10 Hryven Pavlo Polubotok

Pavlo Polubotok served as acting Hetman of Left-Bank Ukraine from 1722 until his arrest by Peter the Great in 1723, charged with conspiring to secure Ukrainian autonomy from Russian imperial control. He died in the Peter and Paul Fortress in 1724, never tried, never released. The coin was issued as part of Ukraine's ongoing commemorative hetman series, which began in the 1990s as a deliberate exercise in reclaiming suppressed national historical memory following Soviet dissolution.

A persistent legend holds that Polubotok smuggled a vast gold reserve to London before his arrest, entrusted to the East India Company — a story that resurfaced in Ukrainian courts and diplomatic channels as recently as the 1990s. Entirely unverified, but it has never quite died.