Late October in 2025. A volunteer gets a parcel at “Nova Poshta”. The day before, he placed an order for an FPV drone with an anonymous user on Reibert platform The oldest Ukrainian military and historical online forum, where, among other things, online auctions are held for the sale of military equipment, weapons, and ammunition. At the seller’s request, he transferred the payment to the card of 76-year-old Hanna Televan.
While unboxing, the volunteer noticed a small inscription, “Army of Drones”, on the quadcopter. This is the name of the governmental project on developing the field of UAVs and providing them to the Defence Forces of Ukraine, launched in July 2022. All the drones within this project are procured on a centralized basis using state or charitable funds and delivered directly to military units for their combat missions. So these quadcopters shouldn’t have become available for general sale.
This quadcopter is neither the first nor the last one, sold from an anonymous account like that. In the spring of 2026, the law enforcement bodies revealed a scheme with combat drones in one military unit: the drones were written off or not registered at all, and then sold online.
As sales continued, the relatives of the head of one department at the military unit were getting new apartments and cars. A coincidence? NGL.media decided to check: we established the main figures in this case, found their property, and tried to understand how it had become possible.
It’s like nobody sees it
In April of this year, the SBI reported detaining the head of one AFU unit in the Kharkiv region. In the investigators’ opinion, he was selling drones, received by his unit from the state. The equipment was written off as lost in combat or it was not registered at all and then sold via civilian intermediaries. The head of the unit was arrested at the moment of the transfer of USD 50 thousand for the next batch of the UAVs.
The investigators don’t disclose the name of this man or the details of the case, but NGL.media found out that this is a 31-year-old second lieutenant, Andrii Sokol.
What is known about this man? Andrii Sokol was born in the Kherson region. At the age of 21, Sokol got married and settled with his wife, Olena, in the village of Antonivka near Kherson, now they have two children. Some time ago, Sokol served in the army in the Kherson region as a machine-gunner. In 2017, he tried to get a job in the patrol police but failed the competition.
It is not really clear what Andrii Sokol was doing before February 2022. At the time of the full-scale Russian invasion, he was 26, and the war seems to have caught him already in the army or he returned thereto immediately, at least by 2024 he rose to the rank of a head of the unit.
It is clear from the materials of the pre-trial investigation that in October 2024, Sokol was appointed the head of the anti-aircraft artillery platoon of the 28th Separate Mechanized Brigade. A few weeks after this appointment, there started ads for the sale of FPV drones from anonymous accounts Ukropkarate 2818 and Elass on Reibert platform.
PHOTO Andrii Sokol in a picture, documented by the investigators (a photo by the SBI)
It was one of these accounts that sold the quadcopter with the “Army of Drones” inscription, mentioned at the beginning. The details of the payments, received by the volunteer who immediately contacted the law enforcement bodies, led to 76-year-old Hanna Televan – the grandmother of Olena Sokol, Andrii Sokol’s wife. And the data of the Nova Poshta showed that the parcel was sent by Olena personally.
That’s when the law enforcement bodies started keeping an eye on Andrii Sokol: his lifestyle, social networks, and conversations with potential buyers. Finally, his lack of foresight and ostentatious luxury his family lived in, brought him to his ruin.
The serial number of the quadcopter helped trace the entire chain of its delivery to the military unit and its subsequent write-off. It turned out that hundreds of UAVs vanished the same way: they were just written off as the ones, destroyed in combat, or they were not registered at all, and then sold online. The investigators assume that this way Andrii Sokol could have re-sold a total of over 340 drones, for which the state spent UAH 15.2 mln.
In November 2025, Sokol was moved to the position of the head of the platoon of UAV interceptors of the troop of UAV interceptors of the anti-aircraft rocket division of the platoon of the 28th Separate Mechanized Brigade. By that time, there was already an ongoing official pre-trial investigation of the SBI on possible misappropriation and embezzlement of military property part4 of Art. 410 of the CC – stealing or misappropriating weapons or military equipment under martial law, the sanction pursuant to the article is imprisonment for 10–15 years.
