Border architect: How Mykhailo "Hesha" Tokar created a smuggling empire and became the "Master" of Zakarpattia

In modern Ukrainian history, few figures from the shadow world have had such absolute and at the same time non-public influence on an entire region as Mykhailo Tokar’s influence. He was called «Hesha» (a nickname that stuck with him since his school years), «master of Transcarpathia» and «king of contraband». He became the architect of a system where the border was not a line on the map, but an inexhaustible source of resources.

This is reported by Kryminalist.

Mykhailo Tokar was born on July 29, 1962, in the village of Kushchanovytsia in the Mukachevo district. The beginning of his life path was typical for a rural youth of that time: vocational school training, compulsory military service, work as a driver in his native collective farm, and later as a driving instructor. However, the turning point of 1985 and the start of the perestroika era radically changed the course of his biography.

Transcarpathia instantly turned into the main «gate» for scarce imports, and the outskirts of Mukachevo were covered with a dense network of spontaneous markets and wholesale depots within months. Tokar did not stand aside from these processes: with a keen entrepreneurial spirit, he opened his own trading points and actively engaged in smuggling scarce goods.

However, «Hesha» quickly realized that in conditions of total chaos and statelessness, security becomes no less valuable a commodity. To protect his points from raids by «tourists» and local hooliganism, he rallied around him not only reliable fellow villagers but also strong athletes from neighboring villages and towns. Soon this group outgrew the boundaries of ordinary «self-defense», starting to provide strong-arm protection services to other entrepreneurs and traders. This is how the organized group was born, which later took control of the lion’s share of all transit business in the region.

With the appearance of «Hesha’s» group, the rules of the game in the region became clearly regulated. His fighters were «concrete», worked without unnecessary pomp, but extremely effectively. Visiting tourists who tried to impose their own order in Transcarpathia quickly realized: any «delicate issues» were much safer to agree on personally with Tokar. In the border zone, where the interests of many groups intersected, Hesha’s word became the main regulator, and a visit to Mukachevo became a mandatory ritual for those who wanted to work in the region without unnecessary problems.

Tokar’s acquaintances recall that his leadership qualities fully revealed themselves after 25 years. He was not bloodthirsty, but had a steel will and an exceptional gift of persuasion. Tokar possessed a rare ability to achieve his goals not through a demonstration of force, but through the persuasiveness of words and connections. This allowed him to extinguish conflicts and find compromises where others saw only the path to war. His strategic goal was not violence as such, but total control.

The accumulated capital and powerful force resource allowed «Hesha» to reach a fundamentally different level of influence. What was previously perceived as scattered spontaneous schemes turned into a systemic «big game»: smuggling of alcohol, fuel, and timber reached industrial scales. Now Tokar did not just escort cargoes – he began to dictate terms single-handedly and build his own monopolistic smuggling empire.

International scale

«Hesha» became a unique phenomenon for Ukraine’s criminal world. Without any criminal record and never having «trodden the zone», he had connections and authority recognized by the leaders of the most powerful groups not only in Ukraine but also in the CIS (Hesha was credited with ties to the «Solntsevskaya» and «Orekhovskaya» OCG). For the capital’s criminal giants, Tokar was a key operator on the western border through whom they solved their strategic smuggling issues. His deep roots in law enforcement agencies and the border service served as the necessary element that allowed Gesha to convert his influence into an uninterrupted logistics process.

Yeven Chechen OCG, known for their expansiveness, could not establish themselves in the region – Gesha personally made it clear that their methods would not take root here. A distinctive feature of his policy was the principled fight against drugs: he harshly cleared the region of this business.

From 1997, Tokar began massively investing money in legal projects, which, according to local media, were closely intertwined with Viktor Baloga’s business interests. His charity was unprecedented: Gesha’s funds built churches, asphalted roads in villages, and financed hospitals. The Greco-Roman wrestling sports club, where hundreds of children trained for free, became his pride.

Therefore, 1998 became a logical stage of his transformation: Tokar became a deputy of the Regional Council. He did not seek public speeches, but his presence in the economic committee meant one thing – no financial flow in the region would pass by his attention. He did not have time to implement plans to use his deputy mandate. Big politics and big money have their price.

On the evening of December 25, 1998, near his own house in Mukachevo, Hesha’s Mercedes-Benz W140 was shot up. Eight bullets put an end to the era of «single rule» of Tokar.

The murder of Mykhailo Tokar caused unprecedented resonance, and the splendor of the funeral impressed even the seasoned. The criminal world was ready to pay $100,000 for information about the killers.
The law enforcement machine worked quite promptly. Already on January 24, 1999, UBOP operatives detained two men in Donetsk.

