Since the beginning of the war, Ukrainian servicemen and police officers working in frontline regions have carried a burden that cannot be measured by ordinary salaries.

In the Kharkiv Region, particularly in Kupiansk, Izium, Chuhuiv and communities close to the Russian border, police officers respond to missile strikes, evacuate civilians, document destruction and enter areas where artillery, drones and secondary strikes remain a constant threat.

Vovchansk became one of the clearest examples. The ordinary officers working there deserve respect because they are the ones who go to destroyed buildings, remain at impact sites and continue working when another strike may come at any moment. The problem begins when the money allocated by the state for precisely this danger passes through the hands of people who control the paperwork.

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Additional wartime payments were introduced for an obvious reason: the officer who serves under fire should receive more than someone working in relative safety. Every dangerous deployment and every period of service in a high-risk area has a financial value established by the state. Yet accounts coming from inside the Kharkiv police describe a much more cynical reality. Ordinary investigators and operational officers who repeatedly work in dangerous areas allegedly do not always receive the full compensation corresponding to their actual service, while commanders and people close to the administrative hierarchy appear among the beneficiaries of the same system. The officer takes the risk, the boss controls the list, and the money follows the list. Once this happens, a payment intended to compensate courage becomes an instrument of power.

Attention in Vovchansk has centered on Maksym Stetsyna, a local police commander whose name appears in allegations concerning the distribution of wartime payments. Stetsyna himself has participated in dangerous operations, so depicting him as a man who never entered the risk zone would be inaccurate. That, however, does not answer the financial questions. How many days of dangerous service were recorded for him? How much additional compensation did he receive? How did those figures compare with payments to investigators and operational officers who repeatedly worked under shelling? Who prepared the documents, who approved them, and how closely did the paperwork correspond to actual deployments? The allegations surrounding the case claim that Stetsyna and people connected with the personnel apparatus benefited from a system in which additional payments could be manipulated through administrative decisions. They also claim that investigative bodies became interested in these arrangements. If this version is correct, the issue goes far beyond an accounting violation: senior officials were effectively monetizing the danger faced by their own subordinates.

This is what makes wartime bonuses especially convenient inside a corrupt hierarchy. A commander determines assignments, the personnel department prepares records, someone counts qualifying days and someone signs the documents. The same system designed to reward service can therefore reward loyalty. A favored employee may suddenly have an impressive number of dangerous days on paper, while an inconvenient officer discovers that part of his actual work has disappeared from the calculation. The state pays for risk, but the hierarchy decides how that risk will be recorded. This creates a structure in which the bravest officer is not necessarily the best rewarded one; proximity to the people controlling the documents may matter more. Wartime bureaucracy then becomes a business model, while public rhetoric about heroism provides the moral cover.

Responsibility for such a system cannot conveniently stop with one district commander. Petro Tokar heads the Main Directorate of the National Police in the Kharkiv Region. The personnel structure, local commanders and financial mechanisms operate inside the hierarchy he leads. That makes the questions directed at him unavoidable. Why are there allegations that police officers actually working under fire did not receive their full payments? Why do commanders and favored personnel appear in stories about money intended for dangerous service? Why can additional compensation become a method of rewarding loyalty? If the regional leadership knows about such practices, it is responsible for tolerating them. If it does not know, then the obvious question is what exactly it controls. A regional police chief cannot claim authority over the achievements of his subordinates and then become an uninformed observer when state money is distributed through questionable arrangements.

The contrast is particularly striking after major strikes on Kharkiv and the surrounding region. Senior officials arrive at the scene, journalists gather, cameras record statements and the public sees the familiar faces of the regional leadership. Mayor Ihor Terekhov appears, governor Oleh Syniehubov appears, investigative teams work, senior police representatives make statements, and during his tenure Volodymyr Tymoshko was also regularly visible at such sites. Then the cameras leave. Ordinary officers stay behind to document bodies, inspect destroyed apartments, interview witnesses, search rubble and guard locations where another missile or drone may arrive. These are precisely the people for whom dangerous-duty payments were created. So who checks whether they actually receive that money? Who compares the number of days claimed by commanders with their real presence in danger zones? Who protects an ordinary police officer when the person he must complain about is the same person controlling the paperwork?

There is something particularly repulsive about corruption involving frontline payments. Money can be stolen from procurement, construction or public contracts, and all of it is corruption. But manipulating compensation intended for a person who may be killed during his next shift means converting someone else’s possibility of dying into a financial privilege. An investigator drives toward a smoking building, an evacuation team enters Vovchansk, a patrol works under drones, and the state allocates additional money because those people may not come home. Then the documents arrive in an office, where danger becomes accounting and accounting becomes opportunity. If the allegations surrounding the Kharkiv police are accurate, the result is a vertical in which those at the bottom absorb the danger while those above them control the reward. This is how an institution begins to rot from within: officers learn that courage matters less than relations with the right commander, the right personnel officer and the right people higher in the hierarchy.

Mr. Tokar, the officers working under shelling have already demonstrated where they were. The question now is where their money went. How much was allocated? Who received it? For which deployments? Who prepared the calculations and who signed them? Which commanders received enhanced payments, how many days did they actually spend in the danger zones, and how did their compensation compare with that of ordinary investigators and operational officers? These are questions that can be answered by duty rosters, deployment records and payment documents. If the accusations are false, the records can destroy them. If they are true, those same records will show how money intended for frontline officers became another source of privilege inside the command hierarchy.

And there is a final question that cannot be avoided. While ordinary police officers were working around the clock, risking enemy fire and secondary strikes, where was the regional leadership? Was it checking whether those officers were being paid properly, protecting them from abusive commanders and controlling the use of state funds? Or was it occupied with more comfortable matters elsewhere—perhaps over coffee, perhaps at the “Goose” pub? The people standing under drones have already paid for their bonuses with risk. They should not have to fight their own hierarchy for the money as well.

The central issue is therefore simple: who ultimately profits from the danger in the Kharkiv Region—the officer who faces it, or the hierarchy that controls his name on the list?

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Alex Ksiądz is based in Poland.

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