Zelensky covering up ‘dire’ frontline situation – Moscow

RT, Fri, 21 Nov 2025, https://www.rt.com/russia/628091-un-nebenzia-zelensky-ukraine/

Vladimir Zelensky has barred the Ukrainian military from admitting the loss of key towns to Russia, Moscow’s envoy to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, has said. This is being done to hide the actual situation on the ground in the hopes that the flow of Western aid to Kiev remains unhindered, he suggested.

On Thursday, the chief of Russia’s General Staff, Valery Gerasimov,told President Vladimir Putin that Russian forces have liberated the key logistics hub of Kupyansk in Ukraine’s Kharkov Region.

The Ukrainian General Staff, however, has claimed that the city remains under the control of Kiev’s troops.

Zelensky had previously denied the encirclement of Ukrainian forces in Kupyansk and as well as in Dmitrov-Krasnoarmeysk (Mirnograd-Pokrovsk), an urban area in Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), accusing Moscow of exaggerating its gains on the battlefield.

During his speech at a UN Security Council meeting on Thursday, Nebenzia insisted:

“The situation on the front line for Ukraine “remains dire, if not catastrophic. Russian troops are successfully advancing on essentially all fronts.

“Despite the encirclement of a significant number of Ukrainian troops, massive losses, forced mobilization, and threats to civilians, the head of the Kiev regime forbids acknowledging the loss of cities, orders his troops to hold their positions ‘until the last soldier,’ and bans retreat.

“The policy pursued by the Kiev government has nothing to do with military reality and is purely political in nature. Zelensky wants to show his Western sponsors that the front is holding, because he counts on continued funding for his war with Russia. He needs billions of dollars to keep the war going for him and his cronies to line their pockets and stay in power.“

Last week, the Western-backed National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) announced a probe into a “high-level criminal organization” allegedly led by Timur Mindich, a former business partner of Zelensky. Its members are suspected of siphoning around $100 million in kickbacks from state-owned nuclear operator Energoatom.

The graft scandal has led to the sacking of Ukraine’s energy and justice ministers, with other prominent figures such as Zelensky’s right-hand man, Andrey Yermak, and the head of the National Security Council Rustem Umerov also being linked to the scheme.

November 24, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets,lies and civil liberties, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Ukraine’s energy sector corruption crisis – what we know so far and who was involved.

Luke Harding, 19 Nov 25,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/19/ukraine-energy-sector-corruption-crisis

Anti-corruption investigators allege high-level kickback scheme involving Energoatom

Ukraine’s national anti-corruption bureau, known as Nabu, says it has uncovered a high-level criminal scheme at the heart of government. It involves Ukraine’s nuclear energy body, Energoatom, that runs three nuclear power plants supplying Ukraine with more than half of its electricity.

What is the scandal?

A group of insiders allegedly received kickbacks of 10-15% from Energoatom’s commercial partners. If these suppliers failed to pay up, they were removed from a list of approved counter-parties or not reimbursed for services already given. About $100m (£76m) was received in this way, Nabu says.

The alleged conspiracy had old-school touches. Its beneficiaries used code names for each other, such as “Professor”, “Karlson” and “Sugarman”. They carried blocks of cash around Kyiv in large and unwieldy bags, sometimes delivering it on foot. On one occasion, a plotter allegedly sent his wife to collect a stash of dollars, which she hid in her car.

Who was involved?

The alleged organiser of the scheme is Timur Mindich, an old friend and business partner of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Mindich co-founded Kvartal 95, the media production company set up by Zelenskyy before he went into politics.

Last week he fled his apartment in Kyiv’s government district hours before Nabu investigators came to arrest him, escaping abroad. He is now thought to be hiding in Israel.

Other alleged participants include Ukraine’s ex-deputy prime minister Oleksiy Chernyshov, who is already under suspicion in a separate case; the justice minster, Herman Halushchenko, and his protege, the energy minister, Svitlana Hrynchuk, who were both fired. All deny wrongdoing. At least three other backroom figures allegedly took part.

How have the public reacted?

