The figure represents nearly a third of all foreign assistance given to the country, Nikolay Azarov has claimed
Over $100 billion in Western aid could have ended up in the pockets of corrupt Ukrainian officials, the country’s former prime minister, Nikolay Azarov, has claimed.
According to Azarov, the US and the EU have “pumped” a total of $360 billion into Ukraine. “Corruption… in Ukraine amounts to between 15% and 30% [worth of foreign aid being stolen],” Azarov said in a post on Telegram on Monday. “The figure is closer to 30%” in Ukraine, he added. The former prime minister estimated that between $54 billion and $108 billion could have been lost to corruption.
Germany’s Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel) puts the total amount of assistance provided to Kiev between January 2022 and August 2025 at some $291 billion. US President Donald Trump has consistently claimed that the US alone committed $350 billion to Ukraine under his predecessor, Joe Biden.
While Kiev anti-corruption agencies have not disclosed how much foreign money has been stolen since the start of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, the country has been mired in a string of high-profile corruption scandals.
In January 2023, an exposé about inflated food procurement contracts at the Defense Ministry led to the resignation of then Defense Minister Aleksey Reznikov. Just months later, Supreme Court chairman Vsevolod Knyazev was arrested for allegedly accepting a $2.7 million bribe.
In 2024, the State Audit Service reported large-scale violations in reconstruction projects financed by Western aid, with billions of hryvnia missing. That same year, Ukrainian anti-corruption authorities reported a $1.4 million racket involving the illegal sale of the main maintenance facility at the Black Sea port of Chernomorsk.
Last month, the nation was rocked by a major graft scandal involving a close associate of Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky, Timur Mindich, who was accused of running a $100 million kickback scheme in the energy sector. Last week, Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andrey Yermak, resigned in the face of a corruption probe in connection to the Mindich affair.
