If you missed Part I, you can read it here.
Vice Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Stanley Fisher was considered a potential savior for Ukraine amidst a financial crisis, Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and its invasion of the Donbas. Fisher was trusted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the US Federal Reserve – and this was why Valeria Hontareva – governor of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) – Ukraine’s central bank – sought his advice in October 2014.
But Fisher refused to provide any strategy, saying Hontareva’s mission was “impossible”. As such, the team at the NBU decided to save Ukraine’s economy on their own – and they succeeded.
Kateryna Rozhkova, Hontareva’s former deputy governor, was one of the prominent figures in this process, as she led the reform of the NBU’s supervision and cleanup of a rotten banking system. It was known as the “falling of the banks” (or “Bankopad” in Ukraine).
Part I of our feature explained the background of what caused the 2014 financial crisis in Ukraine and how it triggered historic reforms. Ukraine and the IMF negotiated emergency financing provided that the central bank would diagnose the financial health of its 180 banks and find how capital was fleeing the economy.
Rozhkova’s task list included establishing sound asset quality, transparent ownership, recapitalization, cutting insider loans, and installing proper financial oversight. That had to be done in four years, otherwise Ukraine would have received no lifeline funds.
She reestablished supervision with the system of daily balance-sheet monitoring, early-warning indicators, a single supervisor responsible for communication with each bank, and cluster analysis of the business models. With her team, she started negotiating with the banks to restore their financial health.
But the system was getting ready to strike back.
Kyiv Post tells the story of how Rozhkova, and the NBU’s reform team were battling to make the banking reforms last, despite threats, protests, manipulations from bank owners – and even an internal threat from a new governor Kyrylo Shevchenko after the reforms were complete. Rozhkova’s decade at the NBU ended on Aug. 15, 2025.
But as Rozhkova and her team succeeded, the shadow of the bank where she once worked – Platinum – continued to follow her. Years later, in 2024, Ukraine’s Supreme Court ruled that Rozhkova and 11 others bore joint civil liability for the insolvency of Platinum Bank in 2017. It ordered them to pay Hr. 1.48 billion ($35.2 million) in damages.
Rozhkova led Platinum before joining the NBU in mid-2015. It was the 22nd largest bank by assets in Ukraine in October 2016, owned indirectly by Odesa-based entrepreneur Borys Kaufman.
Kaufman was the 46th richest man in 2021 according to the Forbes Ukraine rating, and is now the owner of Ukraine’s largest tobacco distributor Tedis Ukraine.
Platinum would eventually return to threaten her career inside the very institution she helped rebuild.
This is Part II of our story of Kateryna Rozhkova.
The ‘bankopad’ resistance
Kyiv, Aug. 9, 2016. The summer heat pressed on the city as protesters flooded the streets outside the NBU, banging drums, pots, and air horns. One poster read: “The NBU and the Deposit Guarantee Fund stole money from my entire family,” TSN reported.
After rallying under the NBU, the protesters blocked Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s main street, stalling the traffic. They called themselves clients of Bank Mykhailivskyi, declared insolvent in July 2016, and demanded the return of their deposits from the bank.
It was not the only protest. Between 2014 and 2019, at least 17 demonstrations erupted in Kyiv and Lviv, as depositors from collapsed banks sought someone to blame. The protests could have also been organised by “politicians afraid of being blamed for the banking system’s collapse”, as head of the Independent Association of Ukrainian Banks Roman Shpek told the BBC in 2016.
Protesters did not know that as the NBU was forcing banks to recover financial health, some bank owners were dragging capital from what was left in the accounts.
The scheme was called a “vacuum cleaner.” Banks advertised high-yield deposits, lured depositors with contracts signed inside its branches, but the money went to a third-party finance company that issued consumer loans.
Bank Mykhailivskyi, whose clients deafened the NBU with horns, was one of these cases. The bank exceeded the norm of deposits and had insufficient asset quality, Rozhkova wrote in her Op-Ed in 2016.
Officially, Bank Mykhailivskyi belonged to LLC Ekosipan, owned by 12 people – but Rozhkova negotiated directly with businessman Viktor Polishchuk, whom she says was the real owner.
