Former judge Oleksiy Tandyr received a real prison sentence for a fatal road accident. This is a unique case for Ukraine. Why the system “failed” and at the same time “restored faith”

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On October 29, there were more people in the courtroom than ever before. For the first time, there were not enough benches for everyone. The National Guard soldiers who served with the deceased Vadym Bondarenko came to hear the verdict of former judge Oleksiy Tandyr.

The sister of another soldier is Olha Zhudro who, like Vadym, was hit by a driver at a checkpoint in Kyiv during curfew. The verdict in their case was declared in May 2026 — the driver was sentenced to 7 years in prison. Other judges of the Svyatoshynskyi court also went up to the courtroom.

“We are interested, as are you,” Judge Serhiy Dyachuk tells to the Babel correspondent.

Vadymʼs brother Oleksandr was missing from the courtroom. He was going by taxi and was terribly late. He had recently had knee surgery, and the doctor examined him for a long time before releasing him to the court.

Vadymʼs parents — Valeriy and Olena — also didnʼt come. Oleksandr asked them not to be nervous again. Besides, the road is long, because they live in the Cherkasy region.

Vadymʼs widow Anna joined the meeting via video link from Finland, where she moved to live with her children because of the war. Even through the screen, it was seen tell how worried she was.

Tandyr, usually cheerful and talkative with journalists, was silent. His lawyer Oleh Yurchenko sat next to him at the table. He was the only one in the packed courtroom “on Tandyr’s side”. Neither his brother Dmytro nor other family members or friends came to support the defendant.

When Judge Ivan Bandura entered, the audience stood up. He reported that he would find Tandyr guilty on all counts of the indictment — the driver violated 6 traffic rules and drove a car under the influence of alcohol. The sentence was 9 years in prison, and he was banned from driving for 10 years.

The civil lawsuits filed by the widow, children, and parents of the deceased, in the amount of UAH 40 million, were fully satisfied. Until the verdict comes into force, Tandyr will be held in the “Lukyanivka” pre-trial detention center.

At the end, Bandura repeated the prison term once again and left. The convoy asked the journalists to leave the hall immediately, and the convict had to be taken to the pre-trial detention center.

Judge Ivan Bandura.

Dmytro Vaga / "Babel"

Tandyr in a "cage" awaits the verdict, on the screen is the widow Anna Bondarenko.

Dmytro Vaga / "Babel"

Tandyr will remain in the "Lukyanivka" pre-trial detention center; he will not be transferred to a colony due to the appeal of the verdict.

Dmytro Vaga / "Babel"

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The lawyer for the deceasedʼs family Pavlo Teslyuk left the courtroom and met eyes with Oleksandr Bondarenko, who had just arrived and missed the verdict. Oleksandr went to the hearing despite everything, when others stopped. He was spending several hours in the morning commuting from Uman, where he worked, but did not make it to the verdict.

“Congratulations, [itʼs] 9 years,” the defense attorney said shortly. That was all Oleksandr wanted to hear. The men hugged. Teslyuk had always counted on this term, while Oleksandr had expected a shorter one — 7-8 years.

Tandyrʼs lawyer Oleh Yurchenko forced himself to comment to reporters. He looked very upset, the first time he had been seen like this in recent years. This is not Yurchenkoʼs first loss in court, but this case has become a matter of principle for him.

“It is impossible to prove Oleksiy’s guilt with the evidence that SBI collected and submitted to the court,” he told reporters, essentially repeating what he and Tandyr had said more than once.

Not without sarcasm, Yurchenko added that “Bandura relented” and did not give the maximum term of 10 years. In his opinion, Tandyr was not tried according to the law, and the trial itself turned into a collective admission of his guilt, where no one was interested in the truth.

Pavlo Teslyuk and Oleksandr Bondarenko hug after the verdict was declared.

Dmytro Vaga / "Babel"

Tandyrʼs lawyer Oleh Yurchenko tells reporters that this was not a court, but a "trial".

Dmytro Vaga / "Babel"

When everyone had left, and only Oleksandr and his lawyer were left in the courtroom, Judge Bandura came out to them. He smiled. Oleksandr thanked him on behalf of the entire family — “this is a fair decision”. Bandura smiled again.

After the verdict, the widow Anna approached her and Vadymʼs five-year-old daughter Polina and cried. She did not expect that Tandyr would be sentenced to 9 years. She expected a maximum of 4-5 years, of which Tandyr had already spent 3.5 in pre-trial detention. Anna also did not expect that the judge would satisfy the familyʼs civil lawsuits. Anna says that after the verdict, she "believed in justice again" and is sure that God saw how many tears she shed.

For the last 2 months, Anna has been counting the days, waiting for the verdict. Judge Bandura went into the deliberation room in early September. Over the 3 years of the trial, Anna has become disheartened.

The trial began in September 2023, and it seemed to her that in a few months “this horror would be over”. During the 2nd year of the hearings, she was outraged, and during the 3rd year she told Babel that Tandyr would never be convicted.