The direct perpetrators turned out to be 27-year-old Ivan Sytar (a native of Uzhhorod) and 25-year-old Dmytro Kulynych (a Belarusian citizen). A few days later, the third accomplice – Ivan Rabchak nicknamed «Belarus», who was later declared the direct organizer of the crime – fell into the hands of the investigation. In 2000, the Zakarpattia Regional Court issued a verdict: each of the trio received 15 years of imprisonment.

The law enforcement officers named a native of Donetsk – professional hitman Yevhen Ihnatkin, known in criminal circles by the nicknames «Hockey Player» or «Zhenya Donetskyi» – as the customer of Tokar’s elimination. As the publication «Zеrkalo tyzhnya» noted, the future hitman was born in Lipetsk, and after graduating from the Moscow Institute of Physical Culture, he moved to Donetsk.

His further criminal «career» turned out to be inextricably linked with Transcarpathia, where he ended up thanks to his professional hobby of hockey.
In 1988, the 30-year-old coach was sent to Uzhhorod to organize a local hockey team. However, Ignatkin did not work in his specialty for long. With the start of the turbulent 90s, the coach’s sports training and organizational skills found another application – in the field of contract killings.

After Tokar’s murder, he left Ukraine but was detained in the Czech Republic in 2000. Only in 2004 was Ignatkin extradited to his homeland. In March 2005, the Zakarpattia Appellate Court sentenced him to 15 years in a strict-regime colony in Vinnytsia region.

A special place in this story is occupied by the figure of Oleh Hruzin, Ihnatkin’s close friend and a Donetsk businessman who settled in Uzhhorod in the mid-90s. Hruzin not only supported («warmed») Ignatkin in prison but also launched a large-scale campaign for his early release. According to unconfirmed information, Hruzin accumulated $1 million to «solve the issue».

The efforts bore fruit: in 2008, Ignatkin was transferred to general regime, and his conditional early release (CER) seemed only a matter of time. However, these plans were completely ruined: on February 5, 2009, Oleh Hruzin was shot in Uzhhorod.

This elimination caused another resonance, exposing deep political layers of the case. Then-Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko revealed a sensational detail in an interview with «Коммersant-Ukraine»: testimony in the case of Oleh Hruzin’s murder was given personally by the Head of the President’s Secretariat, Viktor Baloha.

According to the main version of journalistic investigations, influential figures in Transcarpathia could have been extremely uninterested in Ignatkin’s release. The main fear was not just the possibility of his future confessions, but that outside the prison walls, the customers lost critical leverage of influence that guaranteed the hitman’s silence for fifteen years. In this context, Hruzin’s death and the systematic blocking of Ignatkin’s release look like a coordinated operation to «preserve» the truth about the real, not just the officially designated by the investigation, customers of Mykhailo Tokar’s murder.

Yevhen Ihnatkin was released in 2015. Today, almost nothing is known about his further fate: according to some testimonies, after release, he stayed in Transcarpathia region for some time.
However, the most unexpected turn in this story happened on October 12, 2015.

The publication MUKACHEVO.NET reported interesting news: running for the Mizhhirya District Council is none other than Ivan Sytar – the same hitman who was once convicted for Hesha’s murder. Sytar’s candidacy was nominated by the «Revival» party, whose leader in Transcarpathia was MP Mykhailo Lanyo, known in certain circles by the nickname «Bluk». It was Lanyo, according to numerous sources, who inherited a significant part of «the legacy» and assets of Mykhailo Tokar after his death.

This specific political conjuncture became the background for the loud and scandalous events of the summer of 2015. On July 11, in Mukachevo, on the territory of the «Antares» sports complex, a large-scale shootout broke out between «Right Sector» fighters and Lanyo’s entourage. This confrontation became the apogee of a long conflict between two key Transcarpathian centers of influence — Mykhailo Lanyo and Viktor Baloha.

As the publication «ukrainska pravda» noted, MP Mykhailo Lanyo stated that the conflict in Mukachevo flared up due to his refusal to support Viktor Baloha’s son in the upcoming mayoral elections. The details of these testimonies were revealed by then-advisor to the Interior Minister Anton Gerashchenko: Lanyo said this during questioning by the Verkhovna Rada investigative commission on July 18.

«He has a long conflict with Baloha over political differences. At one time he was in the “United Center” party, then left it against Baloha’s will and since then does not maintain relations. After that, their relations sharply deteriorated and, in his opinion, it was Baloha, who morally and materially supports the RS in Transcarpathia, who asked the head of the RS combat wing to start a show of force and hold a meeting on July 11 for pressure purposes», — Herashchenko noted, quoting the MP’s testimony.

The shadows of the 90s spoke again in the language of machine guns, clearly proving: the legacy of the «Transcarpathian octopus» has not gone anywhere – it has only gone through another stage of transformation, changing leather jackets for deputy mandates, but retaining the old methods of solving issues.