Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) has charged five people in a new episode of its Carthage case, the bureau said. Investigators say the group ran or shielded scam call centers, drug sales, and a fake-euro workshop. Judges have ruled on two suspects, while the most senior one, a security service general, still waits.

As Ukraine fights off Russia’s full-scale invasion, Brussels has tied its EU membership talks to reforms that include independent anti-corruption agencies, a condition watchdogs flagged as under strain. Carthage is the bureau’s hunt for officials allegedly paid to let scam call centers rob people in Ukraine and abroad, and it now reaches the police and security service meant to stop them.

The general called Akim

On 4 November, NABU detectives detained Serhii Duka, a major general in the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). A source in the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAP) told BBC News Ukrainian that he was held under Article 208 (detention without a prior court order). Investigators say Duka is Akim from their tapes, who helped the group with problems in the SBU, the Prosecutor General’s Office, and the police. When the gang paused its call centers last summer, he allegedly told its leader to change addresses and “go partisan.”

Detectives found Duka at a cottage in Roslavychi, Kyiv Oblast, owned by the family of business partners of a relative with ties to Russia, investigative outlet Slidstvo.Info reported.

NABU unit head Oleksandr Abakumov described armed men at the windows and Duka with a pistol, who then smashed his phones with a hammer on a balcony and destroyed a hard drive. Fighters from Alfa, the SBU’s special forces, then arrived in vans. Abakumov called it absurd that the unit came to shield the general from detectives.

The same day, SBU head Oleksandr Poklad said he had fired two senior officials involved in the case, without naming them. The Anti-Corruption Action Center, a Kyiv watchdog, called Duka a key player in the July 2025 attack on NABU, when the SBU searched its detectives. SAP planned to ask a court on 6 November to keep Duka in custody, BBC News Russian reported.

Where the other four suspects stand

Mezha, an anti-corruption center, matched the tapes’ nicknames to the people NABU and SAP charged. The charge list names Andrii Osipov, a repeat convict known as Kryminal (“Criminal”), as the organizer.

On 5 November, the High Anti-Corruption Court ordered Vitalii Rybalka, called Boxer in NABU’s video, held for 60 days without bail, Radio Svoboda reported. The video mentions people being beaten with a hammer. Rybalka denied any part in that and called the suspicion far-fetched, but admitted he knows Osipov. Osipov, jailed in another case, faces the same court next week.

The same court ordered Volodymyr Tsenov, known as Price, held unless he posts bail of UAH 15 million ($330,000). A senior National Police investigator, he is also suspected of taking a bribe.

The fifth suspect, Oleksandr Demianchuk, called Consultant, is a police detective in Kyiv Oblast. No ruling on him was reported by Friday morning.

Detectives also searched Kyiv Oblast police chief Andrii Rubel but did not charge him, Abakumov told Ukrainska Pravda. Rubel ran the National Police’s strategic investigations department from October 2022 to April 2026. NABU suspects he may have acted so as not to notice the crimes, Abakumov said.

What the gang allegedly planned

The tapes show a plot to attack Denys Bihus, an investigative journalist, over his reporting on U420, a shop chain suspected of selling drugs. Participants also discussed how to stop a man who wanted to tell NABU that evidence against one of its detectives might have been faked.

The leader of the Russian drug cartel Khimprom, called Mexican, offered $2 million on the recordings to remove Dmytro Torhalo, the National Police’s anti-drug chief, Slidstvo.Info reported. Torhalo confirmed Mexican threatened him.

The cartel leader also discussed bribing then-Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko to keep the cartel’s drugs off the banned list, Abakumov said in the same interview. Middlemen suggested offering people close to the minister a share of the business instead.

Police push back, the Presidential Office responds

Andrii Nebytov, a deputy head of the National Police, wrote that the tapes date from September 2025 to April 2026, when police were already tracking Khimprom with Interpol and the US Drug Enforcement Administration. Deal plans existed, he said, but police dismantled U420.

