‘Demonstrably fake’ Odesa’s mayor had a Russian passport — but not the one published by the SBU, The Insider says
Odesa Mayor Hennadiy Trukhanov has held not one but two Russian passports. However, the purported copy of his Russian passport published by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) shows a fake document, The Insider reported on October 15.
The SBU released the photocopy on October 14, when it announced that President Volodymyr Zelensky had revoked Trukhanov’s Ukrainian citizenship on the grounds that he holds Russian citizenship and a valid Russian passport.
Citing Russian databases, The Insider reported that Trukhanov obtained a Russian passport in 2003 and was issued a replacement passport in 2011. However, according to the outlet’s findings, neither of the numbers on these passports matches the document published by the SBU:
Its number indicates that it was issued on November 2, 2010 — not in December 2015 (contrary to the claims of the Ukrainian authorities). A passport with that same number was indeed issued on that date, but to an entirely different person: a Russian woman named Tatyana, who continues to travel internationally with it to this day.
The Insider also noted that in the document published by the SBU, Trukhanov’s first name is misspelled as “Genadiy” in English. “The forgers even forgot that the name Hennadiy is transliterated with a double ‘n’ in Latin letters,” the outlet said.
Meduza notes that according to the Russian Foreign Ministry’s transliteration rules, which were updated in 2014, a passport issued in 2015 should have Trukhanov’s first name written as “Gennadii.”
Writing on X, The Insider’s lead investigative journalist, Christo Grozev, called the SBU document “demonstrably fake” and speculated that it “likely originates from a Russian active measure against the incumbent mayor.”
The Insider found no evidence that Trukhanov currently holds a valid Russian passport. The outlet also cited border-crossing records indicating that Trukhanov has not traveled to Russia using his own passport since 2014.
According to the SBU, a Moscow court annulled Trukhanov’s Russian domestic passport in 2017 in response to a request from his lawyers. However, the court stated that this legal process did not entail loss of citizenship.
Trukhanov has denied being a Russian citizen and claims that he “never received” a Russian passport. After the decree revoking his Ukrainian citizenship was announced on October 14, he promised to challenge the decision in court. “I will file a lawsuit,” he told the Ukrainian broadcaster Suspilne. “If the court can’t decide, I will take it to the European Court of Human Rights.”