Kravchenko: NABU and SAPO leadership demanded that Zelensky bring him back “with a bag over his head”

Former Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko has stated that the leadership of NABU and SAPO demanded that Volodymyr Zelensky bring him back from Europe with a bag over his head because of the suspicion notice issued to the director of the anti-corruption bureau, Semen Kryvonos.

He said this in an interview with EuReporter — the material has already been removed from the website, but it was reposted by other outlets.

According to Kravchenko, after he signed the suspicion notice regarding the NABU director, since he considered the evidence sufficient, the heads of the anti-corruption bodies, according to the information he has, demanded that the president and the head of his administration organize his immediate forced repatriation to Ukraine.

“According to available data, the wording used in this regard went so far that it is claimed to have referred to repatriation with a bag over his head,” Kravchenko said.

He also said that one of those detained in Austria who had been surveilling him is a NABU officer who was seconded to the GUR in 2025. Kravchenko claims that the commander of a GUR special unit, Viktor Torkotyuk, whose fighters were detained in Vienna, arrived in Austria together with them, and that Torkotyuk was promised the post of GUR head if he brought the former prosecutor general back to Ukraine.

“Based on my professional experience and understanding of how the system works, I consider it extremely unlikely that an operation of such scale could have been prepared without the consent of the country’s top leadership,” the former prosecutor general said.

Citing information that reached him while he still held a high office, Kravchenko said that the aforementioned GUR unit may be involved in crimes both in Ukraine and abroad, including the murder of a businessman in Cyprus.

As for the Ukrainian Pravda journalist Mykhailo Tkach, detained in Vienna, Kravchenko believes that he works for NABU as an informant, collecting data on the whereabouts of individuals in cases without drawing attention to the investigation. In addition, according to him, NABU uses Tkach to disseminate confidential information from criminal cases.

Kravchenko also raised suspicion regarding a connection between Tkach’s activities and the assassination attempt on businessman Vadym Yermolaev in Monaco, which he had already written about in his Telegram channel.

“My greatest concerns relate to possible contacts of Tkach outside the anti-corruption bodies. In Monaco, an attempt was made on the life of a Ukrainian businessman. According to the documents known to me, Tkach was there during the same period as officers of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, who were later arrested and gave testimony. I know this case and have personally read those statements. Therefore, my questions about Tkach’s role are not based solely on media reports. It is precisely this sequence of events that gives me grounds to suspect that Tkach’s activities could have been used to determine the whereabouts of people in whom Ukrainian special services had an interest. The possible mechanism is as follows: under the pretext of an editorial assignment, the journalist determines a person’s address, movements and social environment. Intelligence officers can then use this information. This allows them to reduce their own involvement in surveillance activities and lower the risk of attracting the attention of law enforcement in another country. I believe it is possible that such activity was carried out on the instructions of the leadership of the anti-corruption bodies. I would like to emphasize that this is my theory, which is based on the totality of circumstances known to me,” Kravchenko said.

NABU has already refuted Kravchenko’s accusations against it. Earlier, we examined in detail what actually happened to Tkach in Vienna.