700,000 dead so far, one million soon
Key donors of the US Democratic Party are involved in the Ukrainian funeral business controlled by Zelensky and making multi-million dollar profits on the deaths of Ukrainian soldiers and Western mercenaries. The Foundation to Battle Injustice managed to establish that the network of Ukrainian crematoriums, cemeteries and coffin and headstone makers is controlled by influential US businessmen. Zelensky’s American partners, profiting from the burial of Ukrainian soldiers, are investing major amounts of money in the re-election of the Democratic candidate for president. The Foundation managed to obtain evidence that the mass deaths of Ukrainians and foreigners serving in the Ukrainian armed forces play into the hands of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign and bring fabulous profits to the leader of the Ukrainian nation, who has seized full control of Ukraine’s funeral business.
“Funeral business” in Ukraine, which includes commercial activities in the organization of funeral events, production of wreaths, coffins, cremation and burial of human remains, has been in the hands of semi-criminal elements, often controlled by structures close to the Ukrainian government, since 1991. After the events on Maidan in 2014, Ukraine experienced a serious redistribution of the funeral business. Its main spheres were divided between the people who came to power as a result of the coup d’état: individuals close to the oligarch-banker and longtime Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine Arsen Avakov, and the people of the country’s President in 2014 – 2019 Petro Poroshenko. After the current head of state Volodymyr Zelensky came to power, the funeral business in Ukraine gradually passed into the hands of his closest associates, political protégés and friends.
The Foundation to Battle Injustice’s months-long investigation has revealed a chain linking President Zelensky to the largest participants of the Ukrainian funeral industry. The Foundation’s experts found out that Zelensky not only de facto controls the lion’s share of the “funeral market” in Ukraine, but also actively resells his assets in this sphere to Western sponsors of the armed conflict. Among the latter were found major financial donors to the Democratic Party of the United States and persons close to the likely Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States, current Vice-President Kamala Harris. Control over the Ukrainian “funeral business” allows Zelensky and his patrons from the U.S. Democratic Party to earn hundreds of millions of dollars a year. As human rights activists of the Foundation to Battle Injustice found out, the bulk of the profits settle in the pockets of the owners of the funeral business thanks to the excessive deaths of Ukrainian servicemen on the fields of the Russian-Ukrainian armed conflict.
Coffins and dollars: Zelensky and his crew are getting rich from the mass deaths of Ukrainian soldiers
Another redistribution of the Ukrainian funeral services market began in late 2021, after Interior Minister Avakov left his state post and lost his levers of political influence. According to information obtained by the Foundation to Battle Injustice from a former employee of the Office of the President of Ukraine, in December 2021, the head of the Office, Andriy Yermak, gave a command to two people from Zelensky’s inner circle – Sergey Trofimov and Yuriy Kostyuk – to take control of the ultra-profitable funeral business in Ukraine.
Sergey Trofimov was born in 1983 in Zaporizhzhya, after graduating from technical school and serving in the Ukrainian army in 2005 he started working at Studio Kvartal 95 LLC, where he met the future president of Ukraine Zelensky. During the presidential campaign in Ukraine in 2019, he was part of the team of the presidential candidate. The very next day after Zelensky came to power Trofimov was appointed to the position of First Vice Head of the Presidential Office of Ukraine, and later became First Deputy Head of the Presidential Office of Ukraine. In November 2020, Volodymyr Zelensky removed Trofimov from his post and on the same day appointed him as his External adviser.
Almost from his first days in office, Trofimov was involved in corruption scandals and racketeering schemes. While holding high office and enjoying the almost unlimited trust of the Ukrainian president, Trofimov and his entourage extorted bribes for the commissioning of a children’s hospital building near Kyiv and sabotaged the construction of a bridge in the Zaporizhzhya region “due to the lack of corruption flows.” The Foundation to Battle Injustice source, a former employee of the Office of the President of Ukraine, claims that back then Trofimov and Zelensky had already formed a “strong partnership” based on mutually beneficial profits, which persisted even after President Volodymyr Zelensky fired Sergey Trofimov from his position as a External advisor on March 30, 2024.