Polishchuk agreed to return the siphoned deposits to the bank’s balance sheet, Rozhkova told Kyiv Post, but then returned only part of the money. The rest disappeared overnight.
“And then – bang… Our curator called saying nothing worked,” Rozhkova recalled. “Then Polishchuk appeared and said everything would be fixed. When the balance sheet finally came up, there was nothing.”
At the time, the NBU had no authority over non-bank institutions, so it could not see the liabilities building up at the affiliated finance company. The problem surfaced only when liquidity ran out and clients arrived with the contracts. “We found out about that by accident after the NBU curator conducted an investigation,” she added.
In a recent interview, Polishchuk said that Hontareva “signed a letter stating there were no questions for Mykhailivskyi” and claimed he “sold the bank to Borys Kaufman,” though there is no documented evidence of such a sale in the NBU archive or in Ukraine’s judicial records.
Rozhkova and Hontareva’s critics said the NBU should have sent banks into insolvency much faster and not show leniency to their owners like in Mykhailivskyi’s case.
But Kyiv Post’s source from the banking sector and another well-informed financial source on the market said that the crisis had dragged even Ukraine’s largest businesses into a quagmire. Sending every weak bank straight to the Deposit Guarantee Fund could have triggered a wider collapse.
“The NBU’s stance was that a bank should be sent to the Deposit Guarantee Fund only when there was absolutely no chance of saving it. … But there was a tacit agreement that shareholders would act honestly, not siphon off assets,” the well-informed source told Kyiv Post.
After a decade, Rozhkova now agreed that the NBU should have made the banks insolvent faster. “We dragged the shock to the people for four years,” she told Kyiv Post. “Not all individual depositors got their money back – businesses lost funds, and everything dragged on.”
By 2017, the NBU had shut 90 banks – a third of the system’s assets. NBU staff were not afraid to demand fair play from Ukraine’s rich bank owners. The clean-up hit Delta Bank, owned by Ukraine’s tycoon Mykola Lahun; Ferrexpro’s owner Kostyantyn Zhevago who owned Finance and Credit; Nadra Bank owned by Dmytro Firtash, Bank Mykhailivskyi, VAB under the control of Oleg Bakhmatiuk; and even Platinum Bank, where Rozhkova herself had previously worked.
Banks fell for four main reasons: inadequate capital, unresolved insider lending, weak financial monitoring and opaque ownership. After 2017, banks exited the market voluntarily, for non-compliance with NBU requirements or due to Russian ownership – not for the fundamental reasons seen during bankopad.
“When it became clear that most banks had just been drawing up recovery plans – doing nothing the first month, nothing the second, then by the third, we’d say, ‘Well then, goodbye.’ The law was clear: if the plan isn’t implemented, you’re out,” she told Kyiv Post.
But the most consequential fight – PrivatBank – was still ahead.
The PrivatBank showdown
Kyiv, December 2016. No one believed the NBU would challenge PrivatBank, Ukraine’s monster bank owned by influential tycoons Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennady Bogolyubov from Dnipro.
Prior to its nationalization in 2015, the NBU estimated its overall size – comprising total banking assets – at Hr. 241.8 billion ($11.4 billion), NBU archive data says.
Kolomoisky was known to build successful businesses, but was also the “driving force behind a series of non-friendly acquisitions undertaken in PrivatBank’s interests”, as Ukraine’s Forbes described it in 2012.
But the diagnostics three years later told a different story. In 2016, the NBU found PrivatBank’s reliability doubtful – its regulatory capital stood at Hr. -2.6 billion (-$95.6 million). The bank could no longer meet obligations to its 18.2 million clients. An insolvency on this scale would have collapsed the entire system.
PrivatBank delayed its recovery plans, and the bank’s management were dragging the discussions along, Rozhkova told the NBU. She recalled receiving veiled warnings. “He didn’t say, ‘We’ll kill you’ or ‘cut your throat,’ but he’d say things like, ‘We have long arms, don’t make us angry,” Rozhkova said.
