The new Prosecutor General is Ruslan Kravchenko — he led the Yanukovych case and almost headed the NABU. And he also has a dream. A brief profile from Babel

Crimean period

Ruslan Kravchenko is 35 years old. He was born in Severodonetsk, at the age of 15 he entered the Ivan Bohun Kyiv Military Lyceum, and then the Military Law Faculty of the Yaroslav the Wise Law Academy. He has a Masterʼs degree in law and the military rank of "lieutenant of justice".

After his studies, Kravchenko was assigned to Crimea as an investigator at the Sevastopol Prosecutorʼs Office. There, he investigated military crimes. Within a year, he was promoted to senior investigator. When Russia began its occupation of Crimea, Kravchenko was on the peninsula and did not side with the occupiers.

“These are prosecutors who did not betray Ukraine and in the spring of 2014, having destroyed the secret documents of the Crimean Prosecutorʼs Office regarding supervision in the military sphere, left the peninsula and moved to the mainland,” their leader, then Chief Military Prosecutor Anatoliy Matios said about Kravchenko and his future partner in the treason case against Viktor Yanukovych in 2018.

ATO, the case of "Tornado" and the first Russian military

After leaving Crimea, Kravchenko served briefly in Rivne and Lviv, and on September 8, 2014, he left for the ATO zone for six months — to the military prosecutorʼs office in Bakhmut and Debaltseve. In 2015, he was transferred to Kyiv to the Prosecutor Generalʼs Office. Kravchenko worked on the case of the Tornado company.

In 2016, Kravchenko led the case of the first Russian servicemen detained in Ukraine — Alexander Alexandrov and Yevgeny Yerofeyev. They operated as part of the SRG on the territory of Ukraine; the Ukrainian military detained them near Shchastya in the Luhansk region in May 2015. In a conversation with Babel in 2018, Anatoliy Matios praised the way Kravchenko conducted the cases of the Russians and “Tornado”, calling him competent, balanced, and impartial.

Trial against Viktor Yanukovych

A little later, the Prosecutor Generalʼs Office created a department on Russian aggression, which investigated, in particular, the occupation of Crimea. Kravchenko became part of it and began work on charging the commander of the Russian Black Sea Fleet Alexander Vitko, who led military units during the invasion of Crimea. Later, the Yanukovych case, in which Kravchenko was one of the prosecutors, also stood out from the volumes about the seizure of Crimea. In January 2017, Kravchenko, together with the investigator in the case, flew to New York to search for one of the key pieces of evidence — Yanukovychʼs appeal, which was read out by the Russian permanent representative at a meeting of the UN Security Council. After Viktor Yanukovych was declared suspicious, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation opened a case against Kravchenko. In July 2017, the Basmanny Court in Moscow arrested him in absentia. Kravchenko is still wanted in Russia.

The trial against Yanukovych was one of the key ones both in the history of modern Ukraine and in Kravchenkoʼs career. He became one of the few prosecutors who interrogated then-President Petro Poroshenko, Minister Arsen Avakov, Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Oleksandr Turchynov and others. Due to Yanukovychʼs active and rather aggressive defense, the case did not leave the media (read more about this trial here). At the time, Kravchenko told Babel that once, in a conversation with Yanukovychʼs lawyer Vitaliy Serdyuk, who often traveled to the Russian Federation, he jokingly asked to hand him over to the Russian authorities so that they would not look for him. In January 2019, the Obolonsky court found Yanukovych guilty of high treason and aiding and abetting in the preparation and waging of an aggressive war.

Then, in a conversation with Babel, Kravchenko shared his dream: “If there is ever a serious tribunal regarding Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, regarding its current government, I would also very much like to be in the group of people who would bring charges.”

If there is no such process, he would like to continue to climb the career ladder in the prosecutor’s office. His career has really gone uphill.

During Yanukovychʼs trial, Kravchenko argued a lot with his lawyers. The trial was actively covered by the media.

Unsuccessful attempts to get into the SAP and head the NABU

From 2019 to 2020, Kravchenko was the deputy military prosecutor of the Central Region of Ukraine. At the same time, the Prosecutor Generalʼs Office was headed by Ruslan Ryaboshapka and launched a recertification of all prosecutors. Some prosecutors did not pass it and resigned. Kravchenko passed the test, and later applied for a competition to the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutorʼs Office (SAP). It was a regular rank-and-file position, but as Kravchenko explained to Babel, he wanted to develop and investigate complex cases. The commission members called Kravchenkoʼs candidacy strong. But at the final interview, they did not support him — the executive director of Anti-Corruption Center (ACC) Darya Kaleniuk voted against him.

Kaleniuk has already explained this by doubts about his integrity: Kravchenko received official housing out of the queue — 42 square meters in Kyiv — and quickly privatized and sold it. According to Kaleniuk, at that time his wife already had an apartment in the center of Kyiv.

“To my numerous questions about why he needed another official apartment, Kravchenko replied: ʼFirst of all, Iʼm a man. Today Iʼm married, and tomorrow I may be not,’” she said.

