UAF serviceman Andriy Sokol, who is suspected of reselling combat drones, is demanding one million hryvnias in moral damages and investigation takedown from NGL.media. He has filed a defamation claim against the the news outlet’s publisher, NGO Lviv Group, NGL.media reports.

The statement of claim was received by the Frankivskyi District Court of Lviv.

NGL.media released an investigation on 26 October 2026 into junior lieutenant Andriy Sokol, who at that time had spent almost seven months in a pre-trial detention centre. According to the investigation, the serviceman may have resold more than 340 combat drones, inflicting 15.2 million hryvnias of losses on the state.

A week after the release of the story, lawyer Dmytro Bakulin filed a claim on Sokol’s behalf, demanding:

  • the full investigation be taken down from the NGL.media website;
  • all mentions of Sokol be removed from the outlet’s YouTube and Instagram pages;
  • NGL.media pay one million hryvnias in moral damages.

The claimant cites the mentions of his real name and the names of his relatives as grounds for the lawsuit.

NGL.media lawyer Yevhen Vorobiov considers the claim frivolous and bearing the hallmarks of a SLAPP suit.

“This looks like a typical SLAPP suit, because they demand a very large sum in moral damages. Moreover, Sokol did not contact the team before filing the claim or let us know that he considered his personal non-property rights to have been violated,” the lawyer remarked.

He also pointed out the contradictions in the claim: the claimant calls the reported information false while asserting that journalists had no right to report information relating to the pre-trial investigation. “Overall, it is an unfounded claim,” the lawyer added.

NGL.media chief editor Oleh Onysko remarked that the newsroom often faced SLAPP suits, but that the demand for one million hryvnias was the largest in the outlet’s history.

“We often face such SLAPP suits, which aim to distract and discourage journalists from investigations, but a demand for one million hryvnias in moral damages is the largest sum in NGL.media’s history so far,” Onysko said.

On 6 July, he Pechersk District Court of Kyiv banned Slidstvo.Info, the Anti-Corruption Action Center (ANTAC), and journalist Alina Stryzhak from releasing and distributing an investigation into 143 real estate properties that the journalists discovered to be owned by the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) director’s brother, Oleksandr Sukhachov. The company Parkovyi-2 claimed in the lawsuit that banning the distribution of this information was not censorship since the law allowed such restrictions in certain cases.

On 24 September, the Kyiv Court of Appeal overturned the ruling by Kyiv’s Pecherskyi District Court banning the release of the investigation.