Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) detained two Kyiv entrepreneurs it suspects of supplying the National Guard with defective combat shirts worth more than 8.6 million hryvnias (about $190,000) and of trying to bribe an officer to accept them, the agency reported on 5 November. According to the SBU, the officer reported the offer to his superiors, and its officers caught the pair as they allegedly handed over the bribe. The agency did not name the company.

Ukraine’s army needs every supply contract to deliver as it fights Russia’s full-scale invasion, and cheating on military procurement costs it twice: in money and in gear that fails soldiers at the front. Investigators have exposed such schemes before, including one in which suspects allegedly stole state funds meant for tank armor. This time, the SBU says, the alleged scheme collapsed early because the officer the suppliers approached refused the money.

Shirts unfit for the front

In August, the company signed a contract to supply 10,000 combat shirts to the National Guard. The shirts did not meet the technical specifications and were unfit for use at the front, the SBU said. According to the agency, the suppliers also delivered an incomplete batch.

The pair then allegedly offered a bribe to an official at the National Guard’s Central Support Base to overlook the defects. He immediately told his commanders, the SBU said. Its military counterintelligence, with help from the National Guard commander, detained the suspects during the handover. They are a woman who previously founded a Kyiv military equipment maker and a man representing the company.

Searches of their workplaces, homes, and cars turned up more than 3.5 million hryvnias (about $77,000) in cash, as well as phones and documents, the agency said. Both are in custody. They have been served notices of suspicion of obstructing the lawful activity of the armed forces and of offering a bribe as a group, and face up to eight years in prison with confiscation of property.

A general in the agency’s own ranks

The arrests come as anti-corruption investigators turn on the SBU itself. On 4 November, Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) detained SBU Major General Serhii Duka, whom it identifies as “Akim” in wiretaps of a group accused of running scam call centers. SBU head Oleksandr Poklad said he fired two senior officials involved in the case.

Suspected Russian agents caught the same week

The SBU also keeps catching people reportedly working for Russia. On 6 November, it detained a man who, the agency says, blew up the car of the head of Dnipro City Council’s Left Bank administration on Russia’s orders in April 2025. The official died of his injuries in hospital. According to the SBU, the man was recruited through an acquaintance in occupied Luhansk. He allegedly watched the victim from a hidden camera on his balcony and fixed a bomb with a motion sensor under the driver’s seat, then hid in Dnipro for more than a year and a half.

A day earlier, the agency caught an unemployed woman in Sumy who, the agency says, helped Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) target the front-line city. She allegedly looked for border guard bases and checkpoints and sent their photos with map coordinates, moving between four homes in a week to avoid detection. According to the SBU, she found her Russian handler while looking for easy money in Telegram chats. She has been served a notice of suspicion of treason.

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.