Justice Department releases huge trove of Jeffrey Epstein files

The Justice Department released more files related to the investigations into convicted sex offenders Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell Saturday morning — a day after initially making tens of thousands of records public.

The Department of Justice has not responded to a request for comment about the discrepancy, and it's unclear why the files are missing a day after they were initially released.

However, in a social media post to its × account Saturday night that seemed to touch on the issue, the DOJ wrote: "Photos and other materials will continue being reviewed and redacted consistent with the law in an abundance of caution as we receive additional information."

One of the missing files showed a mass of framed photos on a desk. They include former President Bill Clinton and the pope. In an open drawer in the same image, there was a photo of Mr. Trump, Epstein and Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell.

Other missing files included photos of a room with what appeared to be a massage table and nude photos and nude paintings.

As of early Saturday afternoon, seven batches of materials had been posted on the department’s website. During an interview on Fox News Friday morning, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche had said the Justice Department would continue to release materials in the weeks ahead.

The much-anticipated materials tied to Epstein, who died by suicide in a New York City jail cell in 2019, and Maxwell, his longtime confidant and former girlfriend, have largely consisted of documents, some of which are heavily redacted, and images of Epstein’s homes in New York City and the U.S. Virgin Islands, as well some photos of powerful people in politics and entertainment. None of those pictured have been accused of any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein and Maxwell.

Maxwell, 63, is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role in luring victims to be abused by Epstein over the course of a decade. She was moved to a prison camp in Texas from a federal prison in Florida in August.

DOJ says additional disclosures to come by year’s end

In a letter to Congress Friday, Blanche wrote that the Justice Department was continuing to review files in its possession and planned to share additional records by the end of the year.

The trove of materials made public to date came after a small group of bipartisan lawmakers — including Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., — joined forces with Epstein’s accusers in a campaign to force the government to release its files related to the wealthy financier.

Following the partial release Friday afternoon, Democrats and some Republicans criticized the Justice Department, contending that officials failed to meet Friday’s congressionally set deadline to make all of the files public.

Khanna called Friday’s release “deeply disappointing” during an interview with CNN, saying many of the records had been overly redacted and other documents, which may have implicated additional people in Epstein’s crimes, were not made public.

“We do not know then who these other rich and powerful men were who abused these survivors,” he said. “And we know from the survivors and the survivors' lawyers that that information is in the files.”

Massie said on social media that the trove released by the Justice Department so far “grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law.”

On Saturday, the Associated Press and NPR identified files among those initially released that appear to have been removed from the Justice Department's webpage.

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee pointed out that one of the images — showing a table with various photographs, including two with President Donald Trump –– was among those no longer posted online.

A request for comment made to the Justice Department by Spectrum News Saturday about the change was not immediately returned.

Records released Saturday

Court records made public Saturday shed more light on how authorities were aware of allegations that Epstein sexually abused several teenage girls and young women more than two decades ago.

Among the trove were grand jury materials from the 2007 federal investigation in Florida into Epstein — a case that ultimately ended without federal charges. In 2008, the notorious financier instead pled guilty to lesser state prostitution charges involving a person under 18.

The newly released records included grand jury testimony from FBI agents who described interviews with several girls as young as 14 and young women who said they were paid to perform sex acts for Epstein. One had told authorities about how Epstein sexually assaulted her after she initially resisted his advances during a massage.

The files also included 2007 grand jury testimony from a 21-year-old woman who described being molested by Epstein when she was 16 after she was recruited by a high school classmate. She also detailed Epstein asking her to bring him other girls and confirmed that he had told her “the younger the better.”

Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Rodney Smith had allowed for these grand jury records from nearly two decades ago to be released. In his decision, he said that the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act –– which was approved nearly unanimously by Congress and signed into law by President Trump in November –– overode the usual rules about secrecy.

Epstein’s accusers have long sought more information about why the federal case from that time seemed to have been set aside for the plea agreement.

Grand jury records in the state case against Epstein were released last year, and the Miami Herald reported at the time that the records showed the Palm Beach County prosecutor had presented two girls molested by Epstein unsympathetically to the grand jury.

Saturday’s release also included a several-hundred-page transcript of the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility’s interview of former U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta in 2019 –– in which officials asked Acosta how the case against Epstein ended in a plea deal.

Acosta cited concerns from the time about whether a jury would believe Epstein’s accusers as part of the reasoning.

His remarks came several months after a federal judge ruled that prosecutors had violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act when they failed to tell accusers about the agreement not to prosecute Epstein on federal sex trafficking charges.

Bendera putih di Aceh, 'Kondisi Aceh begitu buruk, kami tidak baik-baik saja' – Apa respons pemerintah pusat?

Aksi bendera putih di depan pintu gerbang Masjid Raya Baiturrahman, Banda Aceh, hari Kamis,18/12/2025.

Pengibaran bendera putih di sejumlah wilayah Aceh terus terjadi dalam beberapa hari. Yang terbaru, pada demonstrasi di Banda Aceh, hari Kamis, 18/12/2025, warga menaikkan bendera sebagai "sinyal darurat untuk meminta bantuan sekaligus menarik perhatian internasional".

Menurut warga yang berunjuk rasa, penanganan bencana oleh pemerintah pusat lamban. Hampir tiga pekan berlalu usai banjir dan longsor, akses transportasi di berbagai daerah Aceh masih putus.

Pasokan bantuan kebutuhan dasar, menurut para demonstran, tidak merata. Stok obat serta bahan bakar minyak di berbagai tempat juga menipis.

"Pengibaran bendera putih ini bukan berarti Aceh mengalah atau menyerah, tetapi ini adalah tanda SOS, untuk menarik perhatian teman-teman yang ada di luar bahwa kondisi di Aceh hari ini begitu buruk," kata seorang warga yang berdemo, Husnul Khawatinnissa.

