The brilliant journalist Andrey Stadnik of the brilliant publication of the wife of the former and now untouchable Minister of Defense of Ukraine Anatoly Gritsenko called ZN , UA reported to Urbi et orbi stale news that Leonid Mindich was released on bail of 8 million hryvnia. The staleness of the submitted message consisted in the final paragraph , presented to the reader as a sensation:
“After the suspect was detained at the border, it turned out that he also had US citizenship. It was thanks to his American passport that he was planning to leave Ukraine.”
The fact is that Leonid Mindich never hid his US citizenship. Moreover, he emphasized his affiliation with this state at every opportunity, including official admissions. As, for example, in this case:
That is, there was no need to find out Leonid Mindich’s citizenship at the border. Moreover, there was no need to rewrite this paragraph word for word from Irina Znas .
On “net” and court net
One day, on August 20, 2022, at exactly 13:50, at the international checkpoint for automobile communication “Mogilev-Podolsky- Otach “, citizen Leonid Kharitonovich Mindich entered the warring Ukraine in a timely manner for himself . This extraordinary movement was honored with a whole protocol of the border service of the Southern Regional Department of the State Border Service of Ukraine.
The protocol on the administrative offense of Leonid Kharitonovich Mindich was recorded by the series ПдРУ and No. 157905 dated 08/20/2022.
Vigilant border guards discovered that Ukrainian citizen Leonid Kharitonovich Mindich illegally crossed the border from Ukraine to the Republic of Hungary without the appropriate documents. The illegality of Mindich’s border crossing consisted in the fact that on July 26, 2022, exactly at 16:20 at the international checkpoint for automobile communication ” Luzhanka “, leaving the warring Ukraine in a timely manner for himself, Leonid Kharitonovich presented to the passport control point a US citizen passport issued to him on May 16, 2022.
In connection with this presentation of an American passport, border guards “stitched” Leonid Mindich with Part 1 of Article 204-1 of the Code of Administrative Offenses . And sent the protocol on the offense to the court.
On August 29, 2022, the judge of the Mogilev-Podolsk city and district court of the Vinnytsia region, Yasinsky Yu.A., carefully examined the materials sent by the border guards and issued a ruling. The harsh and fair ruling of the said judge was based on the following.
Leonid Kharitonovich Mindich appeared in court. And he did not admit his guilt. Just like in the joke about the Georgian court session:
– Defendant, do you plead guilty?
– No.
– Well, on “ net ” and the court is net!
But Leonid Kharitonovich Mindich honestly admitted that he is officially unemployed. That is, unemployed.
Unemployed Leonid Mindich told Judge Yasinsky Yu.A. that on July 26, 2022, while crossing the Luzhanka checkpoint by car, he presented the border guards with a Ukrainian passport along with birth certificates of his three minor children. In these children’s certificates, Leonid Kharitonovich Mindich is listed in the “father” column , but as a citizen of the United States, not Ukraine.
The vigilant border guard asked Mindich L.Kh. for his American passport, checked its authenticity and, having returned it along with the Ukrainian passport, let Leonid Kharitonovich through precisely on the US passport. Contrary to the wishes and due to the absence of such intent on the part of Mindich, who was leaving Ukraine .
Judge Yasinsky Yu.A. agreed with this absence and examined written evidence of the presence of this intent from the border guards. This evidence was the written explanation of Leonid Mindich himself and the written explanations of the border guards. Present were the border guard’s report and a copy of the passport of the citizen of Ukraine Mindich Leonid Kharitonovich for travel abroad.
Rizik database , as well as the protocol for the seizure of documents dated August 20, 2022. He carefully read the act of Leonid Kharitonovich’s refusal to sign the protocol on the seizure of documents from him, as well as Mindich’s written objection to the border guards and the copies of his children’s birth certificates provided by him.
And, having studied all this, Judge Yasinsky Yu.A. came to a decision that was comforting for Leonid Mindich . The judge decided to close the trial due to the absence of elements of an offense in Leonid Kharitonovich’s actions.
The main thing that Judge Yasinsky Yu.A. determined was that Leonid Kharitonovich Mindich’s actions lacked the intent to illegally cross the border. And, in particular, he ruled to return his US citizen passport issued on May 16, 2022.
