Advocate Dmytro Yagunov Proved in Court the Chronic Inaction of the Bolhrad Prosecutor’s Office and Police in a Torture Case
On 15 September 2026, the investigating judge of the Bolhrad District Court of Odesa Oblast, by a ruling in case No. 497/150/22 (proceedings No. 1-кс/497/389/26), granted the victim’s complaint of 07.09.2026 against the inaction of the investigator and the prosecutor in criminal proceedings No. 12018160150002589 of 01.10.2018. The victim’s interests at the court hearing were represented by advocate Dmytro Yagunov (by videoconference); the position of the prosecution was presented by prosecutor of the Bolhrad District Prosecutor’s Office V.P. Bulhar.
The subject of the complaint was the failure to consider the victim’s motion of 28.08.2026, addressed, among others, to the Bolhrad District Prosecutor’s Office and the Bolhrad District Police Department of the Main Directorate of the National Police in Odesa Oblast. The court ordered the authorised investigator of the Investigative Division of the Bolhrad District Police Department and the authorised prosecutor of the Bolhrad District Prosecutor’s Office to consider this motion in the manner and within the time limits prescribed by Article 220 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine, and to notify the victim of the outcome.
At the hearing, advocate Dmytro Yagunov emphasised that this ruling is not an isolated episode but another link in a chain of judicial decisions recording one and the same fact: for years, the pre-trial investigation authorities and the prosecutor’s office have been evading the investigation of the torture inflicted on the victim on 30 September 2018. As early as 31.07.2026, the same court quashed the unlawful decision to close the proceedings, having established that no investigation had in fact been conducted at all. A month and a half has passed since then, and not a single investigative action has been carried out during that time. Instead, the proceedings were shuffled three times between Bolhrad and Izmail, the case file, according to the investigators themselves, is “physically absent” from the investigative division, and in response to dozens of the victim’s motions, instead of the decisions required by law, letters were sent that cannot be appealed.
The advocate persuaded the court that such inaction is chronic in nature and is not the result of accidental errors or overload. It is a pattern of conduct whose objective outcome is the expiry of limitation periods and the de facto release of the perpetrators from criminal liability. The European Court of Human Rights in Assenov and Others v. Bulgaria, Kaverzin v. Ukraine and Bouyid v. Belgium [GC] has repeatedly stressed that an investigation reduced to correspondence and the formal transfer of a case between authorities is not effective and in itself constitutes a violation of Article 3 of the Convention.
“When, since 2018, the prosecutor’s office and the police have been unable to consider even a victim’s motion, and the court is compelled time and again to order them to do what the law expressly prescribes, this is no longer an error or negligence. It is a strategy of impunity, and every new ruling of an investigating judge makes this strategy ever more obvious to the national courts and to Strasbourg,” Dmytro Yagunov noted.
The victim and his representative will continue to seek a genuine investigation, the notification of suspicion to the perpetrators, and the transfer of the proceedings to an authority unconnected with the Bolhrad and Izmail districts. The ruling of 15.09.2026, like the previous judicial decisions in this case, will be relied upon as proof of the exhaustion of domestic remedies in the application to the European Court of Human Rights under Articles 3 and 13 of the Convention.