Kravchenko got married in March 2019, his chosen one is Olena Shkrobanets, who then worked as a deputy head of the department in the Prosecutor Generalʼs Office. She now works at the UN Office in Ukraine. Her father is a doctor, professor. Before the Revolution of Dignity, he was a deputy of the Chernivtsi Regional Council from the “Party of Regions”; now — from the party "For the Future". According to the Babel information, in 2024 Kravchenko divorced.

In 2020, Kravchenko headed the Department of Procedural Management of Criminal Proceedings on Crimes in the Defense-Industrial Complex of the Specialized Prosecutorʼs Office in the Military and Defense Spheres of the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine.

In 2021, on the eve of the full-scale invasion, Kravchenko headed the Bucha District Prosecutorʼs Office. Already in March 2022, he began to record and investigate war crimes by the Russian occupiers in Bucha. Numerous foreign delegations began to come to the city, and Kravchenko also attended the meetings. It was then that he was noticed in the Presidentʼs Office.

In December 2022, Kravchenko applied for the position of the NABU head. He was in the lead at all stages, but in the end, the commission rejected his candidacy.

"I went through all stages of the competition for NABU head, but was recognized as ʼdishonest,ʼ" he told Ukrinform in an interview.

The commission allegedly found no evidence of misuse of the 42 m² service apartment and accepted his explanation. But in its conclusion, it noted that it had "doubts about the adequacy of the parentsʼ income to the expenses" and accused him of "supporting the anti-Semitic movement".

The first point concerned an apartment that Kravchenko’s mother bought in 2017 and sold to her daughter (that is, his sister) in 2022. He explained that since 2005 he has been living separately and does not live together with his parents.

“The commission wrote that the parents could have had income from which taxes were allegedly not paid. The logic turned out to be simple: if there are questions about the integrity of the parents, then the son is automatically ʼdishonest’,” Kravchenko was indignant in an interview.

Regarding anti-Semitism, the remark concerned Kravchenkoʼs email address: [email protected]. The commission noted that a person with a similar name supported the Nazis in 1932.

"So, according to the commissionʼs logic, because of the name of the email, I seemed to support anti-Semitic ideas… Interesting fact that in 1949, an artist with the same name —Max Neumann — was born in the same Germany, and he is a completely different person, but for some reason no one tied me to art because of this…” Kravchenko explained.

In response, Kravchenko filed a lawsuit with the court — he asked to declare the commissionʼs decision, which it considered "dishonest", illegal and to cancel it. Later, he added another demand — to oblige the government to post the court decision in this case on its website. The court proceeded to consider the merits, but there has been no hearing in the case for over a year.

Kyiv Military Administration and State Tax Service

On April 7, 2023, the president appointed Kravchenko to the post of head of the Kyiv Regional Military Administration (KRMA). He focused on rebuilding the destroyed infrastructure. To monitor, Kravchenko created a supervisory board with the participation of UNDP, Transparency International, and other partners. The first inclusive town for veterans appeared in the Kyiv region.

For many of Kravchenkoʼs predecessors, the post of head of the Kyiv region was a good springboard in their careers. He was no exception. On December 31, 2024, the Cabinet of Ministers appointed Kravchenko as the new head of the State Tax Service — a position that had been vacant for about three and a half years. Kravchenko later reported that during his term, budget revenues had increased by 50 billion hryvnias.

Appointment as Attorney General

On June 16, 2025, the president submitted Kravchenkoʼs candidacy to parliament for the position of Prosecutor General. This position had also been vacant for a long time — since the end of October 2024, when Volodymyr Zelensky dismissed Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin and appointed him ambassador to the Netherlands.

On Tuesday, June 17, the profile committee considered Kravchenkoʼs candidacy for a little over an hour. He was supported by the majority of deputies, with only two abstaining — MPs from “Voice” Oleksandra Ustinova and Andriy Osadchuk. According to Babelʼs sources, Ustinova asked Kravchenko about the 42-square-meter apartment that was mentioned during the competitions at the SAP and NABU. Kravchenko replied that he deserved this apartment with his work and the cases he conducted. As Babelʼs interlocutor notes, Kravchenko gave the impression of a technocrat: "He is a good performer, but he does not look like an ideologue."

According to him, at the committee meeting, Kravchenko said that he would like to expand the powers of the Prosecutor General during martial law in order to have the right to appoint prosecutors himself, because currently this is done by the Qualification and Disciplinary Commission of Prosecutors. In addition, Kravchenko noted that he would like to increase the remuneration of prosecutors.

A few hours after the meeting, the parliament elected Kravchenko as Prosecutor General. As reported by Iryna Herashchenko, an MP from the “European Solidarity” party, at the meeting, Kravchenko also stated that the prosecutorʼs office should remain outside of political influence and that it is unacceptable to ruin a personʼs life and initiate proceedings against people just for the sake of a "plan". He also promised not to allow pressure on business and prosecutors.

If Kravchenko holds on to his post long enough, he will be able to realize his long-held dream. It is the prosecutor general who will transfer cases to the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression, which Ukraine is creating together with the Council of Europe and other countries.