This story is still breaking. New details emerge every day, officials are being fired, investigators are opening cases, and key figures are crossing borders. What follows is the most complete picture available as of early June 2026. Much more will come to light in the weeks ahead.
Sometime in November 2023, construction equipment moved into a forested area in the Baba Alino locality, between the Golden Sands resort and the Aladzha Monastery north of Varna. By May 2026, there were 104 buildings on the site: houses, apartments, infrastructure, all spread across 111 decares of what is officially registered as forest land inside a Natura 2000 protected zone. No building permits had been issued.
The story of how this happened is not really a story about one rogue investor. It is a story about how Bulgarian institutions across multiple governments, political parties, local government, national regulators, intelligence services, prosecutors, collectively failed to stop something that many of them knew about, and some of them may have actively helped along. And at the center of it all is a Ukrainian businessman from Odesa, a reversed expulsion order and a question nobody in power has yet answered publicly.