Husnul bersama puluhan orang lainnya berkumpul di depan pintu gerbang Masjid Raya Baiturrahman, Banda Aceh. Selain bendera putih, mereka juga membawa berbagai spanduk.

"Pengibaran bendera putih ini bentuk panggilan solidaritas internasional. Ini adalah bahasa yang dikenal oleh seluruh dunia," ujar Azharul.

Pengibaran bendera putih terlihat di sejumlah wilayah Aceh dalam sepekan terakhir, dari desa hingga ke perkotaan, termasuk yang tidak terdampak banjir dan longsor secara langsung.

Bendara putih akan kembali dikibarkan di Aceh Barat oleh kelompok mahasiswa, Jumat besok.

Gubernur Aceh, Muzakir Manaf, menyebut pengibaran bendera putih ini merupakan panggilan solidaritas terhadap komunitas di luar provinsinya.

"Bendera putih, kalau kami artikan, semua masuk, sebagai solidaritas, rasa simpati, dan rasa ingin dibantu," kata Muzakir, di Aceh Utara, hari Kamis, 18/12/2025.

Apa respons pemerintah pusat?

Menanggapi aksi pengibaran bendera putih oleh masyarakat di sejumlah daerah di Aceh, Menteri Dalam Negeri (Mendagri) Tito Karnavian menyebutnya sebagai "aspirasi warga" dan memahaminya sebagai "kritik dan masukan" kepada pemerintah.

Hal itu diutarakan Tito menanggapi pertanyaan wartawan dalam jumpa pers di Jakarta, hari Jumat siang, 19/12/2025.

Para aktivis berunjuk rasa dengan bendera putih untuk menuntut pemerintah Indonesia mempermudah perolehan bantuan internasional bagi penanganan banjir Sumatra, hari Kamis, 18/12/2025.

Tito Karnavian lalu berujar bahwa pemerintah "meminta maaf" apabila upaya penanganan pemerintah atas banjir dan longsor di Sumatra dianggap "ada kekurangan".

"Dengan segala kerendahan hati, kami meminta maaf ya bila ada kekurangan yang ada, memang kendala yang dihadapi cukup besar, karena medan yang cukup berat," sambungnya.

Tito berujar, pemerintah wajib untuk terus bekerja dalam mengatasi berbagai kendala.

Dia lalu berjanji bahwa pemerintah akan terus memperbaiki kinerja dan secepatnya memenuhi kebutuhan darurat di Aceh, Sumut, dan Sumbar.

Tito tidak menutupi fakta bahwa penanganan bencana itu tidak terlepas dari peran masyarakat.

"Uluran tangan dari warga masyarakat telah banyak bantu untuk tahap darurat Sumatra," katanya seraya mengucapkan terima kasih.

Sejumlah aktivis berunjuk rasa dengan mengibarkan bendera putih untuk menuntut pemerintah Indonesia membuka pintu bagi bantuan asing dalam merespons banjir dan longsor di Sumatera, hari Kamis, 18/12/2025 di depan Masjid Baiturrahman, Banda Aceh.

Sementara, Sekretaris Kabinet (Seskab) Teddy Indra Wijaya menolak anggapan yang menyebut pemerintah pusat lamban dalam merespons banjir dan longsor Sumatra.

Dia mengklaim pemerintah pusat sudah merespons bencana itu sejak hari pertama.

Dan karena itulah Teddy mempertanyakan tuntutan pemberlakuan status bencana nasional.

"Masih ada pihak-pihak yang terus saja membahas status bencana nasional," katanya dalam jumpa pers di Jakarta, hari Jumat, 19/12/205.

Teddy tidak merinci pernyataannya tersebut.

Dia kemudian menyebutkan langkah-langkah yang sudah, sedang dan akan dilakukan pemerintah.

Namun Teddy mengakui penanganan bencana Sumatra "membutuhkan waktu" karena berbagai kendala di lapangan.

Apa tuntutan utama dari orang-orang Aceh yang mengibarkan bendera putih?

Koordinator demonstrasi di Banda Aceh, Kamis ini, Rahmad Maulidin, mengklaim aksi mereka merupakan gerakan yang digagas masyarakat.

"Kami tidak ada kaitan apapun dengan pemerintah Aceh," ujarnya.

"Gerakan ini kami besarkan didasarkan kekhawatiran masyarakat yang tidak mendapatkan bantuan," ujarnya Rahmad.

"Hari ini banyak daerah yang terisolir. Jadi ini gerakan rakyat yang tidak ada kaitan apa pun dengan pemerintah," kata Rahmad.

Aksi pengbiaran bendera putih di Masjid Raya Baiturrahman, hari Kamis, 18/12/2025, merupakan rentetan dari aksi serupa di sejumlah wilayah Aceh.

Rahmad berkata, kelompoknya menuntut tiga hal. Pertama, mereka mendesak pada pemerintah segera menetapkan bencana di Sumatra sebagai bencana nasional.

Kedua, kata Rahmad, mereka menuntut agar pemerintah membuka akses untuk komunitas internasional yang hendak memberikan bantuan ke Sumatera.

Ketiga, mereka mendesak pemerintah secara tegas menindak perusahaan yang merusak lingkungan.

Rahmad menuding putusan pemerintah yang menolak bantuan luar negeri sebagai kebijakan yang keliru.

"Menolak bantuan luar negeri menunjukkan bahwa pemerintah pusat secara nyata memperlambat penanganan, termasuk pemulihan korban, pemulihan fisik dan rehabilitasi infrastruktur," tuturnya.

Dalam orasinya, Rahmad menuding bencana Sumatra dengan istilah "ekosida", yang terjadi akibat pengabaian lingkungan.

