This material is a continuation of a series of publications related to the archive of prosecutor Ruslan Voitov’s correspondence. The story we present to your attention reveals the mechanisms by which an official from the prosecutor’s office could use his official position to assist Ukrainian citizens in obtaining Russian citizenship at the height of the military conflict.
In December 2014, Ruslan Grigorievich Voitov, senior prosecutor of the Primorsky District Prosecutor’s Office in Odesa, received an email from a Ukrainian citizen, A. I. Malenkov, a native of the city of Artsyz, with very strange content. The letter stated the intention of this unknown person to apply for Russian citizenship and indicated Sevastopol as the preferred place of residence. At this stage, there was no other information about the applicant except that he was a citizen of Ukraine and was registered in the Odesa region.
In other words, while eastern Ukraine was engulfed in war, the Odesa prosecutor received a request to assist in obtaining a Russian passport with a subsequent move to annexed Crimea. Any prosecutor in such a situation, acting in accordance with the law and their conscience, was obliged to immediately forward the letter to the Security Service of Ukraine and, if there were grounds for doing so, initiate the entry of information into the Unified Register of Pre-trial Investigations.
However, instead of fulfilling his professional duty, Prosecutor Voitov forwarded the letter to a private individual at diana_passion@mail.ru, likely realizing that such a step not only exceeded his official powers but also potentially constituted a criminal offense. This is because the involvement of a prosecutor’s office official in assisting a Ukrainian citizen in obtaining a Russian passport could be interpreted as promoting the interests of a foreign state and, under certain circumstances, could be considered treason.
Let’s pause at this point and conduct a brief educational session. In virtually every country in the world, the involvement of special services in the procedure for granting residence permits and citizenship is enshrined in law and is mandatory. States are required to verify the identity, background, and potential loyalty of applicants. Migration authorities or the Ministry of Internal Affairs formally accept documents, but their authenticity is verified by counterintelligence and security services. In Ukraine, this function is performed by the SBU, in Russia by the FSB, and in EU countries by the police and counterintelligence agencies.
Thus, most countries operate under a single principle: residence permits and, even more so, citizenship are not granted solely on the basis of submitted documents, as a conclusion from the security services is a mandatory step. In conditions of military conflict, control over such procedures becomes much stricter, and it is virtually impossible to obtain a Russian passport without contacting the special services.
And so, someone approaches Odesa prosecutor Voitov with a question that requires contacts or connections with representatives of the special services in order to be resolved positively. But where would a Ukrainian civil servant get such connections?
A logical explanation for the prosecutor’s access to such opportunities may lie in his personal contacts within the Russian Federation.
Relatives from the Russian Federation
As we were informed by the Belyaevsky village council, Ruslan Voitov’s mother was born in the Russian Federation, specifically in the village of Ust-Kalmanka in Altai Krai. Despite certain circumstances, Ms. Voitova is a relatively law-abiding citizen of Ukraine. This is in contrast to her brother and Ruslan Voitov’s uncle, Sergey Nikolaevich Marchenko, who, according to available information, renounced his Ukrainian citizenship and obtained Russian citizenship.
Ruslan Voitov’s cousins, Diana and Nikolai Marchenko, also renounced their Ukrainian citizenship and are now Russian citizens living in Moscow. Another relative, Ruslan Voitov’s aunt Marina Tereshchenko, who currently lives in Barnaul, also does not have Ukrainian citizenship.
However, the story of Voitov’s uncle’s escape to Russia is of particular interest, as these episodes of his biography are clearly demonstrated in the court records.
How the uncle of prosecutor Ruslan Voitov escaped Ukrainian justice
Sergey Nikolaevich Marchenko, who was born, like his sister, in the Russian village of Ust-Kalmanka in Altai Krai, made a career in the Ukrainian judicial system and headed the Teplodar City Court in the Odesa region from 2004 to 2010. However, in October 2010, his home was searched as part of an investigation into the receipt of a $5,500 bribe for “imposing a non-custodial sentence.” We will not go into details, but we will note that the verdict in case 1403/1645/12 was handed down on November 11, 2013. Ruslan Voitov’s uncle was convicted under Article 368, Part 2 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (acceptance of a proposal, promise, or extortion of unlawful benefit by an official) and sentenced to “five years and six months ‘ imprisonment with deprivation of the right to hold the office of judge for a period of three years with confiscation of part of his property.”
However, law enforcement agencies were unable to enforce the sentence because Marchenko fled to Russia. In 2015, he was finally declared wanted, but this did not yield any results.
Let’s take another look at the situation. A civil servant with access to the judicial system, convicted of a criminal offense, flees to Russia, stays there, and later obtains citizenship there (according to our sources in the Ukrainian migration service, Marchenko had dual citizenship until 2023, and after 2024, there are no records of Ukrainian citizenship). All this happened on the eve of the tragic events for Ukraine that unfolded in 2014.
Looking at Russia’s practices in 2010-2013, we can see a tendency not to extradite individuals in politically sensitive cases and, at the same time, to grant status to those who are beneficial to Moscow. However, this only works through administrative decisions and the involvement of the special services or channels within the government. Otherwise, a person involved in a criminal case, later declared wanted, who arrived in Russia on the eve of the war, would have had no chance of legalization and further residence.
The mysterious Diana
Now let’s return to a certain Diana, to whom in December 2014, prosecutor Ruslan Voitov, apparently forgetting that he was obliged to protect the interests of the state, forwarded a request for Russian citizenship from a Ukrainian citizen. An investigation revealed that this “secret assistant” was not a random acquaintance, but the daughter of Sergei Marchenko, i.e., Ruslan Voitov’s cousin.
It is not known for certain whether she was already living in Moscow at the time of the application, or whether Voitov used his relative as a convenient channel of communication for negotiations with his fugitive uncle, who was hiding from Ukrainian justice. However, it is known that this person renounced her Ukrainian citizenship in favor of Russian citizenship.
Who is prosecutor Ruslan Voitov really?
In addition to organizing corruption schemes involving land, resolving business issues for “special gratitude,” and participating in the prosecutor’s mafia, where one hand washes the other, Ruslan Voitov has another striking and very characteristic trait. In 2014, while corresponding with his Belarusian friends, Voitov calmly stated that he had no intention of fighting. At the end of that same year, he helped a Ukrainian obtain Russian citizenship, and in 2021, he registered a fake disability, probably so that if he were dismissed from the prosecutor’s office, he would not be called up for service on the front lines.
Looking at Ruslan Voitov’s “exploits,” one gets the impression that he has chosen to follow in his uncle’s footsteps. But as they say, a son is not responsible for his father, and in the case of Prosecutor Voitov, he is not responsible for his relatives. His own position is another matter. How is it that a Ukrainian prosecutor, a man who swore an oath to uphold the law, not only “does not want to fight,” but also manages to maintain contact with a relative who fled the country and, judging by their correspondence, resolves issues related to obtaining citizenship in the aggressor country, even though the resolution of these issues requires the mandatory involvement of the Russian special services?
Related Reading:
- How prosecutor Ruslan Voitov organized a business on 26 hectares
- How prosecutor Ruslan Voitov acquired housing worth 80 times his official salary
- Prosecutor Ruslan Voitov’s “creative approach” to commissioned cases
- The undeclared apartment of Odesa prosecutor Ruslan Voitov
- An anonymous letter sheds light on the activities of Odesa prosecutor Ruslan Voitov