing in Austria.
"Mykhailo Tkach was in Monaco on the eve of the incident involving GUR officers, as well as in Vienna — during the detention of GUR officers. The legal assessment of these circumstances, the connection between the defendants, and the nature of their activities in both cases falls within the competence of European law enforcement agencies," the former Prosecutor General wrote.
At the same time, he never explained why he still hasnʼt returned to Ukraine.
Dismissal of Ruslan Kravchenko
Ruslan Kravchenko has been Prosecutor General since June 2025. On September 15 of this year, Zelensky dismissed him after the then Prosecutor General signed a complaint against the head of NABU Serhiy Kryvonos and a person close to the head of SAPO Oleksandr Klymenko.
At the same time, the Prosecutor Generalʼs Office officially stated that the information about the suspicion of Kryvonos is not true.
Kravchenko signed these suspicions after NABU and SAPO published an investigation on September 4 into the "covering up" of fraudulent call centers (which, according to the investigation, was headed by an official of the Prosecutor Generalʼs Office).
The records in this case include "The Boss" — the former head of the State Tax Service. From December 2024 to June 2025, Ruslan Kravchenko was the head of the State Tax Service.
On the day Kravchenko declared the suspicion to Kryvonos and Klymenkoʼs close person, the media wrote that the then Prosecutor General had fled abroad. He said that he had gone on a business trip. This business trip ended on September 18, but he never returned to work, although despite his dismissal from office he continued to be in the status of an ordinary prosecutor. This provided a legal basis for his final dismissal from the prosecutorʼs office.
On September 17, Anton Kovalsky, who was previously the head of the Khmelnytskyi Regional Prosecutorʼs Office, became the acting prosecutor general.
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