This week, MPs and a number of media outlets are predicting fairly large-scale personnel changes, both in the government and in the Prosecutor General's Office. Allegedly, the resignation of Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin is expected.
According to sources directly from the Prosecutor General's Office, the main reason for the resignation was scandals related to Kostin's frequent absence from Ukraine. People's Deputies previously reported that the Prosecutor General spent many days on foreign business trips, the lion's share of which fell on the United States, where his family lives.
According to sources, the most likely successor to Kostin was initially named as Oleg Kiper, a former Kyiv prosecutor and current head of the Odessa Military Administration, who is close to the Office of the President. He recently claimed in an interview that he had not received any offers to become Prosecutor General. By the way, Kiper, like Kostin, is from Odessa.
But neither Kiper's candidacy nor anyone else's has been finally approved yet. Therefore, it is quite likely that after Kostin's resignation, his current first deputy Oleksiy Khomenko will be the acting prosecutor general for some time.
If Kiper or Khomenko becomes the new Prosecutor General, it will mean that for the first time since 2016, a career prosecutor will become the Prosecutor General of Ukraine. After all, after the dismissal of Viktor Shokin under President Petro Poroshenko, the Prosecutor General's chair has been occupied by people from outside the prosecutor's office system - Lutsenko, Ryaboshapka, Venediktova, and Kostin.
Kiper worked in the Prosecutor General's Office during the Yanukovych era, which is why he fell under the lustration law. However, in 2019, the District Administrative Court reinstated him and declared lustration illegal. In the summer of 2020, Kiper first became the deputy prosecutor of Kyiv, and then headed the Kyiv City Prosecutor's Office.
