Prosecutor General of Ukraine (Генеральний прокурор України; Heneralnyi prokuror Ukrainy). Head of the prosecutorial arm of the state; inheritor of the legacies of the Imperial Russian Procuracy and Soviet procurator’s office. According to the 5 November 1991 law, the Ukrainian Procuracy (as it was then still called) was a centralized, autonomous institution with these functions: to prosecute criminal cases in the law courts or deciding not to; to represent the interests of citizens and the state in court in certain cases; to oversee the adherence to legality of all investigative bodies as well as in the carrying out of criminal sentences; and to participate in interagency crime-fighting efforts. The Constitution of Ukraine (1996) then added the functions of general legal supervision over all governmental institutions’ actions, their officials’, as well as individual citizens’, plus investigating all acts of a criminal nature. The Procurator General of Ukraine was to be appointed for a five-year term, on the advice of the President of Ukraine, by the Supreme Council of Ukraine and be responsible to it.

A law on reform of Ukrainian prosecution bodies came into force on 25 September 2019, establishing the office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine in place of the Procurator General’s Office. Under Ruslan Riaboshapka, the newly-named office began operation on 2 January 2020. This change in name signaled an intention to follow the European model of prosecutorial service.

Reform of the Prosecutor General’s Office (PGO) and service has been an on-going task with the objective never fully achieved. In the process it has surrendered its general supervision and pre-trial investigation functions. But the institution has never fully become aligned with European standards, oscillating between willful neglect and zealous pursuit of high-level criminal cases, often the willing tool of a sitting President.

Symptomatic of this entanglement of law and politics was the succession of prosecutor general appointments made by President Petro Poroshenko, each in turn discredited: Vitalii Yarema, Viktor Shokin, and Yurii Lutsenko—the latter’s lack of professional qualification for the job outweighed by his loyalty. Frequent replacements continued under President Volodymyr Zelensky, with Riaboshapka, a close ally (killed in a helicopter crash in 2020) replaced by the hardly qualified Iryna Venediktova. She was replaced in 2022 by Andrii Kostin who resigned over a draft-dodging scandal within his department, being replaced in 2025 by Ruslan Kravchenko. The youngest Prosecutor General in Ukraine’s history, Kravchenko had served as a military prosecutor before working as head of the prosecutor’s office in Bucha in 2021–23, then briefly as head of the Kyiv Regional Military Administration, and finally as head of the State Tax Service.

An extreme example of the politicization of the Ukrainian PGO was President Volodymyr Zelensky’s prolonged pursuit of his predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, for treason and abuse of office while serving as president of Ukraine. Most of the charges against Poroshenko appeared politically motivated, and Zelensky’s persistence in the face of international disapproval was quite remarkable.

In 2025 President Zelensky signed a law subordinating the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAP) to the Prosecutor General of Ukraine thus potentially destroying their autonomy. The pretext was a spy scandal within the anti-corruption agencies. Following widespread, unprecedentedly vocal public protests, the legislation was withdrawn, but the executive’s penchant for subordinating the PGO along with other legal bodies to his will was again clearly exposed.

Unleashed in 2022, the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine increased the PGO’s workload immeasurably. Wartime inevitably brought with it a rise in associated criminality on the home front such as desertion, treason, profiteering, embezzlement, misappropriation, and trafficking. In addition, there were war crimes, most of which were committed on Ukrainian territory by the invading Russian forces. The International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2023 opened a field office in Kyiv to assist Ukraine in responding to the immense scale of Russian war crimes. The ICC also issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin as well as his chief official in charge over the illegal deportation of Ukrainian children into the Russian Federation. Altogether, by March 2024, the PGO had recorded 128,000 victims of war crimes. By the autumn of 2025, over 230,000 criminal cases had been opened into instances of unauthorized abandonment of military posts (AWOL), and over 53,000 cases of desertion. Russia’s systematic disregard for the international laws of war makes it unlikely for the PGO to be able to bring all perpetrators of war crimes and treachery committed in Ukraine to justice.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Smith, G. B. The Soviet Procuracy and the Supervision of Administration (Alphen aan Rijn, The Netherlands 1978)
Kuzmik, A. M., ‘Rule of Law and Legal Reform in Ukraine: A Review of the New Procuracy Law,’ Harvard International Law Journal, 34 (1993)
‘The Procuracy and Its Problems,’ East European Constitutional Review 8, nos 1/2 (Winter/Spring 1999)
Marchuk, M., ‘Domestic Accountability Efforts in Response to the Russia-Ukraine War,’ Journal of International Criminal Justice, 20 (2022)
Khotynska-Nor, O.; Bakalanova, N; Kravchenko, M. ‘Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine Under Martial Law: Challenges, Trends, Statistical Data,’ Access to Justice in Eastern Europe 20, no 3 (2023)

Bohdan Harasymiw
[This article was written in 2025.]