Merujuk data Wahana Lingkungan Hidup (Walhi), terjadi deforestasi seluas 1,4 juta hektare di hutan-hutan di Aceh, Sumatra Utara, dan Sumatra Barat dalam satu dekade.

Dalam perkembangan terbaru, pemerintah berjanji akan menindak perusahaan yang terbukti mengubah lanskap hutan sehingga turut memicu banjir dan longsor.

Satuan Tugas Penertiban Kawasan Hutan yang dibentuk pemerintah mengklaim telah memetakan setidaknya 31 perusahaan yang diduga secara langsung merusak daerah aliran sungai di berbagai wilayah terdampak banjir dan longsor.

Bendera putih di Banda Aceh

Seorang peserta yang mengikuti pengibaran bendera putih di Banda Aceh, Nurmi, menyoroti situasi di kamp pengungsian, terutama yang alami para perempuan. Ia menyebut para perempuan penyintas bencana di Aceh mengalami kerentanan ganda selama di pengungsian karena minimnya fasilitas.

"Betapa banyak ibu-ibu, kaum wanita, mencuci alat kelamin dengan lumpur," kata Nurmi.

"Mereka membersihkan haid mereka dengan air banjir, kalau ada," kata Nurmi sambil berteriak, dengan suara yang serak.

Warga lainnya, Munawar Liza Zainal, menuding penanganan bencana Sumatra "terkesan setengah hati".

"Kami tidak menyalahkan mereka yang bekerja di lapangan. Kami menyalahkan, mereka-mereka yang sebenarnya mampu menggerakkan kekuatan dunia, yang bisa mengumpulkan pesawat, helikopter," ujar Munawar.

Aktivis lingkungan dan mahasiswa yang tergabung dalam koalisi masyarakat sipil menggelar aksi damai memprotes penanganan bencana alam di Banda Aceh, Aceh, hari Selasa, 16/12/2025.

Merujuk data Posko Tanggap Darurat Bencana Pemerintah Provinsi Aceh, per 18 Desember 2025, korban terdampak bencana di Aceh mencapai 1.999,948 jiwa.

Jumlah pengungsi akibat banjir dan longsor mencapai 406,360 jiwa.

Adapun korban meninggal telah berjumlah 458 orang. Selain itu, 31 orang masih berstatus hilang.

Cerita dari Bireuen

Di Bireuen, seorang warga Gampong Alue Kuta, Kecamatan Jangka, mengibarkan bendera putih. Dia menyatakan tidak mampu menghadapi banjir bandang dan longsor terjadi.

"Saya berharap datangnya bantuan dari pemerintah, seperti sembako, agar bisa bertahan hidup. Stok yang ada sudah tidak cukup," kata Edi Saputra, berumur 35 tahun.

Edi Saputra (35) warga Gampong Alue Kuta di Kabupaten Bireun menancapkan bendera putih di perkarangan rumahya.

Rumah Edi dan warga Gampong Alue Kuta lainnya tersapu banjir bandang dengan lumpur tebal. Banyak rumah roboh dan tak layak lagi dihuni.

Selain bahan pangan, Edi berharap pemerintah segera menurunkan alat berat untuk memperbaiki jalan di desanya serta untuk memulai rekonstruksi rumah warga.

Edi dan keluarga kecilnya kini harus tinggal di tempat pengungsian bersama warga lainnya.

"Terkadang bantuan ada datang dan terkadang tidak ada. Kami menunggu dibagikan oleh kepala desa," ujar Edi.

Geuchik alias Kepala Desa Alue Kuta, Habibullah menyampaikan hal yang sama seperti perkataan Edi. Bendera putih adalah tanda bahwa mereka sudah tidak mampu menghadapi dampak banjir dan longsor.

Menurut Habibullah, warga sangat membutuhkan bantuan, baik dari pemerintah maupun berbagai pihak lain. Bantuan yang disalurkan ke kampung mereka, kata Habibullah, hanya cukup untuk membuat warga bertahan setidaknya lima hari ke depan.

Di Alue Kuta, 40 rumah warga hilang. Selain itu ada pula 28 rumah rusak parah dan 95 rumah yang rusak dengan kategori ringan.

"Yang kami butuhkan sekarang adalah tenda untuk tinggal para pengungsi," kata Habibullah.

"Secara keseluruhan, 240 kerluarga atau 875 orang terkena dampak bencana banjir bandang ini," ujarnya.

Petugas Dinas Perumahan dan Kawasan Permukiman melakukan pendataan rumah warga yang rusak akibat bencana alam di Desa Alue Kuta, Kecamatan Jangka, Bireuen, Aceh, hari Kamis, 18/12/2025.

Selain kerusahan rumah, infrastruktur desa dalam radius lima kilometer juga rusak parah.

Lumpur juga memadati jalanan sehingga akses transportasi putus. Listrik di kampung itu hingga sekarang juga belum menyala.

"Warga juga belum mendapatkan air bersih. Obat- obatan dan alat lainnya juga belum ada," kata Habibullah.

Kondisi di Aceh Barat 'tak banyak berubah'

Deni Setiawan, warga Meulaboh, Aceh Barat, menyebut situasi yang dialami warga setelah tiga pekan tidak banyak berubah.

"Makanya kami harus mengibarkan bendera putih. Itu adalah respons masyarakat dan elemen sipil," ujarnya.

Menurut Deni, mengibarkan bendera putih adalah cara warga menyampaikan desakan kepada pemerintah pusat.

"Sebenarnya masyarakat bukan enggak mampu. Masyarakat mampu bertahan. cuma tanggung jawab pemerintahan bagaimana?" kata Deni.

Warga memasang bendera putih di kawasan Pante Ceureumen, Aceh Barat, Aceh, hari Rabu, 17/12/2025.

