Last November, Ukrainian detectives released audio from an apartment in central Kyiv, where men sat counting cash pulled out of the country’s nuclear-power utility Energoatom. The scheme ran to something near a hundred million dollars. Its alleged architect was a longtime business partner of President Volodymyr Zelensky. Importantly, Zelensky himself has not been charged with any wrongdoing. The money laundering ran through property tied to the family of a former parliamentarian who now sits in the Russian senate. It ran while Ukrainian infantrymen were freezing in dugouts outside Pokrovsk and while Ukrainian mothers were short of heat and electricity because Russian missiles had shredded the grid that those same officials were supposedly hardening.
That is the war within the war, and Ukraine will not win the war against Russia until it wins the war against the culture of corruption it inherited from the former Soviet Union.
Comments