Who staged provocation against Shabunin?
A dirty provocation against Vitalii Shabunin was carried out by as-yet unidentified law enforcement officers. Or was it, in fact, law enforcers?!
But not through anonymous Telegram channels.
The cesspit has a specific name.
The same person is also heavily involved in filing disciplinary complaints against me with the High Council of Justice on an industrial scale (up to five of them a month).
As is Hennadii Sikalov, the owner of the "Ostannii Bastion" website.
The pro-Kremlin outlet regularly publishes both Volodymyr Boiko and his lawyer, Rostyslav Kravets (the latter has also filed complaints against me with the High Council of Justice several times).
By the way, the Sikalov’s "Bastion" (and this figure himself) has been spreading insinuations about civil society representatives since the start of the full-scale war (the relevant screenshot is dated March 4, 2022).
For context, here is an excerpt from a Babel article dated 14 July 2025.
One notable aspect of the case against Vitalii Shabunin is that it was initiated by Volodymyr Boiko. Volodymyr Boiko is a well-known blogger who has been publishing "leaks" from law enforcement agencies for years on his Telegram channel, Notes of a Pamphleteer. Since the days of President Petro Poroshenko, he has consistently criticized the heads of anti-corruption bodies, Prosecutors General, senior judges, and civic activists.
Before the full-scale war, he was a regular guest on ZIK, NewsOne, 112, and Nash TV — channels owned by OPFL lawmakers Taras Kozak and Yevhenii Muraiiev (both now under international sanctions). Ahead of the 2019 presidential election, Babel reported several times on "leaks" published on Volodymyr Boiko’s channel that lacked verified credibility but were objectively damaging to the reputation of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau or the Prosecutor General’s Office and to Ukraine’s international reputation overall.
For example, in 2019, Volodymyr Boiko published a purported "Prosecutor General’s Office memo" claiming that Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevskyi had bribed future President Joe Biden through his son. The same year, he also published a "wiretap", claiming it showed a NABU officer demanding money from a private entrepreneur.
The Anti-Corruption Action Center appeared repeatedly in Volodymyr Boiko’s posts. The most telling example was a post Boiko published ahead of the U.S. presidential election in October 2019. At the time, MP Andrii Derkach (later exposed as an FSB agent) used "leaks" from Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office to discredit Ukraine’s new leadership in the eyes of both presidential candidates — Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Volodymyr Boiko relayed messages from Andrii Derkach’s latest press conference (claiming NABU interfered in U.S. elections) and added his own "details," alleging the interference was organized by the FBI’s representative in Ukraine, who later joined the Anti-Corruption Action Center’s supervisory board.)
After the full-scale invasion began, Volodymyr Boiko was mobilized and, according to him, served in the 206th Separate Territorial Defense Battalion. Boiko says he initiated the case against Vitalii Shabunin after receiving an anonymous "leak": "An unknown employee of the National Agency on Corruption Prevention anonymously informed me that Shabunin V. V. resides in Kyiv, where he is fictitiously performing military service at the NACP."
Volodymyr Boiko asked lawyer Rostyslav Kravets to represent his interests. Like Volodymyr Boiko himself, lawyer Rostyslav Kravets has been the subject of media coverage for many years. The most prominent of these concern the so-called Vovk tapes.
In these recordings (wiretaps) made by NABU, former head of the Kyiv District Administrative Court Pavlo Vovk discusses with colleagues how they would manipulate the courts. On NABU’s assumption, lawyer Rostyslav Kravets is mentioned in the conversation as a friend of a judge close to Pavlo Vovk and was to create an artificial conflict of interest Vovk needed.
Babel has written about Rostyslav Kravets:
• Lawyer Rostyslav Kravets racks up millions of views on mobilization-related content. He is also implicated in the Vovk judge case, fought Ukrainian orthography, and, together with Dubinskyi, targeted anti-corruption activists.
In November 2023, lawyer Rostyslav Kravets filed a criminal complaint with the State Bureau of Investigation, alleging wrongdoing by Vitalii Shabunin. Volodymyr Boiko himself also filed a separate complaint with the SBI. Based on his posts and the documents he released, he and lawyer Rostyslav Kravets "pressed" the SBI to open proceedings against Vitalii Shabunin. The Bureau was unwilling to act on their complaints, so they appealed to Kyiv’s Shevchenkivskyi District Court. Only after a court ruling did the SBI enter the case into the Unified Register of Pre-Trial Investigations (URPTI).