With fury. Over the autumn, Russia has destroyed much of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, leading to widespread and worsening blackouts. The hum of pavement generators has become a feature of everyday life, with electricity and heating supplies frequently interrupted. Meanwhile, Russian troops are advancing in the south and east after nearly four years of full-scale war.

In one conversation collected by Nabu in its 15-month investigation a suspect said it was a “pity” to build a structure to defend power stations from Russian bomb attacks since the money could be stolen instead. Chernyshov allegedly spent some of the illicit cash on four luxury mansions in a new-build riverside plot south of Kyiv.

The investigation, which has 1,000 hours of secretly recorded conversations, has been dubbed Operation Midas. The name seemingly refers to Mindich’s apartment, which features a gold toilet in the bathroom.

How far does the corruption go?

The big unanswered question. Was Mindichgate, as it has been called, a one-off? Or one of many similar insider schemes?

Zelenskyy has condemned the scandal, slapped sanctions on Mindich and stripped him of his Ukrainian citizenship. “The president of a country at war cannot have friends,” he said last week after the news broke. He has called for investigations to run their course and for those found guilty to be punished and put behind bars. In July, however – while the Midas investigation was active – Zelenskyy had signed a decree effectively stripping Nabu and the special prosecutor’s office, another anti-corruption agency, of their independence and only backed down after the most serious street protests since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion.

Nabu has indicated that the scandal extends to the defence ministry, where Mindich was involved in pursuing lucrative state contracts. And possibly banking, where he also had connections.

What happens next?

The affair is Ukraine’s biggest corruption scandal since Zelenskyy became president six-and-a-half years ago. Civil society activists, opposition MPs and prominent military veterans have urged him to take decisive action, even if that means the sacking and jailing of people who are personally known to him. The former president Petro Poroshenko has called for the current cabinet to be sacked and for a government of national unity to be formed. This is unlikely to happen. Poroshenko was himself embroiled in a defence procurement scandal, which played a role in his 2019 defeat to Zelenskyy, who promised to clean up public life.

Political commentators say corruption is the result of “mono-government”: the fact that Zelenskyy and his allies enjoy sweeping wartime powers under martial law. No elections can be held while fighting continues. The revelations have also dismayed Ukraine’s western partners and emboldened its enemies. Worst of all, there appears to be a connection with Moscow. According to Nabu, the kickbacks were funnelled through a Kyiv back office connected to the family of Andriy Derkach, a former Ukrainian politician who is now a pro-Kremlin Russian senator. Some cash ended up in Russia, the tapes suggest.

Is there an upside?

Of sorts. Some observers think the fact the scandal emerged at all is proof that Ukraine is slowly moving in the right direction – towards European norms and away from gloomy Soviet-style kleptocracy. Oleksandr Abakumov, the head of Nabu’s investigating team, acknowledged his colleagues had “faced a lot of obstacles” pursuing the Mindich case. But he stressed: “This isn’t a story about corruption in Ukraine. It’s about how the country is struggling with corruption, fighting with corruption.”

November 22, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets,lies and civil liberties, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Zelensky remains a creature of the corruption plaguing Ukraine.

A small number of oligarchs still possess outsized power in all spheres of business and politics. But the truth is moving in mysterious ways.

Ian Proud, Nov 18, 2025, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/ukraine-corruption/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The $100 million corruption scandal around Ukraine’s energy system that broke this past week is critical to ordinary Ukrainians for its timing. Russia has been bombarding the country’s energy infrastructure on a daily basis to deny ordinary citizens heat and electricity during the cold and dark winter months.

In November 2024, a separate scandal broke that $1.6 billion set aside to build protective bunkers around electricity sub-stations had not led to any being built.

With this in mind, many have responded that the highly publicized nature of this latest scandal, which resulted in the resignations of both the energy and justice ministers, offers visible proof that progress is being made in tackling corruption in Ukraine. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) of Ukraine, which is often at the spearhead of such investigations, was first established by Presidential Decree in April 2015. That it continues to function is indeed a positive sign.

It’s not possible, however, to claim that corruption has emerged as a specifically wartime phenomena. This energy scandal is hardly a one-off. In September 2021, with Zelensky having already been in power for two and a half years, the European Court of Auditors reported that state corruption and capture were still widespread in Ukraine. It pointed out that “tens of billions of Euros are lost annually as a result of corruption,” and that EU support delivered over 20 years had not delivered the desired results.

