On May 21, 2026, the HACC granted a motion filed by the representative of Oksana Terekhova, the ex-wife of fugitive former MP Andrii Derkach. Derkach is charged with accepting a bribe of more than $567,000 from Russian intelligence services in exchange for discrediting Ukraine and obstructing its integration into the EU and NATO.

Details of the motion

In February, in the framework of the Andrii Derkach case, a lawyer acting in the interests of Oksana Terekhova — the owner and possessor of the property — filed a motion to lift the seizure imposed by a ruling of an investigating judge of the High Anti-Corruption Court dated August 16, 2022, in case No. 991/2854/22. The seizure concerned funds of €49,000, UAH 200,000, and $10,500 that had been seized on July 26 and 27, 2022, during a search of an apartment.

The motion argued that the search had been conducted in an apartment owned by Terekhova, where the funds in question were seized and subsequently placed under seizure by a court ruling in order to preserve physical evidence.

Arguments made by Oksana Terekhova's representative

Terekhova herself did not appear at the hearing. Her representative argued that the seizure was unjustified, since the money belonged to Terekhova, was her personal property, and had been lawfully acquired through her business activity. This, she said, was confirmed both by information on her client's income and by the fact that the funds had been kept in Terekhova's own safe together with personal belongings — which meant they did not meet the criteria for physical evidence.

The defense lawyer also argued that there was no further need for the seizure, since the pretrial investigation had been completed and the trial was now underway. The prosecution, she said, had never obtained any evidence that the funds were of unlawful origin, and the seizure merely restricted the right to property without grounds.

Not the first such motion

The May 2026 ruling indicates that, in addition to the August 2022 search ruling mentioned above, another ruling by an investigating judge of the High Anti-Corruption Court had authorized a search of Terekhova's apartment in July of that year, in order to find and seize money received as an unlawful benefit from representatives of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian General Staff. This too was part of the investigation in the criminal proceedings against Andrii Derkach.

A motion to lift the seizure of these funds had already been filed on Terekhova's behalf once before. The grounds were entirely identical to those described above, but the court denied that motion in a ruling in February 2024. At the time, the court concluded that the seizure had been justifiably imposed to preserve physical evidence. Because the indictment against Andrii Derkach was pending before the court, the evidence had not yet been examined, no final decision had been reached, and the risk of losing the funds still remained, the need for the seizure had not ceased.

Comparing the latest motion with the previous one, the panel hearing the case of the fugitive former MP found that the representative had essentially advanced the same arguments and submitted the same evidence that had already been assessed. In other words, no new information had been provided to rebut the earlier conclusions, and the representative had therefore failed to prove that the seizure was unjustified.

Even so, the ruling went in Terekhova's favor. The court reasoned that SAPO prosecutors had never added the money seized in the apartment to the case file and had not relied on it to prove the defendant's guilt, so the funds had lost their procedural significance. The representative had fully confirmed Terekhova's ownership of these savings, and the prosecutor himself did not object to lifting the restrictions at the hearing.

And so the HACC returned the funds to their owner.

What is Derkach charged with?

According to the prosecution, between 2019 and 2022 former MP Andrii Derkach received at least $567,000 for conducting special information operations to discredit Ukraine on the international stage, damage its diplomatic relations with the United States, and complicate its integration into the EU and NATO. He had been recruited by Russian military intelligence in 2016, under the supervision of the GRU's top leadership — Igor Kostyukov and Vladimir Alekseyev.

As part of this destructive activity, in 2020 Derkach organized a series of online conferences on the country's alleged external governance, where he released falsified recordings of conversations between Poroshenko and Biden and Putin. Beyond these information operations, Derkach's key task within a large agent network was reportedly to set up private security firms in various regions of Ukraine that, during the full-scale invasion, were meant to facilitate the advance of Russian military equipment, the “peaceful” entry of enemy troops into cities, and the seizure of the government quarter in Kyiv.

To carry out this plan, Russia's GRU allocated $3–4 million in funding every few months, part of which the MP appropriated for himself.

When the full-scale invasion began, the former MP fled to Russia. Despite international sanctions and criminal cases, Derkach openly conducts political activity on Russian territory. In the summer of 2024 he became a candidate, and in September a senator in the Federation Council representing Astrakhan Region; in November he joined the defense and security committee, and in December 2025 he was awarded the title of “hero of Russia.”

In November 2025, Derkach's name again featured prominently in a criminal scheme — this time in the Midas case, where it was established that the criminal organization used a separate office in central Kyiv, owned by the Derkach family, to legalize funds, keep off-the-books accounts, and launder money through non-residents. The investigation also confirmed links between those implicated in the scheme and the former MP, in particular through the suspect codenamed Rocket — Ihor Myroniuk, a former adviser to ex-Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko, who had previously worked as an aide to Andrii Derkach himself.