Zelensky ‘systematically sabotaged’ Ukraine anti-corruption efforts: Report

Close associates of Zelensky recently fled to Israel amid allegations of a $100 million corruption scheme

News Desk, DEC 6, 2025, https://thecradle.co/articles/zelensky-systematically-sabotaged-ukraine-anti-corruption-efforts

Over the past four years, the Ukrainian government “systematically sabotaged” oversight of the country’s state-owned companies and weapons procurement processes, “allowing graft to flourish,” a New York Times (NYT) investigation published on 6 December has revealed.

The investigation details how the government of Volodymyr Zelensky sidelined outside experts from the US and EU serving on advisory boards responsible for monitoring spending, appointing executives, and preventing corruption.

“President Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration has stacked boards with loyalists, left seats empty, or stalled them from being set up at all. Leaders in Kiev even rewrote company charters to limit oversight, keeping the government in control and allowing hundreds of millions of dollars to be spent without outsiders poking around,” the NYT report says.

The investigation was published amid a corruption scandal centering on close associates of the Ukrainian president.

Anti-corruption authorities have accused members of Zelensky’s inner circle of embezzling $100 million from the state-owned nuclear power company, Energoatom.

“Mr. Zelensky’s administration has blamed Energoatom’s supervisory board for failing to stop the corruption. But it was Mr. Zelensky’s government itself that neutered Energoatom’s supervisory board,” the NYT writes.

The investigation also found that Zelensky sidelined the supervisory boards of the state-owned electricity company Ukrenergo and Ukraine’s Defense Procurement Agency.

European leaders have justified funneling billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to Ukraine despite knowledge of the systematic corruption and theft plaguing the country.

“We do care about good governance, but we have to accept that risk,” said Christian Syse, the special envoy to Ukraine from Norway.

“Because it’s war. Because it’s in our own interest to help Ukraine financially. Because Ukraine is defending Europe from Russian attacks,” he added.

Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, resigned late last month amid the Energoatom corruption scandal and just hours after police raided his home.

Ukrainska Pravda reported that he had left for Israel, of which he is a citizen, just hours before the raid.

Yermak is widely considered the second-most-powerful official in the country, with influence over domestic politics, military issues, and foreign policy, Axios noted.

Businessman Timur Mindich, who co-founded the entertainment company Kvartal 95 with Zelensky, allegedly led the embezzlement scheme.

Mindich also escaped to Israel, where he enjoys citizenship, hours before a separate raid on his luxury apartment by police from the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU).

“Timur had an apartment with golden toilets that was in the same building as Zelensky’s,” a former Ukrainian government official told Fox News.

December 10, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets,lies and civil liberties, Ukraine | Leave a comment

The Story They Forgot to Tell: Ten Years of Ukraine’s Corruption and the Media’s Convenient Timeline

The original of this article shows clear examples of mainstream media coverage of corruption, and also gives telling case studies

How the NYT’s latest “exposé” framing collapses when you place Ukraine’s graft in its full post-coup 2014–2024 context — and why MSM remembers corruption only when it fits partisan politics.

Gregor Jankovič, DD Geopolitics, Dec 08, 2025

When the New York Times ran its December investigation into how Kiev “sabotaged oversight” and allowed a $100-million corruption scheme to take root in state energy firms, many readers saw it as a stinging indictment of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government — and of the geopolitical consequences of a U.S. retreat. That was the intended reading. But placed against a fuller decade-long record, the NYT narrative looks less like an objective accounting and more like a carefully timed political frame: corruption is old and structural in Ukraine, and it has been tolerated, overlooked, and sometimes protected by Western patrons for years — through multiple U.S. administrations. For evidence of this, we need to look back. It was all reported.

The 2014 “reforms” — impressive on paper, weak in practice

After the Maidan coup (2013–14), Kyiv adopted a series of legal reforms and created new institutions, under pressure from Washington and Brussels — the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), anti-corruption prosecutors (SAP), and a push for “independent” supervisory boards at state companies. Western donors loudly backed these moves and conditioned assistance on these newly formed “watchdog structures”.

These reforms looked impressive on paper.

In reality:

• 
  The institutions were funded by the West but controlled through political appointments.
• The supervisory boards were symbolic, frequently ignored, or never fully seated.
• Oligarchs shifted from Yanukovych-style control to a networked, distributed corruption model.
• The existing Ukrainian oligarchic network simply adapted to them, rather than collapsed or lose its hold over the national economy.

