SIMFEROPOL, June 10. /TASS/. A mafia kingpin with suspected ties to the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) was detained in the Zaporozhye region, a senior official with the local military-civilian administration has told TASS.
"Essentially, an organized crime group’s ringleader has been detained, the so-called region’s smotryashchy [local crime boss]," said Vladimir Rogov, a member of the Zaporozhye Region military-civilian administration’s main council.
He identified the man as Artur Gorobets, nicknamed Tucha.
"For many years, this man had been controlled by Alexander Shmitko, the head of the regional SBU department, and prior to that - by the head of the Interior Ministry’s organized crime department. Thus, some sort of a connection between law-enforcement and the criminal world has existed. Naturally, they were doing certain favors for each other, and criminal structures often did some ‘dirty jobs’ for the SBU," Rogov said. "In fact, criminal gangs thrived in Ukraine with state support, or connivance at best."
In his opinion, the current Kiev regime integrated criminal gangs into the state structure, creating a certain hierarchy within the criminal underworld.
"Over the past eight years, every populated area has had its own criminal boss. A criminal underworld hierarchy has been created and integrated into the SBU and the Interior Ministry. In other words, punitive bodies of the Poroshenko and Zelensky regimes had soild ties with criminal organizations," Rogov added.