Deni menyebut perbaikan jalan yang tidak kunjung dilakukan. Akses transportasi dari dan menuju kampungnya masih terutup lumpur dan batang-batang pohon yang terbawa banjir.

"Alat berat kami tidak punya. Misalkan dibantu pusat atau dari luar negeri, tentu akan cepat diperbaiki," ujar Deni.

Selama tiga pekan terkahir, kata Deni, warga bertahan secara mandiri. Dia menyebut bantuan biasanya datang jelang kunjungan resmi pejabat pemerintahan.

Dalam beberapa hari terakhir, Deni menyebut bantuan dari kelompok non-pemerintah mulai berdatangan.

"Mayoritas relawan itu membawa beras, mi, dan pakaian layak pakai.. Ada juga makanan seperti sarden," tuturnya.

Deni membandingkan situasi saat ini dengan apa yang terjadi tak lama setelah tsunami menerjang Aceh pada 2004.

Usai tsunami, kata Deni, korban bencana dan infrastruktur ditangani dengan cepat. Dia menyebut jalur yang putus akibat tsunami kala itu bisa segera tersambung.

Bantuan untuk warga pun bisa segera tersalurkan ke para pengungsi saat itu. Alat berat, kata dia, setelah tsunami dikerahkan ke tempat-tempat terdampak tsunami, termasuk kampungnya.

Jelang akhir pekan ini, sebagian wilayah Aceh Barat masih terisolasi, terutama kawasan Pante Ceureumen.

Per hari ini, Deni melihat tak sedikit warga yang di pengungsian yang memendam trauma. "Kalau hujan itu, mereka langsung berlari naik ke gunung," ujarnya.

Aceh Tamiang

Bendera putih juga berkibar di Aceh Tamiang.

Menurut Sulaiman, warga Kecamatan Karang Baru, pengibaran ini merupakan inisiatif warga, bukan arahan pihak manapun, termasuk pemerintah daerah.

Sejumlah bendera putih ini, kata laki-laki berusia 50 tahun itu, serentak dipasang sejak 16 November lalu.

"Dengan bendera putih ini, kami berharap ada pihak-pihak yang membantu warga. Menurut kami, pemerintah lamban menangani bencana ini." ujarnya saat ditemui pada hari Kamis, 18/12/2025.

Warga dan anak-anak duduk di bawah bendera putih yang terpasang di sisi Jalan Lintas Sumatera, Aceh Tamiang, hari Senin 15/12/2025.

Sulaiman merupakan penjaga warung kelontong pinggir jalan. Banjir bandang telah menghancurkan semua yang dia miliki.

Rumah dan segala harta bendanya, termasuk dokumen-dokumen penting seperti ijazah dan akte kelahiran anak, lenyap. Satu-satunya yang tersisa hanyalah pakaian yang melekat di badannya.

Pada 2006, banjir besar juga pernah melanda Kecamatan Karang Baru. Namun dampaknya tidak sedahsyat kali ini, kata Sulaiman.

Selain dampak kehancurannya yang meluas, Sulaiman bilang penanggulangan banjir kali ini amat lambat.

Sulaiman dan keluarganya bahkan terpaksa menumpang tidur dalam mobil boks milik pengendara yang terjebak banjir selama tiga hari berturut. Alasannya, kata dia, pemerintah tak kunjung mengevakuasi warga di kampungnya.

Selama di mobil boks itu, mereka hanya makan seadaanya, bergantung pada uluran tangan sesama warga.

Sulaiman berkata, bantuan dari pemerintah, termasuk tenda darurat BNPB, baru mereka peroleh lebih dari sepekan setelah banjir datang.

"Jadi bendera putih ini agar orang-orang bisa melihat dan membantu Aceh, entah dari luar atau dalam negeri," ujarnya.

"Dengan inilah kami memohon para donatur untuk membantu korban bencana ini," kata dia.

Selain menggalang pertolongan publik, Sulaiman menyebut pengibaran bendera putih juga menyimbolkan kekecewaan warga terhadap pemerintah.

Kapal patroli KN Pulau Dana-323 diberangkatkan menuju Lhokseumawe, Aceh, hari Kamis, 18/12/2025, dengan membawa sekitar 92 ton bantuan lanjutan bagi korban bencana banjir dan longsor.

Saat liputan ini dilakukan, kondisi sebagian besar warga Aceh Tamiang masih memprihatinkan. Lumpur dan sampah menyatu dengan kepingan rumah-rumah yang hancur diterjang banjir.

Air bersih dan fasilitas sanitasi masih langka di kabupaten ini. Sementara itu, listrik telah menyala di beberapa tempat.

Di sepanjang jalan, warga berdiri memegang kardus-kardus bekas. Mereka bergumul dengan debu demi mendapatkan bantuan dari siapa saja yang melintas.

Menurut Yuni, warga Kecamatan Karang Baru lainnya, mereka menunggu di pinggiran jalan karena terpaksa.

"Bukannya kami memanfaatkan keadaan ini, tidak. Kalau tidak minta-minta, dari mana kami makan? Kadang orang kasih kami nasi, barulah kami makan," ujar Yuni.

"Kalau tidak turun (ke jalan), kami tidak makan. Kalau cuma tidur-tidur di rumah, kami mati kelaparan.

"Makanya banyak dari kami berjejer di sini, ya, untuk cari makan tadi," kata warga lainnya, Andrianto.

Aceh Utara

Syifa Yulinnas ,yang meski keluarganya berada di Aceh Utara, telah berkeliling ke sembilan kabupaten dan kota yang terdampak peristiwa banjir.

Dari perjalanannya itu, tiga wilayah yang menurutnya terdampak parah adalah Aceh Utara, Aceh Tengah, dan Aceh Tamiang.

