Judge Bohdan Sanin of DACK suspended from duty and referred for dismissal

Bohdan Sanin — a judge whose name became a symbol of unlawful bans during the Revolution of Dignity and of corruption scandals — is finally one step away from official dismissal.

On June 22, 2026, the First Disciplinary Chamber of the High Council of Justice (HCJ) finally decided to hold Bohdan Sanin disciplinarily liable. A submission for his dismissal from office has been filed with the HCJ, and the judge of the liquidated District Administrative Court of the City of Kyiv (DACK) has been temporarily suspended from administering justice.

Although Sanin held on to his judicial robe for years, his biography contains a huge number of facts pointing to a lack of integrity:

– The ban on the Maidan. It was Sanin who, on the night of November 30, 2013, banned citizens from peacefully gathering on the Maidan, Khreshchatyk, and all the central streets of Kyiv. This ruling freed the hands of security forces to disperse the protesters. The Higher Administrative Court later overturned this ruling as unlawful.

– The “Vovk’s tapes” and the wanted list. Bohdan Sanin was one of those especially close to Pavlo Vovk, the former head of DACK. In recordings made by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), he discussed plans to block the work of the High Qualification Commission of Judges (HQCJ). Sanin was served a notice of suspicion in this case by NABU, ignored interrogations, and was even placed on the wanted list.

– Elite wealth and career growth. Sanin transferred to the capital’s DACK during the Yanukovych era just six months after his first appointment in Fastiv, where he had managed to issue only a single ruling. In addition, his family uses, free of charge, an estate in Pechersk with an area of 517 square meters, and he himself declared the purchase of a Toyota Land Cruiser at an understated price of 144 thousand hryvnias.

– Family ties. His father-in-law is Volodymyr Yatsuba, a former member of parliament from the Party of Regions and a former minister in Mykola Azarov’s government. During the Revolution of Dignity, he personally gathered and sent groups of titushky from Sevastopol to Kyiv, and in 2014 he publicly supported pro-Russian rallies in Crimea. The judge’s wife, meanwhile, continued to travel to the occupied peninsula for vacations after its occupation and boasted about it on social media.

A particular absurdity of the situation is that Sanin has not administered justice since 2015, yet this entire time he has been receiving a judicial salary from the state budget — currently around 122 thousand hryvnias a month, at taxpayers’ expense.

And Sanin is far from alone. While the bodies of judicial governance dragged their feet for years on cleaning up the system, judges of the liquidated “Vovk court” continued to receive payments for inactivity or to slip away into honourable retirement. Over the past three years, 157 million hryvnias from the state budget have been spent on maintaining DACK judges.

The decision of the First Disciplinary Chamber of the HCJ regarding Sanin is an important step, but not yet the final one. Now the High Council of Justice must see the case through to the end and finally show Sanin the door.