Ukraine's anti-corruption agencies have detained Serhii Kropyva, head of the cyber department at the Prosecutor General's Office, and accuse him of shielding a network of fraudulent call centres and laundering what they earned.

The National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office announced the operation on September 4. The Kyiv Post reported that Kropyva was appointed to the post in 2022 without a competitive selection process by the then prosecutor general Iryna Venediktova, having previously headed the Kyiv cyber police and then served as first deputy head of the national cyber police force, and before that as a deputy head of the Odesa Oblast State Administration under governor Oleh Kiper.

That career path is the story. The official accused of protecting online fraud rings came out of the police unit set up to stop them, and was given the prosecution service's cyber brief without a competition.

The case sits inside Operation Forrest Gump, announced on August 19, which targets criminal organisations involving senior officials and which prosecutors have linked to the earlier Operation Midas. Nobody senior to Kropyva has been charged.

Recordings released from the NABU file have put the money on display. On the tapes the voice attributed to Kropyva discusses buying Audemars Piguet watches and spending on Loro Piana and a Porsche, and instructs his girlfriend to delete photographs of expensive watches and a Van Cleef bracelet from Instagram, according to Marta Havryshko, a Ukrainian historian who has been publishing extracts. She also reports the line "if you're gonna steal, steal a million" and says the call centres were defrauding European pensioners of millions of euros a month.

The Prosecutor General's Office said on September 4 that it would cooperate fully with the investigation and that the employee under investigation would be suspended for the duration of the pre-trial inquiry. It denied that prosecutor general Ruslan Kravchenko's own office had been searched; Ukrainska Pravda later reported that his whereabouts had been unknown since the operation began.

What the call centre market has to do with the shootout

The detention has revived an argument that has been circulating in Ukrainian military Telegram channels since the gunfight between Security Service and military intelligence officers in Kyiv on September 2: that the fight between the two agencies is at bottom a fight over the call centre business rather than a counter-intelligence case.

The argument, set out in a widely reposted 4 September post from a channel run by military intelligence fighters, strings together the kidnapping and killing of a Ukrainian citizen named Komarov in Bali, in which the victim spoke before his death about people providing cover for call centres; the Monaco case; the bombing outside the home of the businessman Vadym Yermolaiev, whose elder son had featured in a European case involving a call centre network; the charging of a serving military intelligence officer over the killing of the alleged hitwoman in that case; and NABU's case against MP Mykola Tyshchenko, which investigators put at more than $1mn for influence over the operation of specific call centres.

"Where have these call centres been operating for years?" the post asks. "Who was providing cover for them? Who shut them down? Who negotiated with them? Who received the information? Who used the coercive apparatus? Why, in stories involving call centres, murders, assassination attempts and kidnappings, do people from different security structures keep appearing?"

None of that is established, and the channel is a partisan one that says openly it is defending its own. It is set out here because it is the frame in which a large part of Ukraine's own security community is reading the case, and because the Kropyva detention is the first time an official has been arrested at the point where the two stories meet.