Bahkan di Aceh Tengah, warga baru memperoleh bantuan beras sebanyak 2,5 kilogram pada minggu ketiga.

"Karena di kawasan Aceh Tengah, akses mereka kan enggak bisa keluar. Kalau keluar bisa, tapi harus jalan kaki sampai 7-8 jam," tutur Syifa.

Asalnya yakni Aceh Utara itu, kata dia, tak pernah banjir sejak dia lahir hingga November kemarin.

"Jadi umur Syifa ini sudah 37 tahun, baru kali ini banjir. Selama ini enggak pernah. Alhamdulillah keluarga tidak apa-apa, tapi semua yang di rumah harus mulai dari nol lagi," ujar Syifa.

Bendera putih berkibar di sejumlah daerah di pinggiran jalan lintas nasional Banda Aceh -Medan.

Meski keluarga Syifa sempat mengungsi selama empat hari pasca kejadian, sekembalinya ke rumah, lumpur setinggi 50-100 sentimeter masih tersisa di dalam dan pekarangan rumahnya.

Bantuan untuk warga, kata Syifa, sudah berdatangan, tapi tidak dibagikan secara merata dan jumlahnya pun cenderung minim.

Di sisi lain, harga bahan pokok mulai melambung karena stok yang kian menipis. Di beberapa wilayah seperti Aceh Tengah, muncul jasa penitipan untuk membeli sembako: sekali jalan seharga Rp15.000 hingga Rp20.000 per kilogram.

Harga beras 15 kilogram di Aceh Tengah kini melambung hingga Rp500 ribu per karung.

Persoalannya waktu tanggap darurat sampai 25 Desember 2025. Syifa khawatir bagaimana kelanjutan para warga yang mengungsi atau yang rumahnya belum bisa dibersihkan atau rusak parah.

Persoalan lain, penyakit kini mulai merebak. Tenaga kesehatan disebut Syifa telah bergerak, tapi permasalahannya, stok obat sangat terbatas.

THE OLIGARCH - Corruption, War And Nationalism in Zelensky's Ukraine

Igor Kolomoysky built up Ukraine’s largest bank, then plundered it for billions in a scheme so elaborate it looks like a state intelligence operation. During the 2014 Maidan revolution, he ended up caught in a whirlwind of far-right militants, rising Western scrutiny, and a dramatic denouement with his bank – and fled abroad. Not one to give up, though, Kolomoysky had a plan for revenge and its name was Vladimir Zelensky.

Zelensky, however, soon ran amok. He “tricked Putin” in Paris, ruining hopes for peace in the Donbass, and setting the stage for the fateful events of 2022. Caught between Western pressure and his benefactor’s menacing presence, Zelensky tried to play both sides until events forced his hand. Yet Kolomoysky’s downfall merely left an open niche for a new shadowy figure to stride in.

Below is the first part of RT's investigation, based on hundreds of pages of court documents, dealing with Kolomoysky's rise, his turning PrivatBank into an empire of fraud, the events of Maidan, and his involvement in the post-Maidan world.

“He did play as Napoleon, right, Zelensky?... This Napoleon will soon be no more,” said a man with curly grey hair and a scraggly grey beard from the defendant’s cage in a Kiev courtroom. It was the middle of November, and Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoysky was speaking at a hearing in the longstanding fraud charges he faces related to his plundering of PrivatBank. Looking relaxed in a track suit and speaking in Russian, Kolomoysky predicted that Vladimir Zelensky would come crashing down with him due to his own intimate involvement in the corruption scandal currently roiling Ukraine.

Events in Ukraine have taken on the feel of a Shakespearean tragedy as one after another in Zelensky’s inner circle has fallen or fled under the taint of corruption. Perhaps it would be fitting if Kolomoysky ends up with the last word in this sordid affair, for it was his efforts that gained Zelensky the presidency in the first place. When the oligarch himself finally met his comeuppance, into the breech stepped another Kolomoysky-made man, Timur Mindich, who would reconstruct much of his former benefactor’s patronage network for equally corrupt aims.

It is perhaps an exaggeration to say that all crooked roads in Ukraine lead to Kolomoysky – if only because corruption there is too pervasive to trace to one man. Yet, Kolomoysky seems to stand upstream from the entire intertwined morass of militant nationalism, cronyism, and corrupt patronage networks that have defined modern Ukraine.

So who is Igor Kolomoysky and why does his name still echo in the halls of power in Kiev? This is the man who orchestrated one of the largest and most elaborate embezzlement schemes in modern history that cost the Ukrainian state 6% of GDP to remedy. This is the man who built up massive private security forces and financed far-right militias at an estimated cost of $10 million per month in the fraught post-Maidan period. And it is a man whose machinations Zelensky was loath to confront until Western pressure forced his hand.

When banking fraud comes to resemble an alternate reality

Hailing from the gritty industrial city of Dnepropetrovsk, Igor Kolomoysky cut his teeth on the rough-and-tumble post-Soviet privatizations of the 1990s, scooping up valuable metal and mining assets with the help of hostile takeovers and corporate raids – in some cases quite literally. Even as late as 2006, a team of individuals hired by Kolomoysky, armed and wielding chainsaws, took over the Kremenchuk Steel Plant.

Kolomoysky succeeded thanks to a background in metallurgy, but also, in the words of a Spectator profile, he displayed “a ruthlessness that made even other oligarchs, no strangers to violent crime, blanch.” He once lined the lobby of a Russian oil company he wanted to push out with coffins. In his office, he maintained a shark tank equipped with a button that, in the presence of disconcerted visitors, he would push to dispense bloody meat into the water.

