Zelenskyy asks the Rada to remove Kravchenko the morning the prosecutor strikes back
Ruslan Kravchenko resigned last week after a NABU case reached his office. On Monday he signed a suspicion against the anti-corruption chief as the president demanded a parliamentary vote.
Kyiv3 min read
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President Volodymyr Zelenskyy asked the Verkhovna Rada on Monday to vote without delay on the removal of Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko. Kravchenko resigned last week after a National Anti-Corruption Bureau investigation reached his office. Resignation is not removal. Only parliament can take him off the post.
Earlier on Monday, Kravchenko said he had signed a notice of suspicion against the head of Ukraine's main anti-corruption agency. The sequence is the story. The prosecutor who is leaving still has the power to accuse the people who pushed him out, and he used it on the morning the president asked deputies to finish the job.
Kravchenko was appointed in June 2025. He arrived just as draft law No. 12414 sought to put the National Anti-Corruption Bureau and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office under the prosecutor general. That bill triggered street protests and a Western warning about wartime graft. The agencies survived. Ten months later they were searching rooms inside Kravchenko's own building.
The case that broke him is an alleged protection racket around scam call centres. Detectives named Serhii Kropyva, a deputy head of the international legal cooperation department at the Prosecutor General's Office, as a suspect and a confidant of the prosecutor general. Searches on 4 September covered Kravchenko's premises, those of deputy Mariia Vdovychenko, and those of Oleh Kiper, the head of the Odesa regional military administration.
On 7 September Zelenskyy met Kravchenko, Servant of the People faction leader Davyd Arakhamiia, NABU chief Semen Kryvonos and SAPO chief Oleksandr Klymenko. That evening Kravchenko posted his resignation. I do not want the position of prosecutor general to be used as an instrument of political confrontation, he wrote. My position regarding the charges remains unchanged.
Zelenskyy told journalists the same night that the letter would go to the Rada. Monday's statement is the follow-up. He wants the vote now, not after a long committee argument.
This is the third senior loyalist the anti-corruption agencies have forced out in ten months, after a business partner of the president and a chief of staff. The pattern matters more than any one name. Wartime Ukraine still has to show lenders and weapons suppliers that NABU and SAPO can reach the offices that sit closest to Bankova Street.
Kravchenko's counter-move on Monday tests that claim. A departing prosecutor general who signs a suspicion against the anti-corruption chief is either defending his institution or trying to muddy the vote. Deputies will have to decide which reading they prefer when they walk into the chamber.
The Rada can accept the resignation, reject it, or stall. Rejection would leave a wounded prosecutor in post during a war and a corruption fight. Stall would leave the office in caretaker mode. Acceptance would open a new confirmation fight over the next prosecutor general, a post that Western capitals treat as a condition of further money.
Zelenskyy has spent 2026 firing and hiring at the top of the defence stack as well. The prosecutor file is civilian, but it sits in the same pile of legitimacy problems: who investigates whom while the front still moves.
The useful fact for readers who already know Kravchenko resigned is the Monday exchange. The president asked for a vote. The prosecutor signed a suspicion against the anti-corruption chief. Both acts happened on the same morning. Parliament now has to pick which one stands.
Western finance ministries treat the independence of NABU and SAPO as a condition for the next tranche. A prosecutor general who can sign a suspicion against their chief on his way out of the building is exactly the risk those ministries write memos about. Deputies who vote to keep Kravchenko in caretaker mode will have to explain that vote in Brussels and Washington as well as in their own constituencies. The Monday request from Zelenskyy is therefore also a request to keep the money pipe open.
