At the beginning of 2024, Volodymyr Zakaliuzhnyi, a pensioner from Bairak village near Kharkiv, intentionally damaged his own house – at least, this is what the police believe. According to the investigators’ version, he damaged the external load-bearing walls, “making through holes”. It was done not in an outburst of frenzy, but with an entirely pragmatic purpose: to receive compensation for his home, allegedly destroyed by the war.
And he actually got it. After the inspection by a special commission, Zakaliuzhnyi was paid UAH 617 thousand. He used this money to buy a garden house in Kharkiv. Now he faces three to eight years of imprisonment for large-scale fraud.
This story is far from being rare in a fighting country. The editorial office of NGL.media analyzed all the court proceedings, detected in the court register, related to the misuse of yeVidnovlennia [eRecovery] programme. The representatives of local authorities are involved in at least half of the analyzed misuse cases.
And while in case of the pensioner from Kharkiv, it is rather about his independent actions, there are other cases when local officials created an entire organized group to receive compensation for homes that actually had not been destroyed.
The compensation may be obtained in the form of a certificate for the procurement of a new home, or it may be transferred to a special account. This money may be used to pay for repair or building materials. It can be spent only for specific groups of goods – the checklist is formed by the commission. The maximum payment for the damaged apartment is UAH 350 thousand, and for the house – UAH 500 thousand.
If the house or apartment is destroyed completely, a real estate certificate is issued for the procurement of new real estate, in this case, the amount should correspond to the cost of the damaged home. Recently, there appeared a possibility of receiving the money to rebuild the destroyed house using one’s own land plot.
In more than two years of the eRecovery programme, the Ukrainians have already been approved a total of UAH 52 bln of compensations, including over UAH 10.9 bln for the repair of the damaged homes. According to the estimates of the experts, the total expenses of the housing fund have already amounted to USD 84 bln .
Lie in the application
Despite the fact that evident lies are often stated in the applications for compensation, some still get to obtain them. For instance, Nataliia Slieta from Protopopivka in the Balaklia community of the Kharkiv region received her payment for the house, which had been destroyed before the full-scale war.
In 2020, the woman inherited a house in the village and suggested that her neighbours could buy it for UAH 10 thousand. Since nobody bought it, the house was soon disassembled. However, in summer 2024, Natalia Slieta finally registered her right for inheritance and submitted an application for compensation. The commission seemed to have inspected the yard and approved issuing a certificate for UAH 1.36 mln to her. Yet she didn’t manage to use it. This May, she was sentenced for fraud – three years conditionally. The comparatively soft court ruling was impacted, among other things, by the presence of four children of the accused woman and her sincere remorse.
The example of Natalia Slieta was probably followed by other residents of Protopopivka. At present, the police are inspecting three more houses in this village, the owners of which were given certificates for the total amount of UAH 2.6 mln.
A similar story happened in the Chernihiv region, in Novyi Bykiv village. A former director of the kindergarten, Natalia Yermak allegedly “added” internal damage of the house to her application, which increased the compensation amount from UAH 6 to 128 thousand – 18 times. Now her case is considered by the court.
According to the experts, due to the Russian invasion in Ukraine, over 2.5 mln households (13% of the entire housing fund) have been either damaged or destroyed, the total cost of the loss has amounted to USD 84 bln (a photo of Getty Images / Babel)
In Zaporizhzhia, seven people also applied for compensation for their damaged homes. But, the court ruling states that in their applications, they specified that their homes were damaged by shelling on the day when there actually was none. A similar investigation is going on in the Konotop district of the Sumy region, where law enforcement officers believe that residents of several villages could have written lies in their applications.
Maryna Beskurna from Savyntsi village in the Kharkiv region was accused of fraud, too. Previously, she had already been convicted for collaboration, because after the village was invaded in 2022, she started working with the Russian administration as a record clerk. As a result, after the liberation, she could not even apply for any compensation for damaged property the order on providing compensations for damaged property, approved by the Cabinet of Ministers, states that persons, sentenced for crimes against the foundations of the national security are prohibited to receive benefits. Yet Beskurna still applied for it, having forged the certificate on the absence of the previous charge. The court sentenced her to three years, conditionally.
In the conversation with NGL.media, she claimed that she hadn’t forged any documents and that a false document was somehow formed in Diia. “At first, I didn’t know that we could not apply for any compensation. I wouldn’t like to be mentioned. I have already suffered for nothing,” Maryna Beskurna believes.
Compensation for made-up damage
Kateryna Zvierieva, a deputy of the Zaporizhzhia city council and a member of the city commission on eRecovery issues, gives typical examples of attempts to overestimate the compensation amount.
“The apartment indeed was damaged by the explosion wave: a wall fell down, the windows were broken, and the entrance door was torn away. But the checklist stated a large amount of money and a long list of damages, which raised doubts of our commission. For instance, in the picture, made after the explosion, there was no wallpaper, but it was indicated in the checklist. The same went for tile, bathroom equipment, suspended ceiling, parquet,” Zvierieva said in the conversation with NGL.media.