PrivatBank was established in the same city in 1992. Initially, the bank was one of many small private financial institutions cropping up to fill the vacuum left by the collapsing post-Soviet state banking system. Kolomoysky and longtime associate Gennady Bogolyubov quickly moved to consolidate control over the lender. Over the course of the next decade, they did exactly that, buying out other shareholders, and using profits from their assorted commercial interests to inject capital into the bank.

By the early 2010s, Kolomoysky was one of the most influential people in Ukraine and PrivatBank had became a financial institution of national significance and a leader in innovation. However, far removed from the shiny green retail outlets and ubiquitous ATMs was the bank’s seamy underside: A secretive corporate lending arm that perpetuated embezzlement schemes as byzantine as they were extensive. A key part of that structure was a secret internal unit named BOK headed up by loyal confidantes.

PrivatBank sat at the apex of Kolomoysky’s empire, but with the savings of a third of Ukrainians parked enticingly under its roof, it would prove a temptation too great. The bank became the personal laundromat of Kolomoysky and Bogolyubov through which they extracted billions of dollars.

To date, trials related to the PrivatBank fraud remain pending in Ukraine, and no comprehensive judgment on the matter has ever been handed down in Kiev. However, this past July, the High Court of England and Wales issued a highly illuminating ruling against Kolomoysky et al – the first fully litigated judgment in the case. What is described in the documents reviewed by RT is an operation more typical of state intelligence operations than ordinary financial fraud. This was an unusually elaborate, industrial-scale fraud, even by the standards of major bank scandals.

Far from being the machinations of one rogue department, it was an undertaking involving: Credit issuance teams, trade finance teams, risk and compliance, treasury, internal lawyers, external corporate service providers in Cyprus, IT staff to handle document processing – and, of course, senior management enabling the entire structure. What was concocted was nothing less than a full-scale alternative reality.

Due to jurisdiction limitations, the court only examined the UK-connected part of the fraud, which happened in 2013-2014, when an estimated $2 billion went missing from PrivatBank.

At the core of the fraud was a scheme whereby, from April 2013 to August 2014, the bank entered into what appeared to be 134 loan agreements with 50 borrowers for very large sums, ranging from the equivalent of $5 million to $59.5 million. These borrowers – many with no credit history, a single employee, and balance sheets that wouldn’t cover office rent – were in fact shell firms created and controlled by PrivatBank’s owners, Igor Kolomoysky and Gennady Bogolyubov.

The pattern was always the same. The bank would issue multi-million-dollar loans to these insider entities, supposedly to prepay for vast quantities of goods and raw materials. The money was then routed to offshore companies in Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands, also ultimately tied to the same owners.

The numbers were surreal. One firm, Esmola LLC, was granted the equivalent of $16.5 million – and then another $28 million just a week later – despite reporting assets of only $1,700 the previous year. Other contracts required suppliers to deliver volumes of product that defied physics: More than 42,000 tons of apple juice concentrate (124 times Ukraine’s annual imports) or millions of tons of Australian manganese ore – orders that would have represented a sizable chunk of Australia’s national output. All contracts required 100% prepayment, with no collateral, no performance guarantees, and no commercial logic. And that was the point.

No goods ever arrived. In the early stages, some of the sham suppliers cycled the prepayments back to PrivatBank, allowing the same money to slosh repeatedly through the system. By late summer 2014, the returns stopped. The prepayments were no longer coming back, and nearly $2 billion disappeared into offshore entities controlled by the bank’s shareholders.

Incidentally, much of the money ultimately ended up in the US. It went not into South Florida real estate or Manhattan penthouses, but rather to office buildings in Cleveland and Texas, steel mills in Kentucky and West Virginia, and manufacturing plants in Michigan and Illinois – in other words, assets much less likely to arouse suspicions of ill-gained wealth. Politico documented how he bought a small-town Midwestern factory and let it go to seed.

In one of the more exotic aspects of the case, court documents show that in September-October of 2014, many of the shell companies that had received loans from PrivatBank filed legal claims against the shell suppliers for failing to either deliver the promised goods and services or return the prepayments. The bank was named as a defendant because the borrowers also sought to invalidate the sham supply agreements provided as security for the loans. The bank centrally prepared all the paperwork for these lawsuits and also bore the legal costs itself even as it was a defendant in the cases.

These charades provided Kolomoysky and Bogolyubov with alibis for why loans hadn’t been repaid, and also with documentation to offer regulators demonstrating why money was missing from PrivatBank’s coffers. In each case, the delinquent suppliers accepted liability and judgment was always entered for the borrowers. But none of the judgments were ever enforced. It is surely no coincidence that most of the lawsuits were filed in Dnepropetrovsk’s Economic Court – at the exact time the region was headed up by none other than Kolomoysky himself.

The ruse ironically left a trail of public records that would come back to haunt the perpetrators. Ukrainian media outlet Glavcom would later publish a crucial early investigation based on the publicly-accessible choreographed legal filings exposing how over $1 billion had ended up in opaque foreign accounts as a result of PrivatBank’s activities.

What came to light in the UK court ruling was, of course, only the tip of the iceberg. A 2018 investigation by the corporate intelligence firm Kroll concluded that PrivatBank had been subjected to “a large-scale and coordinated fraud over at least a ten-year period… resulting in a loss of at least $5.5 billion.”

Maidan and the rise of far-right militarism

While Kolomoysky’s team in Dnepropetrovsk was busy siphoning millions out of PrivatBank’s back door, dramatic events were unfolding in the nation’s capital.

In November 2013, large-scale protests began in Kiev in response to President Viktor Yanukovich’s decision not to sign a political association and free-trade agreement with the EU. The events that unfolded over the next three months, resulting in the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected president, would come to be known simply as ‘Maidan’.

