The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) denied that its employees helped former Kyiv City Council (KCC) deputy Denys Komarnytskyi cross the border.
SBU reported this in a comment to Babel.
SBU notes that the detained officials had the status of public freelance workers for less than 5 months — that is, they were not on the staff of the special service and did not receive money. SBU emphasizes that the detainees were deprived of this status in early February 2025 — that is, before Komarnytskyi was put on the wanted list and he left abroad.
Investigators are now identifying everyone involved in Komarnytskyiʼs smuggling abroad. In total, since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion, SBU has uncovered 215 schemes for illegal border crossing, and 1 869 people have been reported suspicious.
“Ukrainska Pravda” (UP) reported that four people with identification cards from the Security Service of Ukraine helped Komarnytskyi leave. Two employees of the Department of Strategic Investigations of the Transcarpathian region and one local deputy also participated in the scheme.
According to journalists, on February 11 — the day after Komarnytskyi was put on the wanted list — the former deputyʼs aides came to pick him up in two Toyota Land Cruisers with cover plates that are not in the police database. Komarnytskyi was taken from a cottage town near Kyiv, and the motorcade set off for the west of the country.
Ahead of the motorcade, at a distance of 30 km, a camouflaged car with the plate "200" was driving — such cars are used to transport the bodies of deceased Ukrainian soldiers. This was a "cover" to find out if the cars were stopped and checked at checkpoints.
What preceded
In early February, law enforcement officers exposed a criminal organization led by former Kyiv City Council deputy Denys Komarnytskyi. He was the leader of the “Leonid Chernovetskyi Bloc” faction in the Kyiv City Council from 2008 to 2010.
Other suspects include:
- Deputy Head of the Kyiv City State Administration;
- Chairman and member of the KCC Standing Commission on Architecture, Urban Planning and Land Relations;
- current deputies of the KCC;
- First Deputy and Deputy Director of Municipal Enterprises;
- four citizens whose positions are not reported by law enforcement agencies.
The defendants are suspected of seizing valuable land in the capital for development and fully influencing the local authoritiesʼ decisions on granting land rights. The scheme consisted of the defendants looking for promising land plots and registering ownership rights to non-existent houses on these territories for fake people. Then they submitted applications to the City Council to grant them ownership rights to land plots for servicing these structures — this way they avoided bidding.
According to the investigation, during 2023-2024, the defendants illegally removed land in the city center worth 11.6 million hryvnias from the property of the territorial community of Kyiv.
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