image copyrightGetty Images
Anti-corruption authorities of Ukraine in a high-profile case called “Carthage” constantly mention the Khimprom group, with which, according to detectives, Ukrainian law enforcement officials were associated. They are accused of protecting call centers, selling drugs, counterfeiting and other crimes.
This is an adapted translation of material from a correspondent of the BBC Ukrainian Service. The original in Ukrainian can be read here.
The essence of the suspicions is that some officials from the office of the Prosecutor General, the SBU and the National Police allegedly received bribes in exchange for non-interference in the activities of criminal structures and blocking investigations in such cases.
NABU states that the recently released materials are just the beginning and that “most of the iceberg still remains under water.”
A drug cartel, a transnational criminal syndicate, a drug corporation, a network - all this is about Khimprom, which operates in many countries of the former USSR and Europe; According to NABU, he entered Ukraine “thanks” to those who were supposed to fight him.
We collected information about the activities of this group over the past 10 years, and also found out how law enforcement officers fought it and what came of it.
History of appearance
As NABU reported in its materials on the Carthage case, the Khimprom company appeared no later than 2012 in the Russian Bashkortostan, in the city of Sterlitamak.
It is called the “city of big chemistry”, since many chemical and petrochemical enterprises have been located there since Soviet times.
End of Most Popular
This extension will help if you have difficulties accessing the BBC Russian Service website.
Download extension
End of story Chrome browser extension - link
The founder of Khimprom is called 37-year-old Yegor Burkin.
In Russia between 2010 and 2012, there were hundreds of small, unrelated groups operating on the darknet (a hidden part of the Internet that can only be accessed through special software) that traded narcotic substances.
Russian media wrote that Burkin was initially one of the regional operators of such sales. Subsequently, these groups came under a single leadership. After some time, the group’s activities spread from Russia to Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania and other countries.
At the first stage, Yegor Burkin and several of his accomplices produced synthetic drugs, including spice (smoking mixtures), mephedrone and alpha-PVP. To circumvent the prohibitions, they changed the structure of known substances, creating new compounds that were not yet included in the lists of prohibited substances.
The cartel built its business on synthetic cannabinoids, selling them in Russia and many other countries, including Ukraine.
The materials of NABU and SAP on the Carthage case say that all the work of Khimprom was digitized, and drug distribution networks were organized through online platforms. The secret “offices” worked anonymously: no one knew where the curator was, who were the accountants, and who were the chemists making the substances.
Photo by National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine
In February 2017, Russian media disseminated a statement by the press secretary of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation, Irina Volk, that “the illegal activities of the international drug syndicate Khimprom in Russia have been suppressed.”
According to her, Khimprom’s annual turnover at that time was more than two billion rubles. Then 67 members of the group were detained, and 47 of them, as stated by the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, were citizens of Ukraine. In total, at least a thousand people were involved in the syndicate’s network in different countries.
After being charged, Burkin and his accomplices moved to Ukraine to avoid punishment.
Ukraine: was there a “defeat” of Khimprom?
In Ukraine, Burkin continued to lead the drug business operating in the former Soviet republics and EU countries; Here he also established the production and sale of synthetic drugs, law enforcement officials say.
The international organization Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) published a report in 2024 that revealed details of Khimprom’s activities in Ukraine.
This report stated that the syndicate controlled the popular online marketplace RuTOR, which became the successor to the Russian portal Hydra. Many Ukrainian dealers also traded on this site, without even suspecting that they were actually working for Khimprom, the researchers note.
In particular, experts believed that Khimprom could be behind both legal and illegal actions aimed at eliminating competitors. They include, for example, the transfer of information about the activities of competitors’ drug laboratories to local police departments.
GI-TOC researcher Ruggero Scaturro noted that after the start of a full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine, supply routes for components for the production of synthetic drugs passed near the combat zone, and also that drugs were supplied to the front line.
Meanwhile, already in 2019, the SBU and the National Police reported “the defeat of the Ukrainian branch of the Russian syndicate Khimprom.”
Law enforcement officers claimed that there were no analogues to their special operation in the history of Ukraine.
Former first deputy chairman of the SBU Pavel Demchyna said that during that operation, law enforcement officers conducted about 80 searches and detained about 20 representatives of the top members of the criminal group.
