The henchman of the OPFL MP is in charge of the international division of Ukrzaliznytsia: who is Mykhailo Plastun

In the summer of 2023, Ukrzaliznytsia registered the company Ukrainian Railways Cargo Poland with an office in Warsaw. The main goal of the international division was to be cooperation with foreign partners in the field of cargo transportation.

Mykhailo Plastun was appointed as the head of the company, a man the uninformed reader is unlikely to have ever heard of. However, his face is well known to businessmen who are used to solving cases in a semi-legal way and to law enforcement officers who help implement various schemes.

Mykhailo Plastun is a former employee of one of the most corrupt units of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Department of Economic Protection. He worked there under the leadership of the ideological founder of the department, Ihor Kupranets. Kupranets gained the status of odiousness because in his position he did not so much protect business as bend it, promoting his own companies for large contracts.

One of the cases in which Kupranets was involved was mooring fees at ports, where companies in which he had an interest received money instead of the state. This story with the ports is not an isolated one, and it is directly related to Mykhailo Plastun.

While working at the Department of Economic Protection, Plastun gained the necessary connections with business that help him to this day. In particular, he got acquainted with a coal tycoon who received a part of the companies owned by the son of fugitive President Yanukovych, Vitaliy Kropachov. During his time at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Plastun helped him to obtain an interest in PJSC Kyiv-Dniprovsky Interbranch Enterprise of Industrial Railway Transport (Kyiv-Dniprovsky IIRT).

Since 2012, Stepan Yevsyukov had been working at the company, with Kropachov’s brother Oleksandr as his deputy. Subsequently, Yevsiukov moved to work for Selydivuhillya, which is now part of the businessman’s group of companies. In 2016, Kyiv-Dniprovsky MPPZT was headed by Oleksandr Skoryk, who in 2018, after a long period of hiding from the investigation, was taken into custody on charges of causing UAH 8.8 million in damage to the company. According to media reports, after Kropachov’s people took over Kyiv-Dniprovsky MPPZT, many of its assets were privatised or simply cut up for scrap metal.

The Department of Economic Protection, where Mykhailo Plastun worked, has had another connection with Kyiv-Dnipro MPPZT since 2016. In particular, since that period, it has been guarded by Alpha Security Company LLC. One of the founders of the company is Leonid Mateiko, a business partner of Ihor Kupranets’s wife and father in a number of companies.

Currently, Alfa Security is run by Plastun’s colleague, former first deputy head of the Department of Economic Protection Mykola Marchenko.

The same company, by the way, guarded the checkpoints of the Mykolaiv port, where Kupranets and the company additionally earned money through other schemes.

In 2018, the interest in Kyiv-Dniprovskyi MPPZT from businesses closely associated with former law enforcement officers continued. The company Novitnie Oborudovaniye, then run by Oksana Sorochynska, daughter of Oleksandr Tereshchuk, head of the Main Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Kyiv, won a tender for the supply of equipment for video surveillance and audit of the security systems of this enterprise. The tender was worth UAH 10 million. Sorochynska’s business partner in Novitnie Obladnania is Yevhen, the son of Volodymyr Pankratov, the former chairman of the board of Kyiv-Dniprovsky MPPZT.

The common interests of Vitaliy Kropachov and Mykhailo Plastun do not end with Kyiv-Dniprovsky MPPZT. In addition to being the head of Ukrzaliznytsia’s international division, Plastun now owns a business law firm, Virtum, and a business centre, Raphael.

Together with Plastun, the latter’s beneficial owner is Denys Kozlitin. He is also the head of the Rozvytok media holding, which includes the Friday and Avtoradio radio stations. The Detector Media outlet explicitly names Kozlitin as Kropachov’s business partner.

In 2022, Kropachov bought a digital broadcasting licence for Channel 4 and Era Production. Early last year, he announced the launch of a TV channel called Ukraine World News. The general producer of the project is Olha Hirzheva, who worked as an editor at the now-banned TV channel of Putin’s godfather Viktor Medvedchuk, NewsOne. The latter fact makes it clear what policy Kozlitin and Kropachev’s media partners adhere to in their activities.

In 2020, Plastun and Kozlitin’s Rafael Business Centre LLC received urban planning conditions and restrictions for the construction of an office building on Lesia Ukrainka Boulevard next to Parus. It is planned to be a 7-storey building with an underground car park.

In fact, the head of Ukrzaliznytsia’s international division, Mykhailo Plastun, is also a developer in the coal billionaire’s company.

However, while Plastun has been enjoying a warm seat in the office in Warsaw, where Ukrainian Railways Cargo Poland is located, Kropachov has been in custody since mid-May 2024. Law enforcement officials accuse him of fraud in the coal sector, which caused the state damage of more than UAH 2 billion.

The SBI reports the following: "According to operational information, the Ukrainian billionaire (Kropachov - Ed.) took over the assets of the son of fugitive former President Viktor Yanukovych, Oleksandr, and gained actual control over many state-owned mines and processing plants in the eastern regions. He, his trustee, the head of the enterprise and an accountant united in a criminal organisation that prevented the state enterprise "Krasnolimanska" from working and brought it to bankruptcy... According to the scheme he developed, all refunds from the budget, in particular through the application of a "zero" VAT rate, were received by commercialists, while the state enterprise artificially accumulated debt to the state... Money worth billions of hryvnias was further laundered through the purchase and sale of movable and immovable property."

In addition to all of the above, Mykhailo Plastun is currently an assistant to the MP from the banned Opposition Platform - For Life party, Hryhoriy Mamka. The MP is a career employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, where he has worked since the early 2000s, and reached the peak of his career in the Department for Investigation of Particularly Serious Crimes.

Mykhailo Plastun was appointed to the international office of Ukrzaliznytsia when Oleksandr Kubrakov was still in charge of the Ministry of Infrastructure. And surely he should have asked about the biography of the candidate who was sent to coordinate Ukrzaliznytsia’s actions with foreign partners. Not only does Plastun do business with an openly pro-Russian businessman suspected of embezzling billions of state funds, but in the third year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he continues to advise a member of parliament from a party of the Kremlin’s henchmen.

A year after the creation of Ukrainian Railways Cargo Poland, it is not clear whether any work is actually being done there. Their official website is extremely uninformative, as is Mykhailo Plastun’s social media. His last post, made in March 2024, is indeed about Poland, but it is not about work. It is a meme about a missile that flew into the territory of this country and was not shot down by Polish air defence.

Kubrakov has recently been fired from the Cabinet of Ministers, Kropachov is in custody, and Mykhailo Plastun, a former senior operative from the Interior Ministry’s Economic Protection Department, is now an international representative in the structure from which he helped to siphon money for years. The aforementioned Kyiv-Dnipro MPPZT, the ports, and Ukrzaliznytsia are all subordinated to the Ministry of Infrastructure. Only Kubrakov knows why a pro-Russian former police officer, Mykhailo Plastun, was sent to establish relations with European partners.

Author: Olena Dobrodiy