Portnov’s Case Continues: DBI Investigator Prepares Absurd Charges Against Poroshenko
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Source: Facebook page of the author
Today, dear readers, we will interfere with the investigator’s activities and violate the secrecy of the pre-trial investigation. But if you have fun doing it, it is not a crime.
SBI investigator Artem Yablonsky attracted our attention when Bukvy published his letter to the Verkhovna Rada apparatus in March, in which he wrote about the “implementation of illegal plans” of Petro Poroshenko to advance the Kharkiv agreements. Yablonsky had already been a well-known figure since January 2014, when he worked in the Holosiivka prosecutor’s office during the attempts to suppress the square. However, he clearly does not like it when they call him “Yanukovych’s prosecutor”: when we formally challenged him, he filed documents with the court, continuing to work in the prosecutor’s office during Poroshenko’s term. Maybe now someone will call him “Poroshenko’s prosecutor”, although he himself is unlikely to like it any more.
The “let’s say that Poroshenko is to blame for the Kharkiv agreements” project was one of the late Portnov’s favorite toys. With his perverted sense of humor, he clearly enjoyed accusing his enemy not just of something abstractly fictitious, but of what he, Portnov, Yanukovych’s chief lawyer, actually did himself at one time – which everyone knows about. But his Portnov investigators will write, and his Portnov judges will sign, that it was the other way around, and no one will do anything about it. As we have learned in recent months, in January 2025, Portnov was actively selling this “Kharkiv” story to Zelensky as a promising direction in the fight against Poroshenko in general and as a way to justify the introduction of sanctions in particular. Yablonsky and investigators from his team conducted searches of Poroshenko’s employees from different times under the pretext of “there is information that evidence of crimes from 2009-2010 is preserved in N.’s apartment, which can be destroyed.” The searches were usually limited to confiscating telephones: investigators were genuinely interested in current correspondence, and not events that had occurred over 15 years.
With Portnov’s death, all this activity became somewhat less demonstrative, but did not stop. This week, an examination was conducted, which Yablonsky ordered back in February, but it was completed only in June. The examination was really complex: a Soviet military man, a fireman-explosives expert and two more such experts in the field of “military research” from the research center of forensic examination in the field of information technology and intellectual property of the Ministry of Justice were supposed to finally scientifically answer the question: did citizen Poroshenko cause harm with his actions (inactions)?
The answer was disappointing to us: yes, it did. This is what military science says, and you can’t argue with science.
An inexorable examination has established that Poroshenko’s interview with Mustafa Naem in Ukrpravda in 2010 not only contradicted the requirements of the Constitution of Ukraine, but also (damn it!) is in a causal relationship with the occupation of certain areas of the Kherson and Zaporizhia regions in 2025. Moscow on 23.10.2009 “failed to implement measures aimed at preventing an armed conflict” “without notifying the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation Lavrov about the need to stop the violation of the agreements on basing in Ukraine by the Black Sea Fleet.” And so on in the same spirit (for want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost). Read it yourself, the full accessible text has already been published on the European Solidarity website (we have an introduction and conclusions, and there are 260 pages in total). This surrealism should not be seen in the original.
If you read closely, there is also something about the Sevastopol Marine Plant and Russian customs duties. To understand what it is here for, you need to know that Yablonsky has a theory that under Yanukovych’s Kharkov agreements, Putin settled with Poroshenko due to a change in the duty on molasses produced by Roshen and orders for repairs of Russian military ships at the Sevastopol Marine Plant. Both are untrue, but the promotion of the Kharkov agreements and sabotage of NATO accession are also untrue, and who does this bother?
As for the examination, it is an absolute dirty disgrace.
It is not that this particular expert assessment is wrong, because these particular experts are not competent enough for such complex issues. And if better experts were found, they would be trusted more. Or that the experts have a questionable methodology, and with a different methodology there would be different conclusions. This is not true.
The thing is that such a forensic examination is impossible in principle. Any person, be it Napoleon or Kissinger, if he or she undertakes to give an opinion on the harm to national security and sovereignty in the forensic examination mode, thereby embarks on the path of charlatanism and pseudoscience. Only a court can check for compliance with the constitution, and not just any court. And it is done in the mode of a competitive court hearing, not an examination. And national sovereignty and national security, as we are constantly reminded in our case on the lawsuit against Zelensky on appealing sanctions against Poroshenko, are generally such subtle matters that they require exclusively discretionary decisions of the President, which the court cannot check for him. They cannot be formalized, counted or measured. In fact, both investigator Yablonsky and his experts understand all this, and they understand that this is not possible. They are simply sure that nothing will happen to them for this.
People who don’t know how justice works might think that this was an unsuccessful attempt to convince the court in the future by confusing it with military science. In fact, such examinations work differently. It is impossible to convince anyone with such a text, and it is not necessary. You just need to know from the very beginning, even during the investigation, that this case will go to a judge who “understands everything correctly” and has the same “roof” that you do. And then it doesn’t matter at all who wrote it or how, the judge will simply copy this text, and it will become a sentence. Here in Kyiv, such things are still exotic, but in Russian courts it has long been put on the conveyor belt. Examinations for extremism, for discrediting the army, Putin and other such crap. Even in my own case, when I was tried in absentia in Moscow, there was such a psychological and linguistic examination, which proved that I did not just say that Russian soldiers killed civilians in Bucha, but did it with the hidden goal of destabilizing something there.
The difference is not that Artem Yablonsky’s Russian colleagues are smarter than him and have long ago invented what he has only just now thought of. The difference is that the vertical structure in the courts there was completely built a generation ago, and any Russian judge accepts such fantasy expertise automatically. But in Ukraine, such a scheme so far requires artificial selection of judges and manual control over them by Portnov or someone who has successfully taken Portnov’s place.
In fact, this is the saddest part of the story. This particular examination is not viable, it will not harm Petro Poroshenko or anyone else. Yes, money from the DBR budget was stupidly thrown away to conduct it during the war – but this is not the first and not the last wastefulness of this war. But the very fact that the Kharkiv Agreements case was not closed immediately after Portnov’s murder and they are still trying to force something out of him, testifies to the fact that investigator Yablonsky and those with whom he works have ambitions to replace Portnov and continue his case.
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