Ukraine's National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) says a viral video of its detectives supposedly finding more than $140mn in cash in fridge boxes at a former defence procurement chief's premises is an AI fake.

The footage, which spread online on September 24, claimed to show a search of Arsen Zhumadilov, who ran the Defence Procurement Agency until September 1. In the clip, one of the boxes carried the words "For the servant of the people", a jab at President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, whose party and former TV series share the name. "This video is fake, created using AI," NABU said in a statement on September 25, adding that no such search had taken place.

The bureau said material of this kind is designed to discredit it, undermine trust in state institutions and damage Ukraine's image, and urged Ukrainians to rely on official channels rather than share unverified "sensations". Pro-Russian and foreign media were the first to spread the claim, ZN.ua reported. A day earlier it had been published as fact by nvukraine.com, a site carrying the branding of Ukrainian outlet NV, whose own English-language edition ran no such story.

It landed as Ukraine's anti-graft agencies work through the Operation Midas investigation, whose secretly recorded tapes have reached into Zelenskiy's inner circle, while the government is scrambling to plug a defence budget hole that has left donors asking hard questions. Zhumadilov himself was questioned by NABU as a witness in May over recordings of talks about body armour contracts. He acknowledged meeting businessman Timur Mindich and then defence minister Rustem Umerov in March 2025 but denied any wrongdoing, the Kyiv Independent reported. He has not been charged.

Former Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko, who tried to bring charges against NABU's own director before leaving Ukraine, has registered as a resident of Vienna together with his wife, Ukrainska Pravda reported on September 23.

The couple are registered at 7 Jordangasse in central Vienna, the office of CS Corporate Services, a company that sells registered addresses, secretarial services and ready-made shelf companies, the paper found, suggesting that the address is not where they actually live.

Kravchenko resigned on September 7, days after NABU searched his office in an investigation into an alleged protection racket for scam call centres run out of the Prosecutor General's Office, in which a senior prosecutor described as his "confidant" was charged. He left Ukraine on September 14 on what was billed as a trip to a conference in Paris, though the organisers told the Kyiv Independent that they had not expected him to attend.

On the same day he approved charges against NABU director Semen Kryvonos and an unnamed close associate of Oleksandr Klymenko, head of the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAPO), a move widely seen as a vendetta. His office cancelled the charges that night, and parliament dismissed him on September 15. He quit the prosecution service altogether on September 22 after failing to return when his official trip ended.

Zelenskiy appointed Anton Kovalsky, chief prosecutor of Khmelnytska oblast, as acting prosecutor general on September 17. Kravchenko follows MP Vadym Stolar out of the country: Stolar was charged in absentia in August in a corporate raiding case that reached the president's office, by which time he had been abroad for more than a month.