In Ukraine, 50 of the 478 individuals registered as owners or beneficiaries of at least 50 companies have addresses in the temporarily occupied territories or in areas of active combat. These findings are contained in a study by the analytical service “OpenDataBot,” published on October 26, 2026, based on data from the Unified State Register.
According to the study, 42 mass owners of companies have registered addresses in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. This represents nearly one in ten people on the overall list.
The largest number of such entries are in the Donetsk region—17—and the Luhansk region—16.
Another five mass owners are registered at addresses in Crimea, and four in the Kherson region.
The largest number of businesses among individuals with addresses in the temporarily occupied territories is linked to Ruslan Merzlyakov of Donetsk, who is listed as the owner or beneficiary of 2,221 companies.
He also ranks second in the overall Ukrainian ranking of mass owners of businesses.
Next in this group is David Stepanyan from Mariupol, who is linked to 205 companies.
Third is Yevgeny Gasyukov from the city of Khrustalny in the Luhansk region, under whose name 171 companies are registered.
Separately, analysts identified eight mass owners with registered addresses in areas of active hostilities.
Two such addresses were recorded in each of the Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions.
The largest number of companies in this category is linked to Yuriy Terekhov from Kherson—275 enterprises.
He is followed by Sergey Khmelevsky from Nikopol in the Dnipropetrovsk region, with 255 companies, and Dmitry Zakhoda from Kherson, with 152 enterprises.
In total, the registered addresses of 50 major owners are linked to territories that are under Russian occupation or are located in zones of active hostilities.
At the same time, the authors of the study specifically note that an owner’s legal address does not necessarily correspond to the location where their enterprises actually conduct business.
Thus, the presence of a registered address in an occupied territory does not indicate that all enterprises associated with the individual in question continue to operate under occupation.
Furthermore, the registry data alone does not allow for determining the actual location of a specific owner or drawing conclusions about their activities in Russian-controlled territory.
As Miroslav Laba, a tax and regulatory policy specialist at the Economic Expert Platform, notes, a large number of companies linked to a single individual can create additional risks for management transparency and tax oversight.
According to him, the use of nominee owners is one of the risk factors that requires attention from regulatory authorities.
At the same time, the expert emphasizes that owning a large number of companies is not, in and of itself, a violation of the law.
As of October 2026, there were a total of 478 mass company owners in Ukraine. The leader of the national ranking is Kyiv resident Vitaliy Ilnitsky, who is linked to 5,889 legal entities.
Source: “OpenDataBot,” study “478 Mass Owners of Companies in Ukraine,” October 26, 2026.