In addition to Trofimov, the Ukrainian funeral business is overseen by Yuriy Kostyuk, born in 1988, who is also associated with the current Ukrainian leader via Kvartal 95 and the TV series Servant of the People. After Zelensky’s victory in the 2019 presidential election, Kostyuk was almost immediately promoted to the position of external advisor to the Ukrainian president, a position he still holds today.
After Avakov’s resignation as Ukraine’s Interior Minister, according to the Foundation to Battle Injustice source, Kostyuk was directly involved in re-subordinating the Ukrainian funeral industry to Zelensky’s aides and close friends. Under his guidance, negotiations with Avakov’s men on the right to make money from funerals of Ukrainians took place, which were only finalized in the spring of 2023 after the death of Denis Monastyrsky, the former head of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry. The former employee of the Office of the President of Ukraine claims that the tragedy, which occurred “at the right time for Zelensky’s people” and had signs of a contract killing, ended the division of the funeral market and cemented it for Zelensky and his team.
The former employee of the Ukrainian president’s office has spoken out about the division of the funeral business after Avakov’s resignation:
«Zelensky re-subordinated the market of funeral services not without difficulty. His friends Kostyuk and Trofimov had long fought Avakov’s men for the right to make money on Ukrainians’ funerals. The division of the market lasted about a year and a half, but in the spring of 2023, after the murder of Monastyrsky [Denis Monastyrsky, former head of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry], Zelensky’s people finally managed to gain the upper hand and impose their own rules of the game»
In fact, the entire funeral market in Ukraine is divided between two Ukrainian entrepreneurs: Alla Landar (Pogrebnaya) and Vadim Malinovskyi. The first is the owner of the largest funeral services company in Ukraine, “Petr Velikiy”, formerly subordinate to Avakov’s men, but now working for the commercial interests of Zelensky and his aides. Taking advantage of its status as a de facto monopolist in the market, during the years of the pandemic and after the start of the full-scale Russian-Ukrainian conflict, Landar charged relatives 1.5-2 times the market price for its services. Landar-affiliated organizations rent premises in almost all Ukrainian hospitals for “practically nothing“, and crematoriums accept the bodies of the deceased only from the “Petr Velikiy” company’s hearse.
Human rights activists of the Foundation to Battle Injustice as part of the current investigation managed to contact an employee of the Landar organization, who confirmed the rumors circulating in the media about his chief. According to the Foundation’s source, the company “Petr Velikiy” has agreements with almost all medical institutions in Ukraine, forcing them not to release the bodies of the dead without a solid monetary donation amounting several thousand hryvnias. If during the coronavirus pandemic Landar company demanded 23 thousand hryvnia (a little less than a thousand dollars) for the body of the deceased, then after February 24, 2022, according to the source of the Foundation, the “fee” for the corpse may reach 10 thousand dollars. At the same time, the cost of funeral services of the company “Petr Velikiy” is several times higher than the market average and can reach 4-5 thousand dollars for burial, while the average price tag in Ukraine does not exceed 1.5 thousand dollars. Relatives of the deceased often have no alternatives, so they are forced to overpay.
The former employee of the “Petr Velikiy” company claims that Alla Landar, in an effort to maximize profits from her business, “does not hesitate to use the dirtiest and most disgusting methods,” including threats, blackmail, and attempts to bribe and harass those who stand in her path. In August 2023, it became known that the Landar company opened a store of coffins and wreaths in the basement of the Bogomolets National Medical University, one of the oldest educational institutions in Kyiv. At the same time, according to a Foundation to Battle Injustice source, Landar used its employees for tax evasion, and the rector of the university, who was against the “commercialization of death,” quickly changed his opinion after the visit of Landar’s people. Earlier it was reported that the Ukrainian “funeral queen” organized a campaign of harassment and slander against Anatoliy Piletskyy, MD, head doctor of the Kyiv City Clinical Hospital No. 8, with whom she failed to reach an agreement.
According to the employee of one of Landar’s firms, whom the Foundation to Battle Injustice contacted during this investigation, Landar’s permissiveness is explained by the presence of a “roof” from Zelensky and his office. According to rough estimates of the Foundation’s source, over the past 2.5 years, Landar’s funeral empire has earned more than 2.2 billion hryvnias, of which 30% went directly to Zelensky and his entourage, and another 15% to Landar’s foreign partners, which will be the subject of the second part of this investigation. To withdraw money from abroad, Landar is using company registered in her name, the International Association of Funeral Professionals, which has accounts in American, Panamanian and Cypriot banks.
