Ukraine's prosecutor general quits after NABU raids his office over call-centre graft

Ruslan Kravchenko, Ukraine's prosecutor general since June 2025, put his resignation on Telegram on Monday night. "This is a political decision, and I have made it consciously. I do not want the position of Prosecutor General to be used as an instrument of political confrontation," he wrote. He thanked President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Verkhovna Rada and asked them to accept the letter. He also said his view of the accusations against his office had not changed.

Those accusations come from the National Anti-Corruption Bureau and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office. They searched the prosecutor general's building at the weekend as part of an operation that Ukrainian outlets have called Carthage. NABU says a criminal group inside the office took money to protect fraudulent call centres and then laundered the proceeds into property, jewellery and cash. Agents published a photograph of a safe stacked with dollar bills. Five people, NABU said, sat behind the scheme. Serhiy Kropyva, a deputy head of the international cooperation department, was detained. The office suspended the official it named as the organiser.

Kravchenko had told reporters earlier on Monday that he would not resign unless parliament voted him out. By evening he had reversed. On Sunday he had called the claims "completely unsubstantiated." The president has not commented in public.

The Swiss-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Crime has estimated that illegal call centres employ about 60,000 people in Ukraine. The shops run cross-border phone fraud against targets in Europe and farther afield. A prosecutor's office that is supposed to close them is a useful friend. That is the charge. It is also the latest in a year of senior departures. Andriy Yermak left the presidential office. Iryna Mudra, a former deputy there, is in custody. Former justice minister Herman Halushchenko is gone. Nationwide protests in 2025 followed an attempt to clip NABU and SAPO's independence.

The war calendar makes the timing harder. US envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff were in Kyiv over the weekend on another push to freeze the front. After that pause, Russia struck the capital again. Two people were killed and at least ten injured, according to Ukrainian city officials. Kravchenko's letter landed on the same news cycle as the first bodies from the renewed raids. Day 1,658 of the full-scale invasion is a poor week to lose the state's chief prosecutor to a graft file.

Parliament still has to vote. Until it does, Kravchenko remains the legal holder of the post. The Rada can accept the resignation, reject it, or sit on it. Zelensky can propose a successor. NABU's case against Kropyva and the unnamed organiser will run on its own track. None of that repairs the simple fact now on the record: the man who ran Ukraine's prosecutions for fifteen months left after his own building was searched over protection money for phone scams.