More than 2,600 government and law enforcement officials have been targeted by investigators from the State Bureau of Investigation. All because of suspicion of fictitious identification of disability groups, which allowed them to receive monthly pension payments from the state budget. Among those involved are prosecutors, security forces, and officials.
Investigators already have at their disposal cases seized from medical and social expert commissions (MSEC), accounting journals, documents, and certificates that may indicate abuse when establishing the status of a “disabled person.”.
According to the State Bureau of Labor Statistics, some of the diagnoses raise direct doubts about their veracity. In a number of cases, this is the establishment of a second group of disability for life for employees who, at the time of registration, did not have functional disorders that fall under the legal criteria.
The investigation has already yielded results: suspicions have been raised against two heads of district prosecutors' offices in Khmelnytskyi and Cherkasy regions. According to the State Bureau of Investigation, both falsified documents in 2020 to obtain a disability pension, and have already received UAH 1.07 million and UAH 477 thousand, respectively. Now they face liability for fraud on a particularly large scale (Article 190 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine) and removal from office.
But prosecutors are only the top. The remaining more than two thousand cases are still being analyzed. The Ministry of Health is involved in the inspections, in particular the “Institute for Medical and Social Problems of Disability”, which currently performs the functions of monitoring the decisions of the MSEC.
The key point: in most cases, disability groups were not given simply “for reference,” but became the basis for monthly pensions or exemption from mobilization. And this was during a full-scale war.
Another fact is no less revealing: in some regions, complete journals of MSEC meetings have already been seized, which record dozens of similar “preferential” decisions. According to sources, such “services” were often accompanied by cash rewards, and the doctors themselves acted in accordance with a prior agreement with officials.
This is not the first time that such schemes have been investigated. In March, the acting head of the MSEK, who demanded a bribe for registering a disability, will be tried in the Kyiv region. And last fall, President Zelensky personally initiated the liquidation of the old MSEK system.
A new model of examination — functional assessment — has been in effect in Ukraine since January 1, 2025. But in fact, complaints are considered by one center in Dnipro, and getting there with a disability is a separate story.
Despite the new system, the old corruption model still has painful echoes in the budget. Investigators have already reported that in just one case, the budget suffered losses of over 1.5 million hryvnias. And there are hundreds of inspections ahead and, probably, dozens of new suspicions.
If systemic violations are confirmed, this will be one of the largest schemes for embezzling social funds in the history of the MSEC.
