Zelensky fires deputy head of the Presidential Office Iryna Mudra after searches in operation “Forrest Gump”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has signed a decree dismissing Iryna Mudra from the post of deputy head of the Presidential Office.

The document was published on the official website of the head of state.

“To relieve Iryna Romanivna Mudra of the post of deputy head of the Presidential Office of Ukraine,” the decree states.

Earlier on the morning of August 19, NABU and SAP announced an operation to expose a criminal organization operating under the leadership of current and former members of parliament with the involvement of senior officials from the Presidential Office. Searches were conducted at Mudra’s premises as part of this operation — as reported by Verkhovna Rada deputy Oleksiy Honcharenko.

The operation was given the code name “Forrest Gump” — after the Oscar-winning film by American director Robert Zemeckis, whose main character is a man with an intellectual disability played by Tom Hanks. The anti-corruption agencies published a recording in which one of the suspects says that “only a dimwit would register the theft of money and the payment of his children’s tuition in their names,” and therefore he is “Forrest Gump.”

Verkhovna Rada deputy Yaroslav Zheleznyak noted that in the new recordings, former energy and justice minister Herman Halushchenko is mentioned under the pseudonyms “Forrest Gump” and “Private Ryan,” with the participants in the conversation discussing his “rescue operation.” Ukrainian media recall that the education of the former official’s son at the elite Swiss college Beau Soleil, costing around $180–200 thousand per year, had been the subject of a NABU investigation.