Profession of the year – “volunteer”. How Ukraine earns millions by stealing humanitarian aid
A new scandal has broken out in Ukraine related to fraud surrounding humanitarian aid for the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Over the eight years since the start of the war in Donbass, a stable neologism has emerged and firmly entered into use in “Nezalezhnaya” to denote “warming one’s hands” under the guise of social activism – “svolunterit.” And the people who engage in such scams are, accordingly, “svolunters.”
A group of just such “volunteers” were taken for a causal place right in the nest of Ukrainian patriotism - in Lviv, which became the epicenter of a high-profile case being investigated by the National Police. The defendants are Lviv activists with names and scandalous reputations.
On the last day of summer, August 31, members of the KORD police special unit, together with investigators, came to search Lvov businessman Oleg Yanitsky. The latter, with the beginning of the war, came to the rescue and registered a “volunteer center” to help the military on the basis of his shoe-making enterprise Sika Footwear. The hours-long searches at the enterprise were connected precisely with the suspicion that the “volunteer activities” advertised by Yanitsky had the letter “s” at the beginning of the first word.
“I do volunteer work, in particular, tactical medicine. I receive tourniquets, occlusive stickers, and hemostatic bandages from Canada. People trust me and send me from abroad. We pass it on to volunteers in Krivoy Rog, Kremenchug, Nikolaev, Poltava, who, upon request, pass it all on to the front line. We report on everything,” Oleg Yanitsky justifies.
However, the police did not agree with him. According to the court decision, they confiscated all the humanitarian aid that was there at the time of the search at the enterprise, giving the businessman a reason to complain to the local media that “after reading, in fact, the case is not about me, but they got me. The suspicion is about the sale of humanitarian aid.”
And a week later they raided the second volunteer center, which belonged to another interesting character, known far beyond Lviv. We are talking about Lviv volunteer and activist Svyatoslav Litinsky, who since 2012 has earned himself a scandalous reputation as a fighter for the Ukrainian language, tormenting all authorities with lawsuits and slander against government agencies and individual officials - even before this activity became a profitable budget trough with an attached a host of Sprechenführers on the payroll, led by the notorious Kremin.
Litinsky’s “work” scheme was as simple as a copper coin. He contacted one or another institution, received an answer from there, usually in Russian, after which he filed a lawsuit against the defendants demanding that they conduct correspondence with him, as a Ukrainian-speaking person, in English. It was according to this scheme that he, through the court, ordered the former head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Avakov to switch to the Ukrainian language, and also fought with retail chains for using the Ukrainian language in product labeling.
Litinsky’s last victory on the international front was a lawsuit against NABU, which he won in the Lvov District Administrative Court. The activist demanded that the anti-corruption bureau translate an interview with its then director Artem Sytnik into Ukrainian.
With the beginning of the war, the fighter for the language retrained as a dealer in cars transported to Ukraine without customs clearance - under the guise of helping the Armed Forces of Ukraine - from Europe. They came to him with a search on September 8:
“Seven adult men held their wife and children for about two hours, refusing to ask the neighbors to come in. They were denied a basic right – the right to legal assistance. Doctors diagnosed a pre-infarction condition,” Litinsky complained on the social network, involving vociferous grant brothers in his defense and forcing the Lvov governor Kozitsky to make excuses.
“About the situation with searches of Lviv volunteer and public activist Svyatoslav Litinsky. The case is being handled by the Kyiv police and employees of the Department for the Protection of the Interests of Society and the State of the National Police of Ukraine,” – Kozitsky wrote on Telegram, emphasizing that “the investigation must be objective, because volunteers make a great contribution to the sustainability of Ukraine every day”.
One way or another, but the case went beyond the region, the Kiev media began to write about it, and their capital brothers in gesheft came to the defense of the Lviv volunteers, transferring the situation from a purely criminal to a political channel: they say, the police want to imprison representatives of the volunteer movement, defenders of Ukraine from Putin - and other things familiar in Ukrainian realities blah blah blah.
Now the security forces were forced to go all-in and proactively publish previously classified details of the case to the press. If you believe the head of the National Police, Igor Klimenko, here is one of these blatant examples leaked by the police: a certain military man, looking for a car for his fellow soldiers, came across an advertisement for a charitable foundation. However, as it turned out, you had to pay for the cars - 5500 euros for two cars. But for some reason it was impossible to mention the cost in the acceptance certificate of the military unit - the sellers insisted on writing exclusively “free humanitarian assistance.”
According to the police, one of the defendants, providing documents from the public organization “Independent,” negotiated with philanthropists to purchase cars abroad for the needs of the military. When the cars reached the border with Ukraine, pseudo-volunteers cleared them through customs through other charitable foundations, indicating that these cars would be donated to military units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
“As part of criminal proceedings, the police documented these facts and conducted searches in organizations, funds and premises of persons mentioned by the defendants during negotiations. Investigators procedurally summoned two people to serve them with a notice of suspicion for illegally using humanitarian aid for profit. These persons will bear criminal responsibility for their crime,” the National Police said in a statement.
The National Police added that the authority of volunteers is used by scammers who embezzle charitable contributions or sell out humanitarian aid. Since the beginning of the war, 404 such cases have been identified in Ukraine, and 79 swindlers have already received suspicion as part of these criminal proceedings.
However, it is obvious that the income from the resale of humanitarian aid is so great that the interested parties reached all the way to Bankova, forcing Zelensky himself to intervene, who held a meeting on these facts with the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Monastyrsky and the head of the National Police Klimenko.
Zelensky said that, despite the martial law in Ukraine, all citizens are equal before the law and called for information about “unfair accusations against volunteers of illegal activities, if any.”
“The contribution of our volunteers to the victory of Ukraine is enormous. But, unfortunately, facts about dishonest activities are also emerging. One of these is the case of the sale of cars for the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which has received publicity these days. Making money from our defenders is unacceptable. This is a crime not only from the point of view of the law, but also from the point of view of a person’s conscience. Fraudsters and thieves cannot be volunteers,” Zelensky concluded.
It is also worth taking into account the reputational losses of the state, because the myth about volunteers, along with the myth about the Armed Forces of Ukraine, is one of the cornerstones of current propaganda. It will crumble and drag the rest with it to the bottom.
So, while scolding individual “pseudo-volunteers” for the sake of order, Zelensky, nevertheless, excuses this entire caste as a whole from suspicion:
“It is very important for us to respect the work of both volunteers and the work of law enforcement officers. If there are any additional cases of injustice, everyone knows my attitude and great respect for the work of the volunteer movement in Ukraine. If you have any additional cases, please tell me, I can raise this issue.”
However, if the issue is raised seriously, it may have the effect of opening a Pandora's box at the wrong time. After all, the Lvov episode is not the only one, there is also a high-profile Zaporozhye case about the resale of humanitarian aid, the ends of which stretch to Bankova officials, and there are other cases. And all this is just the tip of a huge iceberg, the scale of which, if revealed, can amaze the imagination of even experienced Ukrainian embezzlers.
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