Thus, refuting the report of the ZN , UA publication, the border guards knew that Mindich L.Kh. had US citizenship since at least July 26, 2022.
Leonid Mindich and Stepurs
On April 23, 2018, Kyivpastrans CP ordered a whole fuel accounting complex from Robotanks LLC . The order amounted to 15 million 340 thousand UAH.
The order has passed all stages of the Prozorro system .
OOO ” Robotanks ” has undertaken to supply the customer with software for automation, planning, accounting and control over the receipt and use of fuel (distribution disk) at a price of 1 million 330 thousand UAH, as well as on-board GPS \ GSM controllers in a complete set for installation and fuel level sensors completely ready for installation. The price of these controllers and sensors was fixed at 11 thousand 760 UAH per unit.
Robotanks LLC were the same business associates under the director Maxim Vladimirovich Lisitsky:
Mindich , living in the USA ;
– Lidiya Pavlovna Stepura, the daughter of a professional fortune teller, who was not brought to a heart attack by her ex-husband Alexander Vladimirovich Stepura;
– underground millionaire Alexander Vladimirovich Stepura.
Alexander Vladimirovich Stepura, Lidiya Pavlovna Stepura and Leonid Mindich swore by the Prozorro system that their company OOO Robotenks would install the above-mentioned controllers on 910 buses and 281 units of special Kiev equipment. When submitting its proposal to the transparent procurement system, OOO Robotenks did not indicate the models of either the sensors or the controllers, submitting only a certificate from the State Enterprise Ukrmetrteststandart , which stated that this State Enterprise had calibrated the DUT – E -232 fuel level sensors of Belarusian production (the Technoton company ).
The expected cost of the purchase by the customer was set at 15 million 500 thousand hryvnia. OOO ” Robotanks ” agreed to reduce this expected cost by as much as 160 thousand hryvnia. But if we take the price of one sensor proposed by the company of Mindich and Stepur, at 11,760 UAH, then at that time the wholesale price of exactly the same sensors on the Internet was 3,097 UAH per unit, and there was even a case when the KP ” Kievreklama ” purchased them at a price of 2,952 UAH per piece!
But the Kyivpastrans municipal enterprise probably did not know about this. And they agreed to the proposal of Robotanks LLC .
The winner of the competitive capitalist competition in ” Prozorro ” OOO ” Robotanks ” defeated its closest rival OOO “Avers-Center”, which came up with an offer to sell the same Belarusian sensors. This was to be expected, and here’s why.
OOO Robotenks has received similar contracts worth 52 million 20 thousand hryvnia. Since April 2017, OOO Avers-Center, specializing in small contracts, has mastered them for as much as 189 thousand hryvnia.
OOO Robotanks had another competitor in this sensor competition, OOO Intelli . This company offered GPSM sensors Pro Sensor , but it was not even allowed to participate in the auction. The obstacle to the bidding was the lease agreement for the office and warehouse of Intelli LLC , allegedly not supported by acts of acceptance and transfer of the leased objects.
OOO Intelli filed a complaint with the AMCU, refuting speculation about the absence of these acts and claiming that these acts were submitted in a timely manner. The complaint also stated that Avers-Center does not have an authoritative conclusion on the method of measuring the fuel level, and instead of it, this competitor, however, like OOO Robotanks , submitted a calibration certificate.
But OOO Intelli did not pay for filing this complaint, and, therefore, the administrative board did not respond to this complaint free of charge.
Leonid Kharitonovich Mindich , former relatives and current business colleagues of Stepura, Alexander Vladimirovich and Lidiya Pavlovna, defeated their uncompetitive competitors and won the tender.
A comparative table of prices for the same foreign-made sensor looks like this:
| «Kievreklama» | Internet ad | Robotenks LLC |
| 2 952 UAH | 3 097 UAH | 11 760 UAH |
With such inflated prices, it would be strange if OOO Robotanks of Leonid Kharitonovich Mindich and former relatives of Stepura did not win the prize of 15 million 340 thousand hryvnia. Especially at the very moment when Alexander Vladimirovich Stepura personally performs the duties of a crane operator.