Since Russia invaded in 2022, Ukraine has been flooded with hundreds of billions of dollars of aid, of a much greater value than its yearly economic output. The United States has been unable to accurately account for the billions it has sent there. No country at this point would be able to assure itself that its funds have been spent well.

The scale of each new corruption scandal has seemingly grown over time. In August 2023, Zelensky sacked all the heads of the regional military recruitment offices following widespread complaints about kick-backs, often bribes to let potential recruits escape military service. In September 2023, Ukraine’s Defense Minister, Oleksii Reznikov, resigned following a procurement scandal related to the marking up the cost of purchased body armour and helmets by 4-5 times. In January 2024, Ukrainian defense officials were arrested over the theft of $40 million, related to an order for 100,000 artillery shells that were never delivered.

To date, President Volodymyr Zelensky has been able to keep Western donors off his back through a sacking here or a prosecution there. What has changed this year is that the erstwhile NABU investigators have been gradually nudging closer to his inner circle.

In July of this year, as the noose was closing around his close ally former Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Chernyshov because of a large-scale property fraud, Zelensky made a failed attempt to hobble NABU and bring it under his personal control. As it turns out, Chernyshov has also been implicated in the current $100m energy scandal, with NABU detectives documenting the transfer of an estimated $1.3 million in cash to him and an associate. On 14 November, NABU sought an order for pre-trial detention of Chernyshov.

Timur Mindich, the man at the centre of the current scandal, is a close ally of Zelensky and co-founded the TV company ‘Kvartal 95’ with him. He was allowed to flee the country before the NABU raids, which discovered duffel bags stuffed with cash and a golden toilet. It hasn’t been lost on some commentators that, in 2014, the ousted President Yanukovych was also alleged to have possessed a toilet made of gold.

Which provides another reminder that, stepping back from the canvas, not much has really changed in Ukraine over the past decade. I first met an anti-corruption activist in Kyiv in late 2015, at the foot of the postcard perfect Andriivsky descent in the quaint Lviv Handmade Chocolate Café. Approaching two years after the ouster of Yanukovych, she was visibly distressed that little progress had been made in tackling corruption. Within weeks, the government of Arseny Yatseniuk faced a no-confidence vote over a slew of corruption scandals involving figures close to him that led, ultimately, to his resignation in February 2016.

In the midst of that scandal, Vice President Joe Biden visited Kyiv in a bid to shore up the government, anxious that Ukraine might not be able to form a better coalition than the one in power. “Corruption siphons away resources from the people. It blunts economic growth, and it affronts human dignity. We know that. You know that. The Ukrainian people know that,” Biden said.

For many ordinary Ukrainians, who protested peacefully in the Maidan in late 2013, rooting out corruption was at the core of the so-called “revolution of dignity.” Biden’s 2015 visit was an attempt to paper over the cracks, and close down moves to unsettle the pro-western government. Yet the endemic corruption carried on.

When it released its recent report on EU accession states, the European Commission noted Ukraine’s remarkable commitment to its EU path. However, it downgraded its assessment to B grade, expressing concern about progress in tackling corruption. As with the 2015 Biden visit it was, I fear, another example of papering over the cracks of a much bigger problem.

The vertical of power in Ukraine, in which a small number of oligarchs possess outsized power in all spheres of business and politics, remains largely unchanged to this day. Zelensky has emerged as a creature of that system, having both clashed and aligned himself with different oligarchs at different times. With presidential elections paused, there are fewer constitutional checks and balances on his power than before the war. And for all its excellent work, NABU is not yet powerful enough to break the system.

There is a persuasive case to make that ending the war and turning off the gravy train would make it easier for Ukraine’s future leaders to refocus on the path to European membership. This would require real and measurable reform. It’s possibly for this reason that public support for an end to the war continues to grow along with outrage at every new case of graft by cronies close to Zelensky. But it may also help to explain why he is in no hurry to see the war end.

November 22, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets,lies and civil liberties, Ukraine | Leave a comment