World
Zelenski asked the Ukrainian Parliament to vote on the removal of Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko
The president called for speeding up consideration of the prosecutor’s resignation, after he had previously announced charges against the head of the anti-corruption agency NABU. The vote, according to a pro-government lawmaker, is scheduled for September 15.
Ukraine’s president, Volodimir Zelenski, asked lawmakers to back as soon as possible the departure of Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko, who had submitted his resignation last week, according to ABC España.
In a message posted on social media, Zelenski said Kravchenko must leave office and urged Parliament to move forward with that decision. According to lawmaker David Arajamia, from the Servant of the People party, the vote on the resignation was set for September 15, although no time was confirmed.
Minutes earlier, Kravchenko had released a video in which he announced that he had approved charges against the director of Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, Semen Krivonos, for the alleged falsification of official documents to obtain illicit benefits. He also said he had approved charges against a person close to the head of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, Oleksander Klimenko, whose identity he did not reveal.
According to ABC España, Kravchenko said he had so far been politically constrained from moving ahead with those decisions and insisted that he has evidence. He also called for the resignation of Krivonos and Klimenko.
The now-resigning prosecutor also lashed out at NABU and SAPO, accusing them of straying from their anti-corruption mission to become a pole of political power without accountability to the public. In that vein, he said the so-called Cartago operation was used to gain access to files on senior officials from both agencies and to halt those investigations.
That case had become the center of the crisis on September 7, when NABU and SAPO announced the dismantling of a criminal organization led by the head of a division of the Prosecutor General’s Office, suspected of systematically taking bribes from fraudulent call centers and laundering that money.
Later, Kravchenko reported on social media that he was outside Ukraine on a work trip abroad. He said he would seek to brief international partners on the situation in the anti-corruption bodies and warn about what he described as a concentration of unchecked influence and its risks to sovereignty, the rule of law and the country’s democratic institutions.
Sources
About this note. Written by El Notero with assistance from artificial intelligence, based on what was published by the cited outlet. El Notero did not conduct its own reporting on this event.