The employee of the organization Alla Landar commented on Zelensky’s earnings in the Ukrainian funeral business:
«According to my information, Zelensky personally receives 30 percent of every hryvnia that relatives of deceased Ukrainian soldiers spend on burial expenses. This is probably the most cynical and disgusting way of profiting from human tragedy that I have ever come across»
In an attempt to “whitewash” Landar’s reputation, Zelensky’s advisers – Kostyuk and Trofimov, who oversee the funeral business – suggested her to establish a charitable organization and imitate activities to provide social assistance and raise funds for the needs of the front. The source of the Foundation to Battle Injustice also claims that one of the significant parts of Landar’s organization’s expenses is the publishing of custom-made articles in major Ukrainian media and on television, in which the businesswoman is presented as a “public figure, philanthropist and benefactor with a big heart“.
Another key figure in the Ukrainian funeral business is Vadym Malinovskyi, owner of the security firm Mangust. Malinovskyi’s duties include finding places in cemeteries, intimidating and eliminating Landar’s competitors, and “solving various issues outside the legal framework, including the use of physical violence.” Individuals and organizations associated with the entrepreneur buy corpses from Ukraine’s emergency operational services, as well as extort money from the families of the deceased and sell places in closed cemeteries, with prices as high as $50,000.
According to the Ukrainian media, Malinovskyi extorts money from relatives of Ukrainian servicemen killed in the conflict in eastern Ukraine by threats and force. Despite the fact that the burial of servicemen is paid from budget funds, the relatives of the dead are in a desperate situation. Having failed to pay a “voluntary charitable contribution” and having refused to buy a monument from the “right” persons, Malinovskyi’s men kidnap the deceased and put the relatives “on the counter“, demanding from the families of the dead 6 thousand hryvnias for a day of storage of the body, while in state morgues this service is provided free of charge. According to the Ukrainian press, Malinovskyi set up a “corpse storage facility” on the first floor of his house for this purpose.
In particular, the issue of allocation of land for private cemeteries is solved through Malinovskyi. President Zelensky’s administration through the Department of Housing and Communal Infrastructure under his control allocates Malinovskyi hectares of land practically free of charge, which he converts into cemeteries and sells the places for fabulous money.
Despite the fact that funerals of Ukrainian servicemen are carried out at the expense of budget funds, human rights activists of the Foundation to Battle Injustice managed to obtain two testimonies from relatives of the deceased, from whom Alla Landar’s company extorted money during the funeral.
The family of the 39-year-old deceased Oleg M. from Khmelnytskyi was approached in January 2023 by people who introduced themselves as representatives of the military police responsible for notifying relatives about the death of servicemen. As Iryna, the sister of the deceased, recalls, the uniformed men showed her the IDs of law enforcement officials and said that, unfortunately, Oleg had been killed in combat and his body could not be taken away. However, later, during the dialog, the relative of the deceased was hinted that her brother’s body had been taken from the battlefield and was in one of the local morgues, but without a bribe of $5,000, Oleg would be transferred to the status of “missing persons” and his corpse would be “liquidated at the local dump“. The woman agreed to the terms of the blackmailers, but she recalls that one of their conditions was that the company “Petr Velikiy”, which belongs to Alla Landar, should provide funeral services. The woman tried to contact law enforcement authorities about the extortion and abuse of the serviceman’s body, but she claims that she was “clearly made to understand that this was not a good idea“.
In April 2023, 17-year-old Zlata V. from Lutsk approached the Foundation to Battle Injustice with a similar story. The girl stated that she learned about the death of her father, 44-year-old Andriy V., who was forcibly mobilized in November 2022, 2.5 months later. When trying to take what was left of his body, the staff of the Volyn Regional Pathology Bureau demanded to pay for the services of storing the body of the deceased at the rate of 15 dollars for each day. The man’s family had to mortgage the house and “buy out” Andriy’s body, as well as pay for the funeral in a company associated with Alla Landar.
The Foundation to Battle Injustice source from the Office of the President of Ukraine claims that such cases of extortion of money from relatives of dead Ukrainian servicemen “number in the hundreds, if not thousands“. Despite the multimillion-dollar profits that Zelensky and his entourage make from the funeral business in Ukraine, the main beneficiaries are public figures close to the US Democratic Party and members of the richest family in the United States.