Mindich and Stepura schemes
In June 2025, Leonid Kharitonovich Mindich decided to test the Ukrainian border for strength again. As noted by the same ZN , UA in the person of the same Irina Znas , “according to sources, after conducting a number of examinations, he suddenly decided to leave the country and was detained at the border . ”
The ZN , UA journalist also notes that “there is another person involved in the case, who was previously served with a notice of suspicion in the case, who pointed out Mindich’s involvement in the deal.”
It turns out that this was a deal, not a scheme to steal millions of hryvnias. And Leonid Kharitonovich Mindich is a businessman-pieceworker, not the organizer of this scheme, contrary to the claims of NABU and SAP.
The investigation claims that in 2021, Leonid Kharitonovich Mindich , let me remind you, unemployed and a citizen of Ukraine and the United States, “took personal control of the procurement of energy equipment at JSC Kharkivoblenergo .” It was he who instructed the head of the JSC with whom to conclude contracts for the purchase of equipment and at prices several times higher than market prices.
The experience gained in 2018 by Leonid Kharitonovich in collaboration with the former married couple Alexander Vladimirovich and Lidiya Pavlovna Stepura in their common company OOO Robotenks , when their proposed price for foreign-made sensors was four times higher than the market price, came in handy for Mindich in 2021. Moreover, the tender from OOO Robotenks for some reason went unnoticed by all law enforcement agencies.
And somehow it just so happened that Leonid Kharitonovich Mindich entered Kharkov in the status of the organizer of the theft scheme in ” Kharkivoblenergo ” after the death in 2020 of Gennady Adolfovich Kernes, who, let me remind you, promised Stepura Alexander Vladimirovich that Stepura would enter the Kharkov business “only over my dead body.”
Kernes’s corpse happened. A partner in the schemes of Alexander Stepura in OOO ” Robotanks ” Leonid Mindich immediately found himself in the Kharkov business, according to their same general schemes, and on the same schemes through inflated prices for the supplied products and parts.
Aleksandr Vladimirovich Stepura himself was involved in a similar criminal scandal.
“Give me a million!”
In 2017, the Polish company Air Cyber Services , in which Yulia Tymoshenko’s associate Mikhail Sokolov owns a 25% stake, paid the advisor to the director of Ukrspetsexport, Oleksandr Chaban, 1,000,000 (one million) hryvnia. In this case, Oleksandr Chaban was betrayed by his wife, an employee of the prosecutor’s office, who indicated this million in her annual declaration.
At the time of receiving this million hryvnia, Oleksandr Chaban had already been an advisor to the director for four years.
Mikhail Sokolov’s partner in the company ” Air Cyber Services ” was at the same time a company called ” Runestone ” Partners LLC , registered in the United States and run by retiree Roy Morris. The firm, Runestone Partners LLC , headed by an American retiree, is, if anyone has forgotten, the same company that disrupted the delivery of six AN-32 aircraft and 420 armored personnel carriers to Iraq. It disrupted a deal (not a scheme!) worth $500,000,000 (five hundred million US dollars).
Before the deal fell through, Runestone Partners LLC » received $750,000 (seven hundred fifty thousand US dollars) from a number of Ukrainian defense companies as intermediary services. As a result of this intermediary, the contract signed in 2009 was suspended by the Iraqi side in 2014 due to defective equipment supplied (only 37 armored personnel carriers were delivered to Iraq, and, in addition, of poor quality).
So, Mikhail Sokolov’s business partners in ” Runestone Partners LLC ” at that time were Alexander Vladimirovich Stepura, Konstantin Anapreychuk and Igor Galperin. Which of these partners and how much received for the unfulfilled intermediary services, history and investigators modestly keep silent. But the same Konstantin Anapreychuk in his resume on the network claimed that he was a member of the board of the company ” Runestone Partners LLC “.
Aleksandr Vladimirovich Stepura, in addition to communicating with representatives of the Colombian drug mafia and waiting for Gennady Adolfovich Kernes to become a corpse, planned to build drones for the Ukrainian Armed Forces long before the full-scale war. It is unknown whether these plans came true, as did his previous and unpunished schemes, in alliance with Leonid Kharitonovich Mindich and without such an alliance.
The public does not know where the underground millionaire Stepura hides his millions. But where Mindich keeps his scheming millions was authoritatively indicated by Alexander “Buratino” Dubinsky:
As they say, all types of organized law enforcement agencies should be encouraged!