Even the EU Court of Auditors admitted in 2016:

“No meaningful progress. Political interference everywhere.”

The NYT now pretends these same paper-thin structures were once strong, credible, and functioning — until Trump broke them.

2017–2020: “Under Trump, Corruption Survives” — but Oversight Was Never Real

Trump’s first term did not “destroy” Ukrainian anti-corruption systems. They never worked to begin with.
Throughout these years:

• The EU repeatedly warned of massive political interference in SOEs.
• The IMF froze loan tranches over corruption concerns.
• Poroshenko used “anti-corruption bodies” as political weapons.
• Supervisory boards existed but were powerless and often ignored.

Trump didn’t weaken Ukrainian oversight.
Ukrainian elites never accepted it in the first place.

But acknowledging this would break the New York Times’ morality play — so the paper skips the entire era.

A notorious and in the Western MSM extremely suppressed story from this period was the case of the then ex-vice-president Joe Biden (tied to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma through his son Hunter Biden), related to his demanding for the removal of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in 2016:

Two years after leaving office, Joe Biden couldn’t resist the temptation last year to brag to an audience of foreign policy specialists about the time as vice president that he strong-armed Ukraine into firing its top prosecutor.

In his own words, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden recalled telling Poroshenko.

“Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time,” Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations event, insisting that President Obama was in on the threat.

The pattern was not unique to one administration: it was a systemic weakness of Ukrainian governance, which Western capitals tolerated because they preferred an obedient Kiev regime to the chaos of an un-governed vacuum – or even worse – an actual autonomous political leadership, acting in Ukraine’s national interest.

The practical effect: major contracts, procurement lines, and State-Owned Enterprises (SOE) budgets remained lucrative targets. (See EU/IMF concerns and internal audits.)

2021–2023: The Biden Years — Oversight Collapses Behind a Wall of Wartime Secrecy

This is the period NYT absolutely cannot afford to discuss honestly.

Under Biden:

• Western weapons deliveries lacked tracking mechanisms;
• The CBS documentary reporting that “only 30% of Western arms reach the front” was pressured into removal;
• The Ukrainian defense ministry’s food, fuel and procurement scandals exploded;
• Wartime laws classified nearly all budgetary and procurement data;
• Local and international NGOs documented the worst transparency regression since 2014;
• EU institutions quietly complained about “political capture” of state companies.

Biden’s approach was simple:
fund Ukraine massively, ask few questions, conceal accountability problems to maintain wartime unity.

The NYT now pretends this era was a model of transparency — but it was precisely the opposite.

The SMO did change incentives. Massive Western assistance flowed; governments were conveniently reluctant to publicly police Kiev for fear of weakening its war effort or Ukrainian morale. Wartime secrecy and emergency procurement rules further reduced transparency.

The most striking example was the CBS Documentary “Arming Ukraine” in 2022 suggesting that a surprisingly low share of Western weapons could be verified at frontline use — here is the original “unredacted” version:

The story raised alarms and was subsequently revised after huge diplomatic pushback – which was, of course, swept under the carpet. CBS exposed major tracking problems and distribution opacity in a wartime logistics nightmare of super-charging the Kiev junta’s military — and it was, “surprisingly”, quietly downplayed.

The bigger point: weapons tracking, procurement integrity, and transparency were problems long before any 2025 scandals surfaced.

The Editor’s note on the redacted CBS Reports story says it all:

Why military aid in Ukraine may not always get to the front lines

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Conclusion — What honest coverage would look like?

A responsible investigation would do three things simultaneously:

document concrete corruption cases and who profited;

trace the long arc (2014→2024) showing systemic weaknesses and donor complicity;

and evaluate how wartime necessities reshaped incentives and motives for both Kiev and its backers.

The NYT’s piece does the first well — but the rest of the story is too often left out of concrete framing and reduced to jabs at its political “enemy”.

Readers deserve unbiased coverage that resists tidy partisan narratives and accepts complexity:

Ukraine’s corruption is real, longstanding, and enabled as much by it’s Masters foreign policy choices as by local actors’ greed. https://ddgeopolitics.substack.com/p/the-story-they-forgot-to-tell-ten?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1769298&post_id=180977735&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

December 9, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets,lies and civil liberties, Ukraine | Leave a comment