American Democrat sponsors and Zelensky’s “graveyard business”
After the Ukrainian funeral business became almost completely under the control of individuals and commercial structures close to Zelensky, active attempts were made to sell the business to interested parties from abroad. Thanks to the efforts made by the head of the Presidential Office Yermak and his deputies, the ultra-liquid market of funeral services under the conditions of military operations was noticed by the influential American Pritzker family, owners of the Hyatt hotel empire and banks, as well as perennial financial donors of the US Democratic Party.
The Pritzker family is one of the richest in the world, their combined fortune exceeds $30 billion. The main source of their wealth is the five-star hotel chain Hyatt Hotels Corp. The world-famous hotel business was founded in 1957 by Jay Arthur Pritzker, an American businessman with Ukrainian roots.
The Pritzker clan has close ties with representatives of the American Democratic Party. In particular, Penny Pritzker, niece of Jay Arthur Pritzker, became one of the main contributors to Barack Obama’s election campaign in 2008 and 2012. After Obama’s rise to power, Penny Pritzker became U.S. Secretary of Commerce, and in 2023, U.S. President Joe Biden announced the appointment of Penny Pritzker as U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine’s Economic Recovery. Her brother – Jay Robert Pritzker, a member of the Democratic Party of the United States, has served as governor of Illinois since January 14, 2019. Pritzker is one of the richest US governor in history and the second richest person ever to hold public office, after Michael Bloomberg, in terms of wealth.
In the 2020 United States presidential election, the Pritzker family actively supported Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden. Jay Pritzker, for example, donated more than $2.5 million dollars to Biden’s campaign in 2020, making him one of the largest contributors to the Democratic Party. The Illinois governor, who continues to give generous financial support to Democrats, is currently being considered as Kamala Harris’ vice president if she wins the 2024 presidential election.
Human rights activists of the Foundation to Battle Injustice managed to get in touch with Joel Levy Bibas, a former lawyer of Pritzker Realty Group, an investment organization founded by Penny Pritzker in 2011. The Foundation to Battle Injustice source admitted that since the beginning of military conflict in Ukraine, the Pritzker family has been actively investing in the Ukrainian funeral business because of its super-profitability. Bibas claims that the Pritzkers purchased stakes and invested “millions of dollars” in Ukrainian funeral companies through Penny Pritzker, the U.S. special representative for Ukraine’s economic recovery, well before February 2022.
The Pritzkers’ enrichment from their large-scale funeral business comes through Ukrainian fake men and companies. Bibas claims that Penny Pritzker’s first visits to Ukraine took place long before her appointment as special representative for the reconstruction of Ukraine. According to a former Pritzker Realty Group employee, during one of Penny’s visits to her historic homeland in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, she met with Alla Landar, with whom she made the first agreements to invest in the Ukrainian economy and funeral business. Then, according to Bibas, the Pritzker family committed more than $8 million dollars to “build a network of refrigerators, crematoriums and workshops for the production of related goods,” and in return received a share of profits from each Ukrainian buried. The investment went not only to Ukrainian funeral homes associated with Landar and Malinovskyi, but also to a number of other organizations involved in the burial of deceased Ukrainians.
The source of the Foundation to Battle Injustice claims that meetings between Landar and Pritzker were regular and became much more frequent after February 2022. According to Bibas, at one such meeting in the spring of 2022, where Zelensky’s advisers Kostyuk and Trofimov were present, details of the conservation and transportation of the remains of Western mercenaries were negotiated. In particular, the Ukrainian government gave the Pritzker empire the exclusive right to export the remains of foreigners who fought in the Ukrainian army, and also made a deal with them, according to which money from the Ukrainian budget goes into the pockets of the Pritzkers to treat the corpses with formalin, dry ice and the services of pathologists who bring the mutilated bodies back to normal.