During the pre-trial investigation, the investigators documented, i.e. registered under their surveillance, the sale of one unmanned Vampire complex, five Vampire drones, and one DJI Matrice 30T. For this batch, Andrii Sokol intended to get USD 50 thousand, but on March 25, 2026, he was arrested right during the money transfer.
Sokol didn’t stop even after the searches, done by the SBI operatives at his home a few days prior to the arrest. Yet his wife was alarmed by these searches, and five days prior to her husband’s detention she managed to leave to Moldova along with their children.
The investigators consider Olena Sokol an accomplice in the crime, she was given a notice of charges in absentia and placed on the international wanted list.
NGL.media didn’t manage to talk to Olena Sokol directly, but her mother-in-law, Larysa Sokol, believes that her daughter-in-law is innocent yet she isn’t intending to return to Ukraine at the moment.
“She (Olena Sokol) didn’t deal with drones, she dealt with their inventory parts. Nothing was hidden… There are many people on these websites, who, for instance, bought a batch of 10 items, and then sold them one by one. But I haven’t seen any drones in her apartment or in mine. She had a small pantry. And she bought them, and then she sent them by mail to those people who would buy one or two from her. I knew that,” Larysa Sokol told in a conversation with NGL.media.
As for Andrii Sokol, he was put in custody with a possible bail of UAH 6.6 mln. According to the information from the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office on the Defence of the Eastern Region, which follows the investigation, Sokol didn’t pay the bail and is still in the pre-trial detention centre.
Luxurious life on the shore of the Black Sea
According to the preliminary estimates, in 1,5 years from November 2024 till late March 2026 Andrii Sokol sold at least 343 drones of different types Shrike 10 (95 it.), VB7 (44 it.), Colibri Advance 10 (25 it.), Colibri Advance 8 (87 it.) and Colibri Pro 8 (92 it.). Their total cost within the state procurement is close to UAH 15.2 mln, but the amount may still change, because the investigation is ongoing.
It is yet unknown how much money Andrii and Olena Sokol made but their money didn’t stay under mattresses for long.
In almost two years, their relatives have become owners of at least four apartments in Fontanka, a resort suburb of Odesa. The apartments were close one to another, in RC Avtorskyi, a 20-minute walk from the shore. The complex was built in 2020, so the apartments there are sold only on the secondary market, the current price is on average USD 1,200 per one sq.m.
RC Avtorskyi, where the closest relatives of Andrii Sokol bought their apartments. The developer presents the RC as business-class apartments (a photo by Riviera Development)
The property here was registered in the names of Andrii Sokol’s close relatives, including his father Mykola Sokol, mother Larysa Sokol, and his wife Olena Sokol. At the same time, the extracts from the taxpayer registry show that they didn’t have enough income to afford such purchases.
Mykola Sokol was the first to buy an apartment with an area of 48 sq.m in Fontanka on March 26, 2024. He paid UAH 1.75 mln or UAH 36.4 thousand per one sq.m. for the apartment, which included a mortgage loan from Oshchadbank for UAH 1.25 mln, with the interest rate not exceeding 7% per year. It isn’t specified in the agreement, but this rate is notable for the state programme, yeOselia. It is interesting that in the purchase and sale agreement, Mykola Sokol indicated another apartment in the same residential complex as his place of living, although that apartment officially belongs to another person.
Soon after that, Andrii Sokol’s mother, Larysa Sokol, also bought some real estate in Fontanka. In January 2025, she bought an apartment with an area of 45.7 sq.m. in the same house with her husband, but it was at a much cheaper price: UAH 1.2 mln or about UAH 26.4 thousand per one sq.m.