“The most active members of this organization have been detained. There are a number of persons who are currently outside Ukraine. With the help of our foreign colleagues, we will demand their extradition and prosecution,” Pavel Demchina said almost seven years ago.
However, as Yuriy Lutsenko, who was the Prosecutor General in those years, recently said, all detainees were released from the pre-trial detention center by decision of the courts; the preventive measures were not extended for anyone.
Law enforcement officers worked on the drug syndicate for more than a year. According to the then Prosecutor General’s Office, Khimprom had been selling synthetic drugs through structures in Ukraine for about four years.
“To make it clear what the discipline was. Some members of the criminal organization today do not have fingers on their hands. For any violation of the established rules of secrecy, unauthorized contacts, or the use of personal mobile phones in the workplace, specially trained people came and simply cut off fingers,” Demchin spoke about the methods of work of Khimprom.
Also in 2019, Yegor Burkin fled from Ukraine to Mexico and from there, according to law enforcement officers, he ran his business. He was able to leave Ukraine allegedly thanks to a passport of a citizen of Moldova with a different last name.
Burkina's explanations
In subsequent years, law enforcement officials reported the discovery of drug laboratories, the detention of some members of the group, and the imposition of sanctions against individuals allegedly associated with Khimprom.
But even then, statements were heard from former representatives of law enforcement agencies that in the structures of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Security Service of Ukraine and other departments there were people who could “protect” the business of Khimprom.
In particular, two years after loud statements about the “defeat of Khimprom,” former Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Alexander Gogilashvili spoke about this in an interview with Babel.
“Khimprom, which has settled here, are Russian citizens who produce and sell amphetamine in huge quantities. If we had been able to detain Khimprom, we would have replaced amphetamine by 60% in Ukraine. But all this is intertwined: various organizations and people provided protection and received money. Starting with the National Police, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the prosecutor’s office, the SBU, etc.,” Gogilashvili said in 2021.
In December 2023, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky imposed sanctions against six people associated with the drug cartel, and, in particular, against Yegor Burkin.
According to sanctions documents published on the presidential website, all six had Russian passports and, at the same time, Ukrainian passports or residence permits or refugee status, issued in 2014–2016. At that time, Burkin, in addition to a passport of a citizen of Ukraine with the surname Levchenko, also had foreign passports of Moldova and Lithuania with other surnames.
At the same time, in 2023, the Security Service of Ukraine reported on its successes in the fight against the syndicate: it conducted a number of special operations, detained and charged 89 drug dealers, 34 participants received real prison sentences. In addition, it closed drug laboratories and prevented “the creation of cross-border supply channels for prohibited substances into the EU.”
Reporting on the successes, the SBU indicated that Khimprom allegedly acted “under the coordination of the Russian special services.”
Burkin himself, while in Mexico, stated in the fall of 2023 that the accusations against him were unfounded.
An interview with him was done by Odessa blogger Stas Dombrovsky, who later admitted that he participated in Burkina’s PR campaign.
His statements were relayed by Ukrainian media. However, the original interview, recorded in Mexico, disappeared from the Internet after a conflict arose between Dombrowski and Burkin.
Burkin denied accusations of drug trafficking and other criminal activities and claimed that he was a businessman whose reputation was being tried to be destroyed by competitors.
“By the way, I talked about my business earlier; it is focused exclusively in the IT sector. This is a network of companies in different countries. We are engaged in lead generation - in simple terms, attracting clients for our clients. We attract traffic to a variety of sites, mainly betting and casinos. We also engage in traffic arbitrage - for small companies involved in lead generation, we act as a “filter” - we resell the traffic they generate to clients. And so on,” he explained.
At the same time, Egor Burkin, who was presented in the Ukrainian media as Egor Levchenko, promoted the campaign “Catch a huckster - get cash!”
He promised bonuses to those who would help the police detain drug dealers or expose laboratories. Singers and TV presenters even participated in this promotional campaign.
In 2024–2025, reports of exposure of drug traffickers decreased. From the materials released by NABU and SAP in November of this year, it follows that it was during this period, hiding in Mexico, that the leader of Khimprom, who already had the nickname “Mexican,” tried to resume and expand the activities of the syndicate with the help of officials in Ukrainian law enforcement agencies and local criminals.
And, according to NABU, such recruitment has yielded results.