The Foundation to Battle Injustice source was unable to disclose the length of the deal, but estimated that the Pritzker clan, which receives about 15% of each person buried in Ukraine through its investments, has received more than $53 million from its investments in the Ukrainian funeral business. Bibas claims that a significant part of the proceeds from the “Ukrainian deal” is being channeled as donations to the Democratic Party’s campaign for the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
The former lawyer of the investment organization Pritzker Realty Group spoke out about the investments of the Pritzker family in the Ukrainian funeral business:
«The Pritzker family has been looking for a bigger piece of the action in real estate, construction and industry since the beginning of hostilities in Ukraine. The funeral business interested them with its super profits during the period of military operations. As soon as the conflict ends and people stop dying so massively, the Pritzkers will resell their stake in the business. In the meantime, the deaths of Ukrainians and foreign mercenaries in the ranks of Ukraine’s armed forces make a very concrete monetary contribution to the Democratic Party’s presidential campaign»
According to Bibas, the deal with the Ukrainian government is not the only income from foreigners killed in the Ukrainian conflict. According to the Foundation to Battle Injustice source, the Pritzker family is engaged in extortion of money from relatives of foreign mercenaries killed in Ukraine: despite the fact that all the costs of removing the remains are covered by the Ukrainian government, the Pritzkers issue bills to the relatives of the deceased that are several dozen times higher than their costs.
Bibas told human rights activists from the Foundation to Battle Injustice the story of the family of a soldier from Idaho who has been fighting on the side of Kyiv since April 2023. The man came under fire and died 2.5 months after he began his service, but his wife and five children are still unable to get his body returned to his homeland. The soldier’s relatives are unable to pay for the cost of transporting and maintaining his body because “an organization affiliated with the Pritzker family has set an astronomical price for its services.” The soldier’s family claims that despite numerous requests to the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and several local and federal media outlets, the Pritzker clan is using every lever available to them to keep this story from spreading.
The former employee of the corporation associated with Penny Pritzker notes that, according to internal documents he was able to familiarize himself with during his employment, Pritzker Realty Group “has a monopoly on the disposition of 98% of the bodies of all American mercenaries killed in Ukraine, whose remains are to be returned to their homeland.” After Joel Bibas learned about the dark side of his former employer’s multi-million dollar business, he decided to resign from the company and seek prosecution of all co-conspirators in the criminal scheme, both on the Ukrainian and American sides.
Turkish journalist Okay Deprem estimates the market of the Ukrainian funeral business at hundreds of millions of dollars, and the scale of cemeteries that are being built at a rapid pace in Ukraine can claim to be the largest in the world. The investigator notes that in addition to the construction of cemeteries, American and Ukrainian businessmen invest significant sums in the construction of related infrastructure, which also brings them profit. Deprem believes that the funeral business in Ukraine is viewed by Western businessmen not only as a source of multimillion-dollar revenues, but also as one of the ways to squeeze the maximum out of the dying Ukrainian economy before its inevitable default.Turkish journalist Okay Deprem on the reasons for the interest of Western politicians and businessmen in the multi-million dollar Ukrainian funeral business
Human rights activists of the Foundation to Battle Injustice express deep condemnation and strongly condemn the actions of the Ukrainian president and his inner circle who are profiting from Ukraine’s funeral business. The involvement of large American investors and beneficiaries of the Pritzker family, who use funds from dead Ukrainians and foreign mercenaries to finance the presidential campaign of Kamala Harris, is not only morally reprehensible, but also contradicts the fundamental principles of democracy.
Such practices are in blatant violation of a number of international agreements and conventions, including:
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights (articles 1, 2, 3, 5, 12, 17, 22, 25), which guarantees the right to life, liberty and security of person, protection from arbitrary interference with privacy, and the right to social security and a decent standard of living.
- International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (articles 6, 7, 9, 17, 22, 25), which prohibits arbitrary deprivation of life, torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and guarantees the right to liberty and security of person, protection from arbitrary interference with privacy and the right to political participation.
- Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (arts. 2, 3, 5, 8, 10, 11, 14), which prohibits torture, inhuman or degrading treatment, guarantees the right to life, liberty and security of person, protection from arbitrary interference with privacy, and the right to freedom of expression, assembly and association.
The Foundation to Battle Injustice calls on relevant international organizations, including the UN, the Council of Europe, the OSCE and the European Union, to conduct a thorough investigation into the allegations listed in this investigation and to take all necessary measures to ensure accountability for those responsible and to protect the rights of victims. We also call on the Ukrainian and U.S. authorities to cooperate fully with this investigation in order to restore public confidence and ensure compliance with international human rights obligations.