The police have opened proceedings over illegal stalking of journalist Yuriy Butusov, Detector Media reports, citing Butusov.

The proceedings were opened under two articles:

  • illegal collection, storage, use or dissemination of confidential information about a person without their consent (Article 182 Part 1 of the CCU);
  • any form of influence on a journalist aiming to preclude their reporting, committed by a group of persons upon their prior conspiracy (Article 171 Part 3 of the CCU).

The news outlet writes that on 18 December 2025, after it was reported that defendants in the energy corruption case (“Operation Midas”) were collecting intelligence on multiple people including Yuriy Butusov, his lawyer filed a statement reporting a crime with the Prosecutor General’s Office. The statement requested that the information be immediately entered into the Unified Register of Pre-Trial Investigations (URPI), a probe be opened, and the perpetrators be brought to justice.

The Prosecutor General’s Office reported later, on 29 December, that the statement had been sent to the NABU for fact-checking and the information had not been entered into the URPI yet.

As per Article 214 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine, the investigator, inquirer, and prosecutor have to enter data into the URPI immediately, no later than 24 hours after a statement is filed.

Yuriy Butusov’s lawyer filed a complaint with the Solomyanskyi District Court of Kyiv about the investigator’s inaction, and on 9 January the court ordered NABU to enter the data, initiate a pre-trial investigation, and provide the applicant with an extract from the register. The bureau complied with these requirements on 13 January.

Previously

As IMI reported, the suspects in the Midas graft case had compiled hundreds of “dossiers” on journalists, officialsm and NABU detectives; these included 10 journalists investigating corruption such as Yuriy Nikolov and Oleksa Shalayskyi.

NABU announced a special operation to expose corruption in the energy sector on 10 November 2025. The investigation revealed that the persons involved in a criminal organisation had built a large-scale scheme to influence strategic state-sector enterprises such as Energoatom.

On 15 December 2025, MP Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Freedom of Speech, published a list of journalists whose dossiers had been compiled by the suspects in the Midas case. He received the list from the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and shared it with the Bureau’s permission.

The list included: Maryna Ansiforova (COSA Intelligence Solutions, LIGA.net), Yuriy Butusov (serviceman, Censor.net chief editor), Stanislav Rechynskyi (ORD chief editor), Volodymyr Fedoryn (Forbes Ukraine chief editor), Olha Chaika (Forbes Ukraine editor), Yuriy Nikolov (NashGroshi co-founder), Andriy Kulykov (Commission for Journalist Ethics chair). It also featured two late media workers: Dzerkalo Tyzhnia founder Volodymyr Mostovyi and investigator Oleksa Shalayskyi.