Godson, Energoatom and Russia. How Derkach helped Moscow seize the Ukrainian energy sector

The NABU's investigation into corruption around the state-owned Energoatom company has revealed that Russian agent Andriy Derkach or people close to him still have influence over the Ukrainian energy sector. In particular, former Minister of Justice Herman Halushchenko, according to MP Yaroslav Zheleznyak.

Derkach is a pro-Russian politician, former MP from the Party of Regions, currently deprived of Ukrainian citizenship.

In 2006-2007, he headed the state-owned Energoatom. He is now a Russian senator from Astrakhan Oblast and a member of the Security and Defense Committee of the Federation Council.

And in Ukraine, as head of Energoatom, Derkach facilitated Russian influence on Ukrainian nuclear energy at the state level. LIGA.net publishes a chapter from the book "The First Energy War," which describes these events. The book is written by historian Yevhen Mochalov and journalist Vitaliy Kryzhevsky, came out in 2025 by Vihola Publishing House. It describes systematic attempts by Russia to seize Ukraine's energy, oil and gas industries since the first days of independence.

The text is published with slight abbreviations.

Kinder surprise for Kuchma's godson

It was probably [Sergei] Kiriyenko's first foreign visit to Ukraine. [We're talking about the head of Rosatom in 2005, editor's note] "We had a difficult conversation for two days. They were drinking our blood," Ivan Plachkov (Minister of Energy in 1999 and 2005-2006 – ed.) recalls. Traditionally, Kiriyenko came to raise the price of fuel. According to Plachkov, these conversations were never about geopolitics. [Anatoly] Chubais and Kiriyenko always operated with calculations, economic arguments about the cost and market conditions.

At the same time, both sides understood why the Russians were pressing. Ukraine was on a course toward European integration, President Yushchenko was preparing to take historic steps toward NATO, and Ukraine was seeking to become part of the EU energy system. According to Plachkov, a strategic agreement on this path had been reached the day before, during Viktor Yushchenko's meeting with French President Jacques Chirac in Paris.

The price of Russian nuclear fuel and the cost of spent fuel removal were rising every year. On US Independence Day, July 4, 2007, Kiriyenko flew back to Kyiv.

This time, he met with Andriy Derkach, president of Energoatom and CEO of the Ukrautoprom concern, under whose roof the Yanukovych government had concentrated all the major assets of Ukraine's nuclear industry, including uranium ore mining, a few months ago. An unprecedented increase. The entire nuclear energy complex was brought under one roof and with one governor.

Derkach is the son of Leonid Derkach, a former KGB officer and head of the Security Service of Ukraine in 1998-2001. He was baptized by President Kuchma himself. We were able to confirm this information from people close to the Derkach family. In his dispatches to the State Department, U.S. Ambassador William Taylor also recognized the religious and family ties between Kuchma and Derkach. Derkach himself once publicly admitted that he "sat on his [Kuchma's] lap."

In 2020, the U.S. Treasury Department will officially reveal another role for Derkach – that of a Russian intelligence agent. The report will state that he was recruited "more than a decade ago," i.e., somewhere in the second half of the noughties. It would take the SBU two more years and the appearance of the Russian military at the ZNPP and Chornobyl NPP to name Derkach as the head of the GRU's "agent network."

This raises a question to which we are not yet ready to give a reasoned answer: was Derkach already an agent of Russian intelligence at the meeting with Kiriyenko on June 4, 2007? The results of those negotiations lead to an affirmative conclusion. The "protocol" on partnership and cooperation signed at the meeting was not encouraging.

The document was signed by Andriy Derkach, CEO of Ukrautoprom, President of Energoatom, and Serhiy Kiriyenko, Head of Rosatom.

The parties agreed to "explore the possibility of establishing joint ventures in the field of uranium mining and enrichment, as well as nuclear fuel production at enterprises in Ukraine and Russia."

Yushchenko instructed the Prosecutor General's Office and the National Security and Defense Council to study the protocol between Rosatom and Ukrautoprom. The PGO found that it contradicted Ukrainian law. On the same day, a decree was published on the website of the Presidential Secretariat suspending the government's resolution on the creation of Ukratomprom headed by Derkach. Yushchenko appealed to the Constitutional Court to recognize the creation of the concern as unconstitutional.

Boyko's Energy Ministry resisted in every way possible. Konstantin Borodin, Boyko's spokesman and longtime companion in office, said that Yushchenko's decree could not be implemented and that Ukratomprom would continue to operate. This was one of many demarches by Yanukovych's government officials that Yushchenko could not deal with. "Ukratomprom even sued the Presidential Secretariat and demanded that the decree be canceled. In November 2007, the Constitutional Court refused to hear the case.