In this case, the commission members decided to inspect the state of the apartment personally and to talk to its owner. “As a result, she confirmed that they had taken it all down even before the explosion. Therefore, we re-estimated their checklist and made it much smaller, at least 10 times smaller,” Kateryna Zvierieva said.
A probable fraud with getting a payment via eRecovery in Borodianka, the Kyiv region, was noticed not by law enforcement officers but by the village council. It was after their internal investigation that the public prosecutor’s office started its official investigation. In autumn 2024, Fedir Ivanov, a lawyer, applied for compensation for the destroyed house, allegedly ruined by the explosion wave in March 2022. The commission approved the compensation payment of UAH 4.5 mln.
This May, the duplicative inspection of the house was made. According to the opinion of law enforcement officers, the house is indeed in an unsatisfactory state, but its damage has allegedly occurred due to “the period of service of building materials”. As for Fedir Ivanov, he told the NGL.media journalists that he knows nothing about the investigation and has all the required documents regarding the damage.
Using the obtained compensation, Ivanov has already managed to buy an apartment in Irpen. At present, it is under arrest for the duration of the investigation. But the law enforcement officers are checking it as well: in the investigators’ opinion, the market value of the apartment is several times lower than the amount, indicated in the real estate certificate, received by the lawyer. And this is another “scheme” of misusing eRecovery.
Fraud with real estate certificates – overestimation of real estate cost
The real estate certificate is issued to people, whose houses have been completely ruined. It looks approximately like this: after the decision of the special commission on declaring the home destroyed, a person applies via Diia, and when the application is approved, they receive a notification about the assigned certificate. This is an electronic document with a stated compensation amount. After that, a person submits one more application to secure these finances in the budget to procure a new real estate. If the finances are available, this person has a month to buy real estate.
The compensation amount is determined by the commission depending on the area of the destroyed home and the average cost of real estate in a specific region. A new real estate can be bought anywhere in Ukraine. If the new home turns out to be more expensive than the destroyed one, buyers can add their own money or combine several certificates.
But if the cost of the new home is under the amount, stated in the certificate, it is not possible to get the difference. Pursuant to the legislation, full compensation will be paid only after the RF pays the reparations. However, since it is still unknown when that happens (and whether it will actually happen), the compensation recipients conspire with sellers of the real estate and buy it at a higher price, thus using the full value of the certificate.
“The victims don’t believe that the current regulation is fair. It makes them try to receive the due compensation in another way,” Anatolii Kolesnikov, the human rights lawyer of “East-SOS” charitable foundation, assumes.
The consequences of the Russian rocket missile attack on Kyiv, July 31, 2025 (a picture by the MIA)
The court register contains a total of six criminal investigations, in which law enforcement agencies suspect intentional overestimation of the cost of real estate, bought with the certificates. In most cases, the buyers didn’t manage to buy the real estate – the payments were blocked by the financial monitoring Financial monitoring is the procedure for checking suspicious transactions and detecting different violations. It is regulated by the Law of Ukraine “On Preventing the Laundering of Income”.
For instance, this is what happened to the resident of Odesa who tried to buy an apartment from his relative using the real estate certificate, worth UAH 2 mln. Law enforcement agencies claim that the price of real estate was actually twice lower. These Odesa residents tried to make this payment four times, yet it was unsuccessful, since the bank considered them risky.
A similar story happened in Kharkiv, now the police are checking two relatives there. In the investigators’ opinion, one man wanted to buy a house and a land plot from another for UAH 9 mln – this is what he had got for the destroyed real estate. This payment was blocked by the financial monitoring as well.
A “record holder” is the case about procurement of real estate using the certificate in the Bashtan district of the Mykolaiv region, where the cost of the house increased more than 11 times – from UAH 134 thousand to UAH 1.5 mln. Law enforcement agencies also investigate cases of possible fraud while buying real estate using the certificate in Kryvyi Rih and Sheptytskyi, which is in the Lviv region.
The involvement of officials
At least in 15 criminal proceedings, law enforcement agencies suspect direct involvement of the representatives of the commissions on determining compensations and the local authorities in the misuse of the eRecovery programme.
For instance, in Kyselivka village in the Chernihiv region, Tetiana Vedmid, the head of the public and housing utilities department of the village council, along with her father, submitted their applications to repair their houses. According to the documents, these houses were believed to have been damaged by combat actions, but law enforcement agencies think that they had actually suffered no damage.
In the investigators’ opinion, Tetiana Vedmid asked one member of the commission, an expert in building, to make up a fictitious report about the damage. Based on this report, the commission approved payments of almost UAH 670 thousand to her and her father. Now Tetiana Vedmid is facing up to five years behind bars.
