Leonid Derkach

Leonid Vasyliovych Derkach (; 19 July 1939 – 14 January 2022) was a Soviet and Ukrainian politician, intelligence officer, and general who was Head of the Security Service of Ukraine from 22 April 1998 to 10 February 2001. Called the "Ukrainian Sorge" , he headed one of the five groups in the Dnipropetrovsk Mafia. (Of the Clan of Dnipropetrovsk, the Derkach group of Leonid and his son Andrii are close to the Leonid Kuchma group.) The Viktor Pinchuk group is a rival of the Derkach group. The Yulia Timoshenko group is a rival of the Kuchma group. The fifth group is the Privatbank group.

Both Leonid and Andrii Derkach were also close to Vadim Rabinovich as well as Semyon Mogilevich, , Leonid Minin, and Sergei Mikhailov, members of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Israeli mafias.

Career From 1957 to 1972, Derkach worked at the Soviet Rocket giant Yuzhmash in Dnipropetrovsk (today Dnipro). From 1958 to 1961, while he worked at Yuzhmash, he studied at the Dnepropetrovsk Mechinists Technical School. He was in the Soviet Army from 1961 to 1964. After graduation, he worked as a senior process engineer at Yuzhmash from 1970 to 1972.

Yuriy Kravchenko was an outspoken critic of both Derkach and Leonid Kuchma. According to Derkach in these recordings, Vladimir Putin is also very close to Mogilevich. Yevhen Marchuk was pivotal in having Derkach fired.

In 2005, the report of the ad hoc committee of the Ukrainian parliament investigating the murder concluded that Gongadze's murder had been organized by then President of Ukraine Kuchma and his Minister of the Interior Yuriy Kravchenko and that Derkach had been involved in the crimes.

He was a member of the 4th Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada (parliament), representing Ukraine's 36th electoral district in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast from 14 May 2002 until 25 May 2006.

Personal life and death His son, Andrii Derkach, who is also a Russian intelligence operative that graduated from the KGB's Dzerzhinsky Higher School now known as the FSB Academy, was a close ally to Rudy Giuliani during 2019 and 2020 for support of Donald Trump's Presidential campaign.

Derkach died on 14 January 2022, at the age of 82.