At the debate, Anna admitted that she couldnʼt forgive Tandyr, even though she wanted to — "itʼs impossible to live with such hatred in my soul". Now she hopes that the verdict will help her cope with it.

In the summer, she and Polina would come to Ukraine, they came to visit Vadym. Five-year-old Polya would ask if “dad is buried here”, tear up the decorative stones on the grave, and cry that she wanted to “see dad”. Anna felt sick.

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Due to the war, it was difficult for Tandyr to become the most hated person, but for many who followed the case, he became the personification of permissiveness and impudence. Even before the accusations of falsifying alcohol tests, he called a soldier at a checkpoint just a pedestrian who ran out onto the road. Tandyr did not admit his guilt and called himself “involved” in the accident because he was driving the car. This greatly outraged people, and there were calls for lynching on social networks.

When the Bondarenko familyʼs lawyer Pavlo Teslyuk took on the task of representing the interests of the deceasedʼs family, he was warned about guaranteed problems — Tandyr was a judge for 12 years, presided over the court and knows every inch of the law. He will shoot down every piece of evidence that investigators have collected with mistakes.

Teslyuk took this risk, although criminal cases are not his profile. His clients are usually accused of corruption. The lawyer explained his decision briefly and simply — a soldier died, so there must be justice.

After all the legal wrangling and three years of the trial, Teslyuk says that Tandyrʼs alcohol intoxication was the "quintessence of the tragedy": this state entailed all other traffic violations, namely, Tandyr was driving at a speed of 100 kmph where the limit was 10 kmph. He hit Vadym at a speed of 61 kmph. Tandyr also failed to stop at a checkpoint, missed the approaching curfew, and failed to pay attention to the fact that other drivers were driving slowly.

"He knew this section of the road very well, because he drove it twice a day," says the lawyer.

Teslyuk has not yet read the full text of the verdict. He does not know on what basis the judge gave exactly 9 years, but he believes that Tandyrʼs guilt was proven in court by the conclusions of several expert examinations. The medical examination stated what injuries Vadym died from. The technical examination indicated the speed of the vehicle and that the car was in good condition. The investigative experiment and other evidence confirmed that the driver could have avoided the accident if he had not violated anything.

Teslyuk admits that the weakest point of the prosecution is the lack of clear evidence of alcohol intoxication. Tandyrʼs blood was taken only 16 hours after the accident (forcibly by court order) and no alcohol was found in it.

He was also taken to give a urine sample late, but 6 hours passed. The State Bureau of Investigation accused Tandyr of delaying and falsifying samples, because instead of urine, he gave the expert a jar of water that he scooped up in the toilet.

Before that, he spat in it, and trace amounts of alcohol were found in his saliva. It is unknown how many ppm Tandyr had in his blood, but witnesses confirmed that he smelled of alcohol. Teslyuk says that also, in the video from the chest cameras, “everything was clear” for those who have seen a drunk person at least once in their life.

Judge Bandura, in his opinion, conducted the trial with restraint, allowed everyone to speak and was in no hurry. Tandyr and his lawyers abused their rights when they skipped sessions or overwhelmed the court with bureaucracy — dozens of motions or challenges to the presiding judge.

When Tandyrʼs lawyer went on maternity leave, the presiding judge demanded that she be waited for. Although, the judge refused, because she regularly participated in other sessions. Teslyuk says that if all this had not happened, the verdict would have been declared in 2024.

The position of Tandyrʼs defense is the opposite. His lawyer Oleh Yurchenko believes that Tandyr was deliberately "made into a monster" because the State Bureau of Investigation had no evidence of his guilt. The judge was deprived of the right to a defense and is unlawfully kept in pre-trial detention all the time — "we even have an ECHR decision on this matter".

The European Court of Human Rights did indeed award Tandyr moral compensation of €2 350 and recognized that he could not be held under arrest without the alternative of bail. Bandura listened to the decision and set Tandyr bail — UAH 120 million. Yurchenko calls this bullying, and Tandyr does not have that kind of money.

Yurchenko says that Judge Bandura ignored serious comments about the evidence. Namely, no one checked the version of events that Tandyr voiced to the investigator. An investigative experiment was not conducted based on his testimony, although the Supreme Court recognized that this was the only way to protect the driver.

Tandyrʼs version of events is as follows: he did not violate traffic rules, was sober, did not evade responsibility, and wanted the State Bureau of Investigation to conduct an honest investigation. Instead, the investigators fabricated evidence. Tandyr and his lawyers unraveled the tangle of accusations, dividing them into separate pieces.

For example, the investigative experiment, in their opinion, was conducted on falsified testimony provided by the main prosecution witness — Vadymʼs commander Stanislav Taranichev. Tandyr repeatedly said that it was this soldier who should be in the dock, not him, because that night it was he who went to block the road and called others after him.

Lawyers compare a photo from an investigative experiment (top) and a still image from a police officerʼs body camera (bottom).

Герман Крігер / «Бабель»

Taranichev shows how Bondarenko put up a road sign prohibiting movement in the lane. After that, the National Guardsman was hit down by a judge.