Two members of the commission on determining compensations in Kupiansk are being investigated by the Kharkiv law enforcement agencies. The deputy head and secretary of the commission allegedly “added” the damage in several houses to the documents, declaring them to be completely ruined. The owners of these houses received the certificates for a total amount of over UAH 4 mln. The investigators assume that the officials haven’t even been to the objects to inspect their condition.
And in the Kramatorsk district of the Donetsk region, the law enforcement officials believe that the commission members and representatives of the Sviatohirsk community could have approved UAH 22 mln in compensations for the real estate that was not destroyed. The prerequisite to the investigation was the testimony of local residents who showed the damaged houses that the commission had allegedly declared unsuitable for living. At the same time, as one resident told during the court proceedings, in case of considerable destruction of other buildings, the same commission sometimes hadn’t included them in their reports.
Also in the Kharkiv region, Nina Zahrebelna, a former head of Virnopillia village and a pensioner now, was sentenced for misusing the eRecovery programme. She forged a certificate of ownership for someone’s house, which had been disassembled prior to the full-scale war, and then forged a report on inspecting the building and received UAH 1.5 mln as compensation. The pensioner was looking at up to five years behind bars, but Zahrebelna made a deal with the investigators and testified against other participants in the fraud. It is known from another proceeding that these are former state registrars of the Oskil village council (Virnopillia is a part of the Oskil community) and Izium city council.
“Kings of Izium”
The law enforcement agencies found out that it is the Izium district of the Kharkiv region where the fraud with payments for destroyed property has become a massive phenomenon. In the investigators’ opinion, Maksym Strelnik, the deputy head of the Izium administration, who headed the commission on compensations, and several other officials, organized a whole system of obtaining real estate certificates illegally.
The investigators believe that Strelnik and his accomplices searched for destroyed houses around the entire Izium district and conspired with the local heads of villages to forge documents, confirming the ownership rights for this real estate. The new owners were people, indirectly related to the real estate object (place of registration, relatives of actual owners, etc.), and willing to make an under-the-table payment to the scheme organizers. Or the organizers just bought the damaged or destroyed houses and then exchanged them for real estate certificates of fictitious “owners”, thus receiving actual money.
The funniest thing about it is that the scheme organizers discussed all their plans in a closed chat, named “Kings of Izium”.
In December 2024, Maksym Strelnik was served with official charges on illegal issuance of three real estate certificates for the total amount of over UAH 4.7 mln. If his guilt is proven in court, he will face up to 12 years of imprisonment.
In general, the law enforcement agencies divided the investigation into several criminal proceedings and, in the words of the head of the investigative department in the Kharkiv region, checked over 200 decisions regarding eRecovery in the Izium district.
Non-transparent procedures
About two-thirds of the active criminal proceedings regarding the fraud with eRecovery are related to destroyed real estate and, correspondingly, real estate certificates. Kateryna Zvierieva, a member of the Zaporizhzhia city council commission on compensation, suggests that the possible reason may be the non-transparent nature of the work of commissions, inspecting the destroyed real estate.
“The risks lie in closeness, non-transparency, and lack of attention while inspecting and making decisions. And there are corruption risks, if it is so-called “remote” inspection On August 27, 2025, the Ministry of Development made a resolution, according to which the commissions can inspect the real estate remotely if it is within the zone of active combat actions,” Kateryna Zvierieva believes.
She works in the commission that inspects only damaged real estate subject to restoration. In 2023, she became a member of this commission by the quota of non-governmental organizations – Kateryna Zvierieva heads NGO “Want to Learn!”, she cooperated with the Zaporizhzhia investigations centre as an analyst. In her words, during the first meetings, the NGO representatives were not even given the documents that could be used to check the degree of damage.
“The first meeting, involving the public, was a real telltale, when all the other members had all the documents, and we were given nothing, they didn’t intend to show us any pictures and suggested our perceiving information by ear and just raising hands,” she recalls.
At the same time, Zvierieva stated that the involvement of NGO members is envisaged only for commissions on damaged property. In case of damaged real estate, this norm is not included in the resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers.
In addition, Anatolii Kolesnikov, the NGO “East-SOS” lawyer, states that the composition of commissions is often formed in a rather closed manner, and local authorities provide insufficient information about their work.
“The activity of commissions is not disclosed properly. Also, the decisions should be taken by the commission in the form of minutes, which should reflect the results of discussions and voting of the members. These minutes are not available for applicants; they can only receive information about the status of their application consideration, with a short description of the grounds,” the lawyer explains.
Kolesnikov adds that the commissions often lack specialists who could adequately determine the state of real estate and the reasons for the damage. Therefore, the real estate owners have to do it on their own and pay for it themselves.
“If it is impossible to determine the degree of the damage, the commission demands a report on technical inspection from the applicant which is prepared by independent certified specialists in the sphere of building and architecture. The number of these specialists, willing to inspect real estate in the relevant territories, is limited, and the cost of their services is rather considerable,” Anatolii Kolesnikov says.
The author Maria Horban, editor Oleh Onysko, translation Nelya Plakhota, cover Viktoria Demchuk
