The Dniprovskyi District Court of Kyiv convicted Vitaliy Shabunin, chair of the Anti-Corruption Action Center (ANTAC), in a case regarding his conflict with pro-Russian blogger Vsevolod Filimonenko, and ordered Shabinin to pay about 4 thousand hryvnias in examination fees.
Judge Olena Kozachuk passed the ruling on 13 May 2026, ZMINA reports, citing their correspondent present in the courtroom.
The court found Shabunin guilty under Part 2 of Article 345 of the Criminal Code (violence against a journalist and inflicting moderate bodily harm).
Shabunin’s lawyer Olena Shcherban said that the court imposed no real penalties due to the statute of limitations having expired. According to her, the defense refused to petition for the case to be closed since they counted on a full and fair trial.
She said that the defense believed the incident to have involved provocation and that the bodily injuries had been falsely attributed to the victim by the police.
The report from the initial CT scan, done on 20 June, was missing from the case file even though the incident had occurred on 8 June, that is, 12 days earlier. Shcherban added that the previous CT scan results had revealed no injuries to Vsevolod Filimonenko.
Shabunin’s defense said they would appeal the verdict.
The prosecutor has been working on the case since 2017. The investigation insisted that Shabunin had beaten a journalist. Instead, the defense claimed that Filimonenko did not have the status of a journalist and the conflict was unrelated to reporting.
Back in 2018, multiple media and human rights organisations, including the Institute of Mass Information, criticised the prosecutor’s decision to requalify the case from deliberate bodily harm to violence against a journalist. The authors of the statement stressed that the authorities were failing to properly investigate real attacks on journalists yet abused the related Criminal Code articles to persecute critics of the government. The statement was signed by journalists, media experts, and human rights activists.
Shabunin’s lawyers also argued that the documents that were supposed to confirm Filimonenko’s involvement in journalism failed to prove his being a journalist. According to them, the publication where Filimonenko allegedly worked did not operate as a full-fledged news outlet. In addition, the blogger had contributed no articles there, and his editorial assignment had been signed by the director of a non-existent company, not the editorial office.
ANTAC emphasised that the claims of moderate bodily harm were false. Filimonenko had no visible severe injuries in the footage filmed right after the confrontation and sprayed an unknown substance in Shabunin’s direction himself.
The doctors in the emergency care ward where Filimonenko was taken the same day found no bone fractures. The first medical document mentioning a fractured jaw surfaced more than two weeks after the incident.
According to ANTAC, Filimonenko has been living abroad since 2019 and has not attended hearings in the case against Shabunin for years. He was last in contact in January 2026.
Who is Vsevolod Filimonenko
Vsevolod Filimonenko is a Ukrainian national and a blogger who participated in a commissioned campaign targeting the Anti-Corruption Centre chair Vitaliy Shabunin. He left Ukraine in 2019.
In 2017, Filimonenko provoked Shabunin into a fight; the latter was then notified of suspicion for inflicting moderate bodily harm on Filimonenko. The case was later requalified and Shabunin was charged with Part 2 of Article 345-1 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine “Threats or violence against a journalist”, since Filimonenko claimed to be a journalist.
Shabunin has said that the case against him was initiated by political figures whose interests could be harmed by his anti-corruption work. Yuriy Lutsenko, who was Ukraine’s Prosecutor General at the time, said that he considered Vsevolod Filimonenko a provocateur.
On 9 February 2018, the Dniprovskyi District Court of Kyiv began trial on merits in Shabunin’s case. However, Filimonenko was absent from the hearings for several years, Shabunin says.
In 2024, Vsevolod Filimonenko was featured in a propaganda film by Russia’s Perviy Kanal, titled “Zelenskyi and His Combat Drug Addicts” and aimed to discredit the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The film presents Filimonenko as a “Euromaidan activist” who says that “drugs were supplied to the Maidan en masse and in unlimited quantities” at that time and that the tea given out to the protesters was spiked with doping.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyi imposed sanctions against Vsevolod Filimonenko in September 2025. YouTube suspended Filimonenko’s channel in Ukraine shortly after.