Presidential Office head Kyrylo Budanov said after the searches that the law is the same for everyone.

NABU and SAP launched Carthage in September against an official in the Prosecutor General’s Office suspected of shielding call centers. Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko then resigned and left Ukraine. His office has since fired eight people.

Ukraine is ready to open all remaining rounds of EU membership talks but must speed up reforms its parliament keeps putting off, the European Commission said in its annual report on 4 November. Brussels backs Kyiv’s goal of finishing the talks by the end of 2028. It also found that no law passed in the past year significantly strengthened Ukraine’s anti-corruption framework.

Russia’s war has made Ukraine dependent on foreign money to pay salaries, pensions, and repairs while its own revenue goes to defense. Next year’s financing gap runs to tens of billions of dollars, and Brussels ties more aid to reforms. That makes the speed of Kyiv’s legislature a question of cash as well as membership. In October, lawmakers passed a tax on cheap foreign parcels only on the third attempt, to unlock a €3.7 billion EU payment. The EU wants reforms before it pays more.

Every remaining cluster ready, a deadline that needs speed

Accession talks are split into six clusters of chapters. Ukraine opened four of them over the past year, and the Commission assessed the remaining two as ready to open. Brussels supports Kyiv’s aim to close negotiations by the end of 2028, but “it is important that Ukraine continues to accelerate the pace of reforms” to get there, the Commission stated.

Moldova, which applied alongside Ukraine, got a different message. Brussels urged it to keep its current pace and called its goal of finishing talks by early 2028 ambitious but achievable. “Albania, Moldova and Ukraine could join the European Union in the coming years if they sustain the reform efforts,” Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos said.

The 119-page report grades each chapter. Ukraine has a good level of preparation in energy and in foreign, security and defense policy, where it made “very good progress.” It is at an early stage on the free movement of workers, social policy and employment, and its future payments into the EU budget.

Ahead of the release, Ukrainian news site Liga reported, citing a single unnamed Foreign Ministry source, that the Commission would raise Ukraine’s readiness in 10 chapters and see progress in all of them. The published report explicitly raises the overall level only in the fight against corruption, and records limited progress in several chapters.

A parliament that slowed down, then turned to reforms when EU money was at stake

Parliament passed 133 laws between September 2025 and September 2026, at a slower pace than the year before, the report notes. It calls the slowdown in legislative decision-making “a point of concern.” Since the end of the summer, Kyiv has focused more on reforms and on meeting the conditions attached to the EU’s Ukraine Facility and the Ukraine Support Loan, two programs that pay out in step with reforms.

Several votes the Commission needs are still waiting. A new anti-corruption strategy for 2026–2030 awaits adoption by parliament. The terms of two members of the High Council of Justice, the body that governs Ukraine’s judges, expired in August, and the report urges lawmakers to fill the seats “without delay.” Two seats on the Constitutional Court that parliament must fill have stayed empty since it failed to appoint judges in October 2025. Why lawmakers keep stalling bills they later pass, the report does not say.

Anti-corruption agencies work, the laws stall

The Commission credits Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies with a better grade. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau, the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, and the High Anti-Corruption Court brought more high-level corruption cases to investigation, trial, and final conviction, reaching top officials and judges. Yet “no laws were adopted to significantly advance the anti-corruption legal framework,” the report states, calling the slow adoption of the reforms Brussels recommended “a major concern, requiring urgent action.”

The 10 priority reforms Kyiv agreed with Brussels on 10 December 2025 “remain mostly outstanding.” Progress on the rule of law roadmap was limited, and law enforcement reforms were slow, with many delayed. Ukrainian watchdogs rated anti-corruption progress as limited in their own report in October.

These reforms decide when Ukraine can finish. No chapter can close until EU governments confirm that Kyiv has met interim benchmarks on the rule of law and democratic institutions, Interfax-Ukraine reported. In October, Ukraine and the Commission set up a joint task force to speed up those benchmarks.