During almost two years of the Great War, the judicial system handed down 80 sentences against hundreds of organizers of schemes to send evaders abroad. Only one in ten cases ended with deprivation of liberty for the accused.
At the beginning of February 2024, the Unified State Register of Court Decisions contained information on the consideration of 770 cases regarding violations of Art. 332 of the Criminal Code (illegal transportation of persons across the state border of Ukraine) using the state system "Shlyah". Those accused under this article face imprisonment for three to nine years, "Economichna Pravda" notes.
verdicts have already been announced for 80 cases in which 101 people were on trial . Although almost all of these people were found guilty by the courts, only eight people were fully punished. In other cases, the courts found the suspects guilty, but gave them milder forms of punishment than the Criminal Code provides.
The fact is that the representatives of Themis administered justice nominally. In the operative part, they approved the "plea agreement" and gave the status of legality to the terms of punishment agreed upon by the prosecutor and the accused. Chapter 35 of the Criminal Procedure Code allows this.
This way of conducting cases by law enforcement officers has become commonplace, for example, in anti-corruption proceedings. It allows prosecutors to quickly move cases and show, albeit formally, almost one hundred percent effectiveness.
However, it has a flip side. As statistics obtained by the European Parliament show, this allows the organizers of schemes to take evaders abroad to work in this business almost risk-free, because they always have the option to "make a deal with the investigation".
Usually, two groups of people are engaged in such a business. The first is represented by "charitable" organizations, sometimes with the involvement of military administrations, which have the right to submit persons of draft age to be included in the "Way" system.
The word "charities" is not accidentally put in quotation marks. Journalistic investigations show that people were most actively submitted for inclusion in the "Way" system by related organizations that were not noticed in volunteer activities at all.
The second group of scheme organizers is represented by real and bogus transport companies that allegedly hire drivers, but in reality sell the right to leave the borders of Ukraine for 5-7 thousand dollars. For this, such companies receive licenses from the State Service for Transport Safety ("Ukrtransbezpeka"), which also administers "Shlyah", for international transportation by road.
According to her data, of the available almost 70,000 carrier licenses, 36,000 were obtained in 2022-2023. It cannot be said that all this is abuse. Since 2022, road transport has saved Ukraine's trade activity against the backdrop of the port blockade. However, at the same time as the surge in issued permits, Ukrtransbezpeka began to massively revoke licenses issued after the start of the Great War from the end of 2022.
After the beginning of the Great War, the state distributed licenses for international transportation en masse. Many scammers probably got them.
For example, "Bootravel" LLC received a license in the summer of 2022. As later established by the law enforcement officers, it was for the organization of a business for the illegal transportation of evaders abroad. On March 3, 2023, when the company appeared in the relevant criminal proceedings, its license was revoked. However, during this time, the company managed to transport at least ten evaders abroad.
In total, according to Ukrtransbezpeka, since the end of 2022, 2,200 licenses issued after the beginning of the Great War have been canceled. However, it seems that losing a license and a suspended sentence are not the only threats to the organizers of the schemes. Thus, the director of the company "Mix Travel Group" was fined UAH 102,000. It is not surprising that the number of people willing to make money from this is growing, because there is practically no punishment for such actions.
