The number of money laundering cases in Ukraine has risen to a record high
Law enforcement agencies in Ukraine are reporting a sharp increase in the number of criminal cases involving the laundering of proceeds from crime.
Over the past six years, the number of such cases has increased nearly fivefold, indicating a significant shift in approaches to investigating financial crimes.
According to the agency, law enforcement registered 1,344 new offenses in this area in 2025. This figure is 3.4 times higher than the pre-war data from 2021 and nearly five times higher than the figures from 2019.
In total, over the past year, investigators processed a record 3,300 criminal cases in this category, with more than half of them carried over from previous periods.
Despite the large-scale deployment of law enforcement efforts, actual financial results and asset forfeitures remain minimal. The established value of laundered assets for the year reached an astronomical sum of 12.35 billion hryvnias.
At the same time, only a tiny fraction of these assets—590 million hryvnias, or less than 5% of the total value of the identified assets—was successfully seized.
Experts attribute this disparity to serious difficulties in gathering evidence within the financial sector. Orest Stasyuk, a counsel at the law firm Asters, notes that simply identifying the initial crime is insufficient to prove money laundering.
According to him, investigators must clearly prove that the assets originated from a specific criminal offense, trace the entire chain of movement of illicit funds step by step, and officially confirm that the financial transactions were carried out specifically to conceal their illegal origin.
Due to significant procedural difficulties, high-profile investigations are often closed, or Article 209 of the Criminal Code is dropped entirely from the charges during the pretrial investigation.
Despite the existing legal challenges, the ability to bring cases to the final stage has improved significantly, and now nearly half of all cases reach trial.
The rapid increase in statistics is linked not only to the activity of law enforcement agencies but also to systemic changes to relevant legislation that took effect in 2020.
Previously, to launch a money laundering investigation, it was necessary to first prove the underlying crime from which the money or property originated and obtain a final court ruling.
Now, money laundering charges are increasingly being added as an additional charge in cases involving corruption, economic crimes, and other serious offenses.
Accordingly, the current rise in statistics largely reflects a shift in investigative approaches, rather than merely an increase in the number of crimes themselves.
This was reported by the “OpenDataBot” platform, citing official statistics from the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine.
NABU and the SAPO have announced new charges in a case involving the laundering of 460 million hryvnias near Kyiv
25 companies under scrutiny: money laundering, tax evasion, and embezzlement through shell companies