Some call the PrivatBank case a climax of bankopad.
After the NBU got access to the bank’s history, Kroll uncovered a $5.5 billion fraud in 2018. In 2025, the High Court in London ruled that Kolomoisky and Boholyubov had misappropriated $1.9 billion, ordering them to pay more than $3 billion in damages, interest, and costs to the now state-owned bank. Kolomoisky was detained in 2023 on suspicion of fraud; Boholyubov, according to Ukrainian law enforcement, left the country to avoid receiving a notice of suspicion.
Threats were another price Ukraine’s central bank paid for saving the economy during the cleanup. Rozhkova once received a message: “Have you insured your life, bitch?” from an unknown contact. As she said with a dry laugh: “It was definitely not an ad.”
Online smear campaigns targeted the NBU leadership, and some NBU employees had to be secretly relocated to safe houses for weeks. Hontareva’s home and car were set on fire. Rozhkova herself became the subject of alleged monitoring and leaks of her phone calls.
“We were doing our job, but for some reason, they thought it was something personal. No one expected such vandalism,” she recalled. But NBU leaders assured their staff that they would not turn against them, she added. “We stood together and protected our people for real, not in words. We supported and helped each other,” she added.
Even after Rozhkova left the NBU, Kyiv Post saw another smear campaign on websites with dubious reputations. “I don’t know who was doing it,” she said. An independent PR expert willing to stay unnamed told Kyiv Post it seemed like a “a low-budget vendetta,” noting the attackers “didn’t understand how to discredit her seriously.”
Bankopad cost Ukraine 38% of GDP together with government-led recapitalization and losses of cash belonging to businesses and Ukrainians, the NBU estimated in the 2017 Financial Stability Report. “By comparison, countries with crises lasting at least three years saw fiscal costs ranging from 1% to 57% of GDP,” it wrote.
But since 2017, the NBU established a fair game for everyone with a red light to fraud. “They saw we are serious,” Rozhkova said.
The fight with Ukraine’s banks was over. The fight inside the NBU was only just beginning.
After the cleanup: а new broom at the NBU
After a three-year tenure and dramatic reforms, Hontareva resigned in 2017, saying “her mission is complete”. The NBU had established macrofinancial stability, cleaned the banking system and transformed itself into a modern, rules-based institution. Her deputy Yakiv Smolii took over, but not for long.
As Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine in 2019, Smolii stepped down in 2020 citing “political pressure” from Ukraine’s then-new president. His resignation was a shock to the governors. As all of them, including Rozhkova, gathered in one of the central bank’s rooms and agreed to stay and defend the institution rather than resign en masse, she told Kyiv Post. “Our teams were behind us – they could have suffered,” she said.
That same year, Zelensky appointed Kyrylo Shevchenko as NBU governor. Until then, Shevchenko had been a CEO of the state-owned Ukrgazbank, where he and Rozhkova cooperated closely on moving the bank from state-driven lending to a commercial model. “We communicated well,” Rozhkova recalled.
When he arrived at the NBU, she said, that changed. Shevchenko’s arrival fractured the internal balance the institution had built during the cleanup. He dismantled internal dialogue, pushed out deputies, and triggered mass resignations – five in ten days. “But we had an agreement,” she recalled, her voice turning bitter.
Senior officials, including Vitaliy Vavryshchuk and Oleksandr Bevz, left over “centralized decision-making”. Shevchenko forced one of Rozhkova’s deputies to resign while she was on vacation, she told Kyiv Post.
The NBU Council reprimanded Rozhkova and then-deputy governor Dmytro Sologub for speaking to the media, but they won in court. Shevchenko removed Rozhkova’s supervisory role and excluded her from meetings.
Yet she refused to quit. “That was when I decided it was a matter of principle,” she told Kyiv Post.
“No one even greeted me in the hallways, but I stayed.”
As Russia invaded, old ghosts returned
On Feb. 24, 2022, as Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Shevchenko held an emergency briefing with four deputy governors – everyone except Rozhkova.
