Nearly $6.7 million stolen in Ukrainian military IT project — NABU
Dzvin automated command system (Photo: Militarnyi)
Nearly $6.7 million was siphoned from Ukraine’s Army IT project Dzvin, with former General Staff officials now under investigation, Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) wrote on Feb. 6.
Dzvin was intended to serve as a core element of a unified automated command-and-control system for the Armed Forces, designed to automatically generate combat command documents, create and track digital maps, receive data on friendly forces and intelligence, and perform operational calculations.
The suspects in the case, charged under Part 5 of Article 191 of Ukraine’s Criminal Code (misappropriation of property on an especially large scale), include:
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a former deputy chief of AFU General Staff, a lieutenant general
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a former head of the Armed Forces’ signal troops, a major general
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a former head of the General Staff’s automation development department, a colonel
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the director of a private company that served as the project’s main contractor.
Investigation showed that Defense Ministry signed a contract for the development of the system with a company that had no prior experience in software development in 2016.
Over four years, the technical specifications were amended 13 times, which allowed the project’s cost to be increased by 300 million hryvnias (about $8.2 million) and led to additional unjustified expenditures of 115 million hryvnias (around $3.1 million).
As a result, the finished system failed to meet its original requirements. NABU said Dzvin was incompatible with NATO standards and not integrated with other military systems. Of the 200 information and calculation tasks specified in the project, only 10 were actually implemented.
Despite these shortcomings, Dzvin system was officially adopted by the Armed Forces in 2022.
In 2024, officials even attempted to secure additional funding for the project.
NABU detectives uncovered the scheme in February 2025.
Bureau said that during the investigation, detectives and prosecutors encountered attempts to obstruct the probe. The suspects allegedly concealed key documentation and even tried to retroactively “modernize” the system.
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