Andrii Sokol’s wife also bought some real estate near Odesa, just like his parents. In April 2025, Olena Sokol spent UAH 1.32 mln to buy an apartment with an area of 38.2 sq.m. In RC Avtorskyi, and three months later, she bought another apartment with an area of 40 sq.m. for UAH 1.28 mln in the same RC. That’s when, according to the YouControl data, Olena Sokol got registered as a sole entrepreneur in Fontanka to lease real estate.
Another sole entrepreneur, registered in Fontanka, is her grandmother, 76-year-old Hanna Televan. Since September 2025, she is allegedly engaged in online retail trade. According to the investigators’ data, it was her account to which the money for the sold drones came. In a short conversation with NGL.media, the woman complained about her health but assured that she had been registered as a sole entrepreneur when she had been “in her sound mind”. She asked us to talk to Larysa Sokol, Andrii Sokol’s mother, in more detail about all the circumstances of the case.
In her turn, Larysa Sokol claims that she and her husband had been saving this money for the apartments for many years, for instance, growing vegetables in greenhouses in the Kherson region.
“Besides, my husband and I have been working all the time and paying our taxes. So, we have not been a burden on our son for several years, as we are accused now,” Andrii Sokol’s mother says.
In her words, after the demolition of the Kakhovka HPP Russians blew the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant on the night of June 6, 2023 the couple took all their savings and left to Estonia via the Crimea and Russia, but then they decided to come back to Ukraine.
“At first, we didn’t buy anything, we kept the money with us. Then we decided that we would still save some more, because the boys and my husband were in the army and made some decent money for the time. We wanted to buy a house, at least like the one we had, about 100 sq.m. But houses here are rather expensive. So we decided: not to wander from one rented apartment to another, while having money in hand, we would buy apartments. My son bought an apartment, we bought an apartment… And we still had some more money, which then was taken from us during the search,” Larysa Sokol said.
However, according to the data of the taxpayer registry the investigators refer to, the family didn’t have official income to cover such purchases. And, it is worth reminding, the first apartment was bought by Mykola Sokol not with his own money but on a mortgage loan.
So, by 2026, the closest relatives of Andrii Sokol have gathered in one RC in Fontanka. The video, made public by the SBI, shows that the officer took pictures of himself with wads of dollars and hryvnia, enjoyed himself in restaurants and resorts, and drove premium-class vehicles. He didn’t really hide his riches, which seems to have made the investigators’ job easier.
Andrii Sokol didn’t register any real estate in Fontanka in his name, but in November 2025, he became the owner of a residential house of 72.2 sq.m. in a near-frontline village of Vasylkivka in the Dnipropetrovsk region.
In addition to real estate, since 2024, the Sokols bought six cars – Audi Q7 (2007), two Toyota Land Cruiser 200 (2013 and 2017), Mercedes-Benz G350 and GL350 (both of 2013), and a DAF truck (2007). According to NGL.media’s estimates, such cars cost a total of about UAH 7.6 mln now.
How can one just steal hundreds of drones?
At present, there are four suspects in this case: Andrii Sokol, Olena Sokol, and two more accomplices – the head of the Nova Poshta cargo facility, where some drones were kept, Oleksii Slobodianyk, and one more serviceman from the Odesa region, who has already made a deal with the prosecutor and is expecting his sentence. They are all accused of misappropriation of military equipment under martial law (part 4 of Art. 410 of the CCU) and Andrii Sokol is also accused of illegal enrichment (part 1 of Art. 368-5 of the CCU).
Several officials, involved in defence-related procurements, explained to NGL.media that it is almost impossible to elaborate such a scheme on one’s own. Whether the drones are procured by the state or the military unit itself, they pass many hands: they are accepted, registered, kept, given. And each stage is registered, because the work with documents in the army is strictly regulated. So it is unreal to write off or not to register hundreds of drones without an accountant, a person from the finance department and other servicemen involved. The scheme is most likely to have involved other people as well: some were proactive, and some just kept their eyes shut.
Kateryna Rodak with the cooperation of Maria Horban, editor Oleh Onysko, translation Nelya Plakhota, cover Viktoria Demchuk