"Ukratomprom was liquidated only in December 2007 after Yanukovych and Boyko lost their positions and a month before the Russian agent lost his seat.

Derkach was practically a model oligarch. Of course, he was more modest than the Ukrainian financial and industrial peloton [the main group of participants in cycling, ed. note] He owned the ERA TV channel, which shared the airwaves with the First National Channel, and the ERA radio station. He also controlled a fairly reputable newspaper, the Kyiv Telegraph.

In February 2008, Focus experts estimated the politician's net worth at $162 million, putting him at 119th place in the ranking of the richest Ukrainians. He was credited with interests in the energy sector, particularly in the oil business. However, Derkach's latest declaration for 2020 is almost empty. Apart from the more than one-meter-high icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, there are no assets in the declaration.

In the late 1990s, Derkach was a member of the supervisory board of Ukrnaftoproduct, a state-owned company that united regional and municipal oil products companies that controlled Soviet-era gas stations, oil depots, and transshipment facilities. Almost all of the gas station chains known to Ukrainians grew up on the basis of these regional and municipal oil products. Derkach is credited with an interest in Kyivmisknefteprodukt, although no evidence of this has been found.

A person who worked with him claims that he never expressed any ideological pro-Russianism, although he did not hide his closeness to the ROC clergy. He was most interested in money. Few heads of state-owned energy monopolies have managed to appear in so many anti-corruption investigative journalistic headlines in such a short time.

Another important characteristic of Derkach is his phenomenal conflictuality. Usually, it was after some kind of trick against his recent partners. "There were no people with whom he did not quarrel. Including his godfather," says our source.

Kiriyenko plant

Derkach is a person who not only tried to consolidate the entire nuclear industry of Ukraine and sew it into structures invented in the Kremlin. He helped create the information myth about the construction of a Russian nuclear fuel plant. This plant became a real Kafkaesque wanderlust. Hundreds of mentions, dozens of visits and incomprehensible signings, which, of course, will never end. And it will continue with a short break from 2006 to 2013.

In 2011, Kiriyenko will fly to Ukraine again. "Kiriyenko arrived in Kyiv on the eve of May holidays. Officially, he was negotiating the construction of a nuclear fuel plant in Ukraine," reads the summary of the interview on Ekonomichna Pravda.

Boris Nemtsov called Kiriyenko a cold computer man. Serhiy Liamets, the author of that interview on Ekonomichna Pravda, gave a similar characterization: "Smart, closed-minded, a pathos of great power and big money, but everyone was like that back then. For us, it was an image interview. We didn't get any insight, and we could hardly have." We just wandered around the mythical plant.

The narrative offered by the Russians was based on a positive reinterpretation of the idea of diversification. They said: "You don't need the Americans. Their fuel is expensive, maybe even unreliable for diversification. You have to build your own. But you can't do it alone. So we will help you as brothers." This left a rather poor design, where Russian fuel had to compete with fuel from a Russian plant in Ukraine. Rosatom's representative in Ukraine, Alexander Merten, in an interview with the same Ekonomichna Pravda, clearly articulated this concept of Russian energy manipulation: "We believe that diversification is necessary, and this is laid down in Ukraine's long-term energy strategy. But in terms of diversification, the main role will be played by our own production, which is why we have announced a tender for the construction of our own nuclear fuel production plant." "Own" means Russian. That is, a joint venture (JV).

After analyzing all the statements about a nuclear fuel plant in Ukraine, whether built by Russia or financed by Russia, there is a strong feeling that Ukrainians were deceived and that no one was planning any construction even in this false form. Yanukovych's government officials were quite comfortable with this format of endless promises. As long as the super-projects were being drawn up, they could confidently draw corrupt billions from operating expenses.

All of these deceptive maneuvers were traditionally publicly cemented by negotiations and signings. In July 2012, at a meeting between Putin and Yanukovych, it was decided, among other things, to establish two Ukrainian-Russian joint ventures in the field of power engineering and the nuclear fuel cycle.

Just look at the words of Rosatom in 2012: "The main issue now is the conclusion of an agreement with an international appraiser and the valuation of the assets of the proposed enterprises that will be part of the JV. The Russian side has already signed the agreement with the appraiser, and we are waiting for the Ukrainian side to sign it, after which the appraiser will start performing his duties." This is a perfect example of how Russia created a framework in which it hid real actions behind vague wording. And it emphasized that it had already done everything. The ball is systematically on the side of Ukrainians. But in fact, it is already 2012, at least the eighth year of promises to build the plant, and construction is at the stage of selecting an appraiser.

In 2006-2013, the Russian plant completely pushed out of the political and media field the idea of an American plant, which was born first in 1995 and was supposed to be a kind of satisfaction for nuclear disarmament. More than ten years later, there was no time for satisfaction.