Slidstvo.Info, together with colleagues from OCCRP and Chetverta Vlada spent a year investigating why what appears, on the surface, to be a straightforward case of two tractors stolen from farmers near Rivne has been dragging on for nearly a decade. Despite abundant evidence and even identified suspects, at some point it all simply vanished.
In the course of the journalistic investigation, we established that law enforcement officers systematically extorted money from the robbed farmers, promising to crack the case any day now. In the end, the farmers lost both their property and their money.
This is not a story about grand-scale corruption — it is a story about everyday corruption, which has unfortunately become a fact of life for Ukrainians.