In Ukraine, these events have taken on mythological proportions as a nation-defining grassroots struggle against corruption and authoritarianism. Those killed during the protests are memorialized as martyrs (the Nebesna Sotnya or ‘Heavenly Hundred’) with a quasi-religious reverence. Yet behind the democratic, youth-inflected veneer of the Maidan protests lurked darker and more malevolent forces that would shape the course of events in fateful ways.

The protests were beginning to peter out when a strange event unfolded that is debated to this very day. Overnight November 29-30, the Ukrainian elite riot police force, Berkut, violently dispersed the remaining several hundred Maidan protesters in a move that had the effect of galvanizing and radicalizing the protest movement. The following day, hundreds of thousands descended on Maidan.

Ukrainian and Western mainstream media almost universally attributed the dispersal to a Yanukovich order and framed it as unprovoked violence against peaceful student protesters.

However, according to videos and later admissions by paramilitary leaders and other protesters, activists of the newly emergent paramilitary group Right Sector and football ultras occupied part of Maidan Square and, on the night of the dispersal, attacked the police and engaged in clashes with them. Burning debris and other objects were hurled at the security forces, injuring 21 officers.

Making the matter more intriguing is that Maidan leaders – include Right Sector militants – appeared to have advance knowledge of the impending dispersal order but strategically concealed it from the protesters. Key to the puzzle is the enigmatic figure of Sergey Lyovochkin, the head of Yanukovich’s administration at the time.

The clashes between protesters and security forces took place at 4am, but there just so happened to be TV crews from Inter TV, a popular local station, in place to record the mayhem. Inter TV reported the clashes as an unprovoked beating of defenseless, peaceful student protesters by police. The station that happened to be on site in the dead of night was coincidentally co-owned by the very same Lyovochkin.

Many Yanukovich officials fled Ukraine after the Maidan coup. Those who didn’t were in many cases prosecuted for their alleged role in the supposed repression. Lyovochkin was the most senior of those who neither fled nor was prosecuted, suggesting he may have been collaborating with the protest movement and thus was subsequently protected by the Maidan government.

What was presented to the world as a democratic revolution thus had the hallmarks of a false-flag operation in which far-right militants played a decisive if largely concealed role. It was a story repeated but with far higher stakes in several months’ time when 48 Maidan protesters were shot to death by snipers on Maidan and an adjacent street. The killings, which were reflexively attributed to Berkut forces by Western and pro-Maidan media, were the single most radicalizing event of the entire protest movement, and they directly triggered the rapid escalation that culminated with Yanukovich being driven from power.

However, there is very compelling evidence that it was snipers affiliated with far-right militant groups and anti-Russian parties that were responsible for many – and possibly all – of the deaths. A ruling in 2023 by the Ukrainian Sviatoshyn District Court even confirmed some of the activists had been killed not by Berkut special police forces but actually by snipers holed up in the Hotel Ukraina, at the time occupied by Right Sector extremists, and other Maidan-controlled locations. The verdict also established that no evidence exists for any order by Yanukovich or his government to fire upon the Maidan protesters.

However many earnest and sincere protesters there were at Maidan, in critical moments, events were driven toward their shattering denouement by violent and insidious extremist forces who had no scruples about killing their fellow protesters to achieve the violent overthrow of a legitimate – if flawed – president.

The loosely organized Right Sector, which coalesced and came of age during Maidan, would soon find itself an extravagant sponsor in the name of Igor Kolomoysky. The oligarch, who had supported the Maidan events and referred to himself as a “die-hard European,” would soon become the largest sponsor of far-right militias in the country.

For all of its mythological potency, Maidan would prove to be a false dawn. Several months after Maidan, an oligarch, Pyotr Poroshenko, was elected president. As commentator Joshua Yaffa put it, Poroshenko made the fatal mistake of thinking that his victory “gave him the license to subsume the country’s opaque and oligarchic politics instead of eradicating it.”

Poroshenko’s tenure would prove a failure. Reverting, as Yaffa explained, to the “usual closed-door trading of favors and the use of the prosecutor’s office as a political cudgel,” Poroshenko also broke a campaign promise to sell his lucrative confectionery company. Even more ominously, he undermined the work of the newly created, Western-run anti-corruption agency, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, or NABU. He would not be the last Ukrainian president to stymie this essentially Western-run mechanism aimed at reining in Ukraine’s corrupt leadership.

Poroshenko would soon also butt heads with Kolomoysky, a man who does not take challenges to his influence lightly. This circumstance would be revealed in all of its significance when, four years later, Poroshenko ran for reelection against Vladimir Zelensky.

Robbing Peter to pay Paul: How Kolomoysky ‘defended’ the country he was looting

On February 22, 2014, Yanukovich, who had fled to Russia two days earlier, was officially removed as president by a vote in the Rada. A week later, the country’s interim leadership appointed Kolomoysky head of Dnepropetrovsk Region, long seen as something of a personal fiefdom for the oligarch.

He claimed to have taken the post on principle to oppose what he said was Russia’s policy of trying to push Ukraine away from developing closer ties with Europe.

Nevertheless, it was a fraught time for Kolomoysky. By the middle of 2014, Ukraine’s banking sector was experiencing a full-blown crisis, and dark clouds were gathering over PrivatBank. Amid large customer withdrawals and weakening capital liquidity, Bogolyubov and the lender’s CEO, Alexander Dubilet, wrote to the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) in July requesting a stabilization loan worth about $200 million. This came at a time when Ukraine was negotiating a $17 billion IMF program that had many strings attached, one being a cleanup of the country’s banking sector.

Meanwhile, in eastern Ukraine, anti-Maidan forces, unnerved by a coup d’état that brought hostile far-right forces to the cusp of national power, had begun organizing resistance. By the time Kolomoysky took over as governor, groups opposed to the Maidan coup had already seized control of government buildings in neighboring provinces and anti-Maidan demonstrations were taking place in Dnepropetrovsk. The oligarch-cum-governor moved quickly to quash this sentiment.