U420 and "roofs"
In March 2026, investigative journalists from Bihus.Info reported that an examination found a synthetic cannabinoid in the products of the U420 chain, which positioned its stores as “cafe shops” and “souvenir shops” with cannabidiol (CBD)-based products.
The name of the network speaks for itself: U is the first letter of the words Ukraine or United, 420 is a slang designation associated with the culture of marijuana use.
photo copyrightNational Police of Ukraine
After NABU published materials about the activities of U420 in early November, the National Police described how they had been opposing it since 2025 until they completely liquidated it in April 2026.
Deputy Head of the National Police Andrey Nebitov said on Facebook that law enforcement officers documented the criminal activities of the cartel in Ukraine, despite threats and attempts at bribery, from September 2025 to April 2026.
“This post is a “memory tablet.” So that no one forgets how employees of the DBN, GSU, DKR (Department for Combating Drug Crime, the Main Investigation Directorate and the Department of Criminal Investigation - BBC), the National Police persistently documented the crimes of Khimprom, despite threats to kill their families, attempts to bribe millions of dollars, media attacks,” he emphasized after NABU reported the details of Khimprom’s “cooperation” with law enforcement officers.
According to Nebitov, Khimprom tried to prevent the inclusion of certain synthetic drugs in the list of prohibited drugs, and the police, on the contrary, opposed this. Back in September 2025, she contacted the Ministry of Health with a request to add the substance to the list of prohibited substances, and in February 2026, after bureaucratic procedures, this ban came into force.
According to the deputy head of the National Police, during the investigative actions, law enforcement officers were exposed to danger: they were threatened with “pouring acid, setting fire, shooting at the windows with a machine gun, dropping explosives, or crashing a truck into the opponents’ yard.”
According to him, in April 2026, “all 105 U420 drug stores were destroyed to the ground.” Nebitov claims that not a single store has resumed operations. According to him, then they managed to detain 23 participants in the criminal network. At the moment, three have already been convicted, says Nebitov.
In July of this year, he said, a joint international operation took place in Kazakhstan, during which several dozen members of the group were detained, nine persons involved were informed of suspicion, among them again Yegor Burkin. And in early August he was once again put on the international wanted list.
However, NABU believes that at the same time, high-ranking officials received millions in bribes in cryptocurrency for protecting call centers and drug networks.
That is, while some units of the National Police detained someone and carried out international operations, certain officials of the police and other law enforcement agencies provided “roof” for the cartel.
Fraudulent call centers and other shady businesses. And that's not all
The international organization Global Initiative to Combat Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) names Khimprom as one of the three largest networks controlling the fraudulent call center industry in Ukraine.
At least, such assessments were made in April of this year, when GI-TOC published a detailed study on the activities of call centers entitled “Connected Kyiv: the phenomenon of fraudulent call centers in Ukraine.”
The authors note that this activity was a logical repurposing of the network, originally created to service orders on the drug market. Subsequently, the group used this experience, technical base and employees to launch financial fraud.
That same month, the Prosecutor General's office announced the discovery of "large-scale activities of the Khimprom criminal group" - fraudulent "offices" that deceived people by telephone in Ukraine and dozens of other countries.
“In the course of suppressing the activities of illegal call centers, more than 70 searches were carried out. More than 200 pieces of computer and server equipment, mobile phones, electronic media, documents and premium cars were seized. “At least 50 episodes of fraud against 47 citizens of European Union countries have been documented,” the prosecutor’s office said then.
At that time, according to GI-TOC researchers, Khimprom had already been managing one of the largest networks of call centers in Ukraine for several years.
NABU is also talking about this. In materials about Operation Carthage released in early November, the bureau indicated that Yegor Burkin’s group controlled at least 52 fraudulent “offices”, which employed about 2.7 thousand people. Their activities were protected by high-ranking officials in law enforcement agencies - the SBU, the National Police and the office of the Prosecutor General.
In addition to call centers, NABU reported on other types of shadow activities of Khimprom - the illegal production of counterfeit cigarettes, counterfeiting foreign currency.
“I understand that after watching the video of the second stage of Operation Carthage, many of you might have one very simple, almost physical desire - to go and wash,” wrote the head of the NABU detective group, Alexander Abakumov, on Facebook, warning: “What you saw is just the tip of the iceberg.”
Find out more
Video playlist
End Video playlist