Alex Kuzmin / «Babel’»

Yurchenko and Bovnehra were ready to defend Tandyr free of charge.

Герман Крігер / «Бабель»

Yurchenko provided the court with a traffic plan that the "Center for Traffic Organization" approved 2 weeks before the accident, on May 12, 2023. It does not provide for the closure of the road during the curfew, which means that the military did it "unauthorized".

In court, the military said that they always blocked traffic 5-10 minutes before curfew in accordance with the order of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine from 2022.

From the official investigation conducted by the National Guard after Bondarenko’s death, Yurchenko quoted in court that the fighters were not involved in “placing road signs and means of forced traffic regulation” at checkpoints. The same document stated that Vadym died while carrying the “Bypass” sign. Yurchenko concludes that they contradict themselves.

Another argument in Tandyrʼs defense is when there are injured and dead people in a traffic accident, the driver should take tests exclusively at a medical facility. The fact that the judge was taken to the hospital only at 6 in the morning is the policeʼs mistake, but not his. His client voluntarily gave urine, and the law does not force him to give blood.

Yurchenko repeated more than once that the first tests "were clean", but when SBI did not suit him, they began to transport a jar of urine to different laboratories, violating the storage temperature regime. Tandyr stated that therefore, experts examined "a rotten liquid that had undergone bacterial fermentation".

Yurchenko calls the expertsʼ attempt to verify whether Tandyr could have scooped water from the toilet and submitted it for examination "funny evidence". The investigators said he could. Yurchenko replied that they "only proved that there is a toilet in the laboratory, and there is water in it".

During the debate, Tandyr spoke for 3 consecutive sessions, criticizing the prosecutionʼs arguments. His lawyer Yurchenko spoke as much, setting out his remarks on 130 pages.

To refute the evidence, Yurchenko often referred to the legal rule "The Doctrine of the Fruit of the Poisonous Tree" — if the primary source of evidence (the "tree") is obtained illegally or unconstitutionally, then any secondary or derivative evidence discovered because of it (the "fruit") is also tainted and generally inadmissible in court.

In his opinion, the very first piece of inappropriate evidence is the accident scene inspection report and the diagram to it. After all, it does not contain information about how the water-filled blocks with which the military blocked the road were located before and after the accident. Even an expert in the traffic accident examination wrote about their absence in the documents.

If the accident scene inspection report is inadequate evidence, then — according to Yurchenkoʼs logic — the following are also inadequate ones:

— a traffic accident examination that described the sequence and conditions under which the accident occurred;

— an auto technical examination, which indicated that Tandyr hit a person because he violated six traffic rules;

— engineering and transport expertise, which established the speed at which the Tandyr was moving and hit Vadym;

— even the seizure of the car in which Tandyr hit Vadym is inadequate evidence.

If the court had listened to these arguments, there would have been absolutely nothing left of the prosecutionʼs evidence — neither the car, nor the data on speeding and traffic violations.

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The head of the All-Ukrainian Association "Automaidan" Kateryna Butko says that the actual term that Tandyr received is a unique case for Ukraine. This has never happened to any judge before. This public organization monitors judicial reform.

Butko says that Ukrainian judges have repeatedly received real punishments for corruption — they are handed down by the High Anti-Corruption Court (HACC), and crimes in the everyday sphere, such as road accidents, usually "die in the courts". Only a few judges were sentenced before Tandyrʼs case, who were immediately released from punishment due to the expiration of the statute of limitations and amnesty.

According to Kateryna Butko, in the Tandyr case, public publicity worked as well — journalists and the public followed the process. The second factor is that judicial reform is progressing slowly, but not stopping, and globally, the institution is changing for the better from within.

Butko says that the problem with real sentences for judges is not only the circular guarantee. An important factor is that the police conduct the investigation unprofessionally. In a process where on one side is a professional judge, and on the other side is problematic evidence, the case quickly falls apart.

After all, the main task of the accusedʼs lawyers is not to find evidence of the clientʼs innocence, but to destroy what the prosecutor has.

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On October 29, after hearing about the verdict, Oleksandr Bondarenko immediately called his father, then — his mother. On the night of the tragedy, he acted in the same sequence. Only then did his parents scream into the phone in horror, and this time they calmly asked if there would be an appeal. The son replied: “Yes.”

Lawyer Yurchenko has long said that he and his client will go all the way, and that they will appeal the verdict even to the Supreme Court. Oleksandr hopes that his lawyer Teslyuk will also go through this path with him to the end. He does not mind. In parting, Oleksandr recalls how he stood confused in Teslyukʼs office after the accident.

“No one believed in victory, not even you,” he says to the Babel journalist.

“It was difficult, but we succeeded,” his lawyer supports him.

Vadym Bondarenkoʼs case has long become a part of his life. Now Teslyuk always stops at checkpoints and honestly admits: “Iʼm afraid.”

Saying goodbye to Oleksandr, he hugs him again. Over the 3 years of litigation, the men became friends.