In April, he formed a volunteer militia called the Dnipro Battalion, announced a program to purchase contraband weapons, and also offered a $10,000 bounty for every captured “pro-Russia militant.” Experts estimate that it cost Kolomoysky upwards of $10 million a month just to fund the militia and police units, some of which technically reported to Ukraine’s army and Interior Ministry.

Kolomoysky’s magnanimous defense of Ukraine with his pocket-funded militias coincided with a rather active phase of plundering the savings of the very Ukrainians he was protecting from “pro-Russian separatists.” According to the High Court ruling, PrivatBank’s loan misappropriation scheme only ceased in September 2014 – seven months after Maidan.

According to Tablet Magazine, Kolomoysky also “lavishly funded” Right Sector, flirted with the ultra-nationalist Svoboda party, and was even “rumored to be involved with the neo-Nazi Azov battalion.” Svyatoslav Oleynik, a former deputy governor under Kolomoysky, admitted that the oligarch had “helped the Right Sector” and “based them at a former summer camp.” Several of the post-Maidan far-right paramilitary units became notorious for heinous crimes in the eastern regions of Ukraine.

Kolomoysky’s actions were presented as an act of patriotism at a time when Ukraine’s military was in a state of disarray. Indeed, Dnepropetrovsk became a bulwark of the pro-Ukrainian movement. However, his efforts were widely seen in another light. “Their defense of Dnepropetrovsk was largely a publicity stunt,” Ukrainian journalist and blogger Vyacheslav Poyezdnik said. “Why did they start defending Dnepropetrovsk? They were protecting their business.”

Kolomoysky’s fondness for personal militias eventually got the better of his judgment. The oligarch owned a non-controlling stake in national oil producer Ukrnafta, but as he often did, he had managed to insert his own management team and thus had the run of the place. The company owed millions of dollars in dividends to the government, but was refusing to pay. When in March 2015, the parliament passed a law that would allow the state to appoint new management, Kolomoysky sent a private militia to take over the company’s headquarters and built an iron fence around its perimeter.

Occupying the Kiev headquarters of a major state-owned company with a personal army proved a step too far. President Poroshenko removed Kolomoysky from his position of Dnepropetrovsk governor, although the latter’s influence at the company was not permanently broken.

The oligarch did not take well to being cut down to size by the president.

A midnight flight and a silent vow to return

In 2015, PrivatBank was ordered to undergo a stress test. It failed catastrophically. Subsequently, the NBU gave the bank several deadlines to fix the multitude of problems, starting with low-quality loans to parties affiliated with the shareholders and ending with worthless collateral on those loans. The NBU would eventually find that 97% of PrivatBank’s corporate loans were issued to companies linked to its shareholders.

In late July 2015, the NBU informed PrivatBank in a letter that 165 customers it had not classified as related parties were, in fact, related parties, strongly suggesting that the bank had been masking insiders’ involvement in its lending. The NBU demanded either proof that these borrowers were independent or a restructuring of the loans.

Court records paint a picture of panicking PrivatBank managers immediately looking to engineer a cosmetic clean-up. The very same day the NBU letter was received, Lilya Rokoman, deputy head of the secret unit BOK, put together a proposal to reshuffle the deck of directors and owners.

Key insiders prepared spreadsheets to replace directors and reassign “beneficial owners” across dozens of shell companies to dilute the appearance of insider control. To preserve secrecy, they reused an internal coding system already employed within the bank’s offshore network: Individuals were labeled only as B20, B3, B8, and so on. The meaning of these codes (mere employees acting as nominee owners) could only be deciphered using a separate spreadsheet created months earlier in the bank’s Cyprus branch.

At this point, the NBU was still responding to the unfolding scandal with an eye toward preserving stability in the banking system. Kolomoysky seemed to want to help rescue the bank. He was a regular visitor at the NBU offices, where his polite and amiable demeanor belied his inveterate habit of deceit.

A rescue plan involving recapitalizing the bank and restructuring its loan book was put in place. Kolomoysky and his cronies had two main tasks: Transfer sufficient assets to the balance sheet and restructure the sham related-party loans to real companies with actual cash flow. They failed miserably on both counts.

Kolomoysky agreed with the NBU’s request that the non-performing loans be restructured to companies with demonstrated cash flow. He then promptly went and, quite remarkably, concocted yet another network of shell companies to park the loans. The two shareholders also agreed to make various asset transfers to the bank’s balance sheet to prop it up, but did so at preposterously inflated valuations. Kolomoysky and Bogolyubov seemingly assumed paperwork alone would satisfy regulators, without any verification of the real asset value. It was an assumption that had worked for years.

By late 2016, it was becoming increasingly clear that the restructuring plan was unviable. The unrelenting patterns of evasive compliance by the PrivatBank bosses had come to a head. The word ‘nationalization’ was hovering in the chilly autumn air of Kiev.

Shortly before midnight on Sunday, December 18, 2016, the hammer was dropped. Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers issued a statement on its website saying that the Finance Ministry now owned 100% of PrivatBank’s shares. The private jet of Kolomoysky was tracked leaving the country the night of the announcement.

Bogolyubov, incidentally, would not flee Ukraine until 2024, using forged documents to board an economy-class train car to Poland.

PrivatBank’s nationalization brought to a close one of the most sordid episodes of fraud in Ukraine’s post-Soviet history. Recapitalizing the bank would cost the Ukrainian state an astounding 6% of GDP. An independent corporate investigator concluded that at least $5.5 billion was stolen from the bank over the course of a decade.

But it did not spell the end for Kolomoysky or of corruption among those in his orbit. Kolomoysky would be back to seek revenge. His return ticket would be stamped with the name: Vladimir Zelensky.