After six years of slow and virtually fruitless proceedings, it seemed that the high-profile case against former Kharkiv mayor Mykhailo Dobkin for the so-called “cooperative scheme” had finally come to naught. In March 2024, the Dzerzhynskyi District Court of Kharkiv, and later the Kharkiv Court of Appeal, closed the criminal proceedings, citing the expiration of the 15-year statute of limitations, since the incriminated events related to 2008–2009.
However, on December 15, 2025, the Supreme Court put a comma rather than a full stop in this story. The cassation instance overturned the decisions of the lower courts and sent the case for retrial, declaring its closure illegal.
The Supreme Court agreed with the prosecutor's arguments that the moment of completion of the crime was determined incorrectly. According to the prosecution, the crime is considered completed not at the moment of the adoption of decisions by the city council, but when the actual illegal seizure of land took place - that is, after the execution of state acts. In this case, this happened on August 18, 2010. Accordingly, the statute of limitations, according to the prosecutor's calculations, expired only on August 18, 2025, and therefore, the closure of the proceedings in 2024 was premature.
This case has become a clear example of how criminal trials can drag on for years, exploiting loopholes and formalism in procedural law. The irony of the situation is that even after the Supreme Court's decision, there is almost no time left for the actual completion of the proceedings and the passing of a verdict.
The essence of the so-called “cooperative scheme” implemented during Dobkin’s term was quite simple. In Kharkiv, service cooperatives were created with the wording “housing and construction” in the name, which allowed them to acquire large tracts of urban land for development free of charge. At the same time, such cooperatives did not meet the requirements of the Housing Code of the Ukrainian SSR in force at that time: their members were not registered in the housing register, did not need to improve their living conditions, and the cooperatives themselves were often created literally a few days before decisions were made to allocate land.
As a result, according to the investigation, in 2008 alone, when Mykhailo Dobkin was the mayor and Gennady Kernes was the secretary of the Kharkiv City Council, at least 650 hectares of city land were illegally transferred. The approximate value of these plots is estimated at 4–6 billion hryvnias. Kernes, who as the secretary of the council was a key figure in bringing the land issues to the session, never made it to court — the indictment was considered without him.
Despite the fact that the Supreme Court has effectively given the case a second wind, most experts agree that this decision is unlikely to change the final outcome. Most likely, the process will again end with the closure of the proceedings due to the expiration of the statute of limitations. As a result, the case against Dobkin risks remaining another textbook example of how large-scale corruption episodes in Ukraine dissolve for years between courts, investigations, and procedural deadlines, never reaching a verdict.