The NBU announced wartime foreign currency restrictions, capital controls, and the removal of Russian-owned Prominvestbank and Sberbank from the market. Afterward, Shevchenko offered a truce, Rozhkova recalled. “I had never been fighting,” she replied.
Shevchenko resigned that October, officially citing health reasons. A day later, Ukraine’s law enforcement charged him in a separate case involving alleged embezzlement of Hr. 206 million ($5 million) at Ukrgazbank prior to his NBU tenure.
Ex-CEO of Oschadbank Andriy Pyshny became the new NBU governor and restored Rozhkova as first deputy governor, responsible for financial stability.
But he did not renew her contract. Rozhkova says their management styles “were too different.”
“He’s not fond of the kind of autonomy I’m used to. I can’t say I was eager to have my contract extended,” she told Kyiv Post.
Yet another shadow was approaching – one from years earlier in the form of Platinum Bank. Two years later, the Supreme Court’s decision hit, imposing a fine of Hr. 1.5 billion ($35.5 million) on Rozhkova. Twenty percent of her official salary is being withheld until the full amount is repaid, and part of her property has been frozen, she told Kyiv Post.
She had led Platinum until mid-2015 and voted on the decisions the court later identified as contributing to the losses. “The inspection concluded the securities weren’t acceptable and had to be fixed urgently,” she said. “We changed something for something else. I’m not saying it was a good solution – but it’s the truth.”
As she left Platinum, Kaufman injected capital in the bank and the recovery plan was completed. But the NBU did not believe it and still sent the bank to the graveyard. The Deposit Guarantee Fund later determined that former management had caused damage, and the case moved through Ukraine’s courts until the Supreme Court ruling in 2024.
Ekonomichna Pravda accused Rozhkova of influencing the NBU’s handling of Platinum. Before the Supreme Court even announced the decision, Rozhkova’s ex-employee wrote in 2019 that she expected “a video from independent journalists showing how the first deputy governor siphoned money out of Platinum Bank.”
But two Kyiv Post sources familiar with internal NBU discussions said Rozhkova did not participate in meetings related to Platinum after joining the central bank. “[Oleksandr] Pysaruk was managing Platinum,” she told Kyiv Post. “We agreed on that immediately.”
Pysaruk confirmed Kyiv Post she was absent from those meetings but clarified that the bank was handled “by the NBU Supervision team that reported to me.”
Rozhkova said that her ex-colleagues kept calling her asking to disclose secrets about NBU policy towards their bank, but she refused to tell them anything, asking them to play fair in return.
For Rozhkova, the ruling remains painful. “That situation was complicated,” she said. “But the court’s decision stands, and I’m complying with it.” The fine is civil, not criminal, meaning it does not bar future employment.
The Platinum ruling remains the one unresolved factor influencing perceptions of her work. For now.
From central banking to dual use
As Rozhkova left the NBU in 2025, she was replaced by Sergiy Nikolaychuk, as first deputy governor for financial stability. Previously focused on monetary policy, he had been one of the architects of inflation targeting.
Nikolaychuk represents the central bank’s monetary wing – the one Rozhkova often disagreed with, according to a source familiar with internal discussions.
“Her position often differed from that of the Monetary Policy Department… though it always helped the discussion. If there was ever one board member who voiced a dissenting view… it was usually Rozhkova, or one or two other persons,” the source said.
Even as Rozhkova walked to the Kyiv Post office, she argued that the NBU should revert from three-month to two-week deposit certificates – something Nikolaychuk did not anticipate would change during the NBU briefing in September 2025.
Some aspects of Rozhkova’s career, before and during the NBU, may never be fully answered. But she led the team that turned a hole-ridden banking system into an institution able to withstand scenarios bankers never imagined in their toughest stress tests.
She will now redirect her expertise to teaching monetary policy at the Kyiv School of Economics and advising Deputy Minister of Defense of Ukraine Hanna Hvozdiar, Rozhkova told Kyiv Post.
Her new mission? To find ways to boost investment in Ukraine’s dual-use sector, so that Ukrainian innovations can attract the vital financing they need.