President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appointed a new prosecutor general on Thursday, his first major shakeup of Ukrainian law enforcement officials since the start of Russia’s aggression.
Andriy Kostin, 49, had previously served as a member of Zelenskyy’s parliamentary faction.
Two weeks prior to the appointment of Andriy Kostin, Zelenskyy fired Iryna Venediktova, the previous general prosecutor, and Ivan Bakanov, the head of the SBU,citing their inability to find Russian agents who had infiltrated Ukrainian law enforcement.
In a meeting with Kostin on Thursday, Zelenskyy stated that the prosecutor’s office’s top priority was “to bring to justice all Russian war criminals who came to our land and committed everything that, sadly, we and our children know in detail.”
According to Zelenskyy’s office, Kostin declared that no crime committed by the aggressor nation would go unpunished.
The office of the anti-corruption prosecutor, which was established in 2015 as part of Kyiv’s commitments to Western backers to address the country’s pervasive corruption, had been without a leader for nearly two years.
The appointment of the head of the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office was among the priorities that the Ukrainian leadership had agreed upon with Brussels, according to Andriy Yermak, chief of the presidential staff.
