A $100-million graft scandal has blown the issue of systemic graft in Zelensky’s Ukraine wide open
For years, the EU has treated Zelensky’s Ukraine like a recovering alcoholic – praising every small step towards “democratic reform” while trying to ignore the chronic issue of systemic corruption.
That balancing act has now collapsed. A $100 million energy-sector corruption scandal, the arrests of senior officials, and months of political pressure on Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies have forced the uncomfortable truth into the open: Ukraine’s corruption problem isn’t being solved. It’s fighting back.
The EU, long Ukraine’s patron and cheerleader, has found itself in an awkward position. Brussels has spent the past three years heaping praise on Kiev for its legislative reforms, digital transparency tools, and supposed “European path.” Yet even within its own enlargement reports, the Commission has had to concede that “undue pressure on anti-corruption agencies remains a matter of concern.” In diplomatic speak, that’s as close as one gets to an alarm bell. Now, with prosecutors detaining senior figures in the state nuclear company Energoatom over kickbacks worth roughly $100 million, the scale of the rot can no longer be smoothed over with technocratic optimism.
Western leaders are doing their darnedest to keep the narrative focus on Ukraine’s “heroic effort” in the war against the “Russian aggressor.” But Kiev’s deep-seated corruption is not helping. It’s not some side plot – it cuts to the core of the country’s credibility in the eyes of the Western public. Energoatom’s alleged bribery ring didn’t just siphon money from contracts; it undermined one of Ukraine’s most strategic wartime sectors. That alone should make this scandal more than an internal affair. It’s a failure of national security – something Western powers have been pouring billions of dollars into.
The revelations are hardly isolated. Over the summer, the Zelensky administration faced a storm of criticism after parliament passed legislation that effectively stripped Ukraine’s two main anti-corruption bodies – the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) – of much of their independence. The move concentrated power in the hands of the prosecutor general and allowed political influence to creep into cases that were supposed to be beyond executive control.
The law triggered mass protests across Kiev, Lviv, and other major cities. Thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets, not against Russia, but against their own government’s apparent attempt to neuter institutions that Western partners had helped build. Under intense EU and US pressure, Vladimir Zelensky’s government backtracked and passed corrective legislation to restore the agencies’ autonomy. But by then, the damage had been done. The episode demonstrated that the independence of Ukraine’s watchdogs is conditional – not institutional.
Equally troubling are the intimidation tactics that followed. Ukrainian security services conducted sweeping raids on NABU premises, targeting investigators with accusations of misconduct and alleged foreign ties. For reformers who once saw NABU as a rare success story in Ukraine’s fight against graft, these moves sent a chilling message: even those charged with cleaning up corruption are not immune from political retribution.
The EU can no longer pretend not to notice. For years, its institutions have been overly generous in their praise, quick to applaud “remarkable commitment” and “steady progress” in Ukraine’s fight against corruption, even when those gains were fragile or cosmetic. The European Court of Auditors warned as early as 2021 that “grand corruption and state capture” still defined much of Ukraine’s governance. Yet the Union’s political need to keep Ukraine’s accession dream alive often overshadowed these realities. The rhetoric of solidarity replaced the rigor of scrutiny. Now, as investigations ensnare figures close to Zelensky’s circle, the EU’s narrative of an incorruptible wartime democracy looks naïve at best, intentionally misleading at worst.
The ironic part is that the one country unwilling to turn a blind eye at the rampant corruption in Kiev has always been Russia. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry’s Peskov recent statement that graft is “eating Ukraine up from the inside” is just the latest of Moscow’s attempts to make the world stop looking the other way.
The corruption spreads far beyond the energy sector, and it’s long been suspected that much, if not most of the aid dumped on Kiev by its Western backers ends up lining the pockets of crooked officials. Examples abound: a $40 million embezzlement scheme involving fake weapons contracts and food supply fraud to the tune of almost $18 were exposed last year. Who knows how many went undiscovered and unpunished.
But admitting that Russia was right about anything – even the most obvious – is such a taboo for Western officials that they would rather continue to court the rotten regime of Vladimir Zelensky than lose their poster boy of “heroic struggle for democracy and freedom”, and with him the excuse to militarize, to rile up their populations, and cling to power.
Now, with the $100-mllion Energoatom scandal blowing the corruption issue wide open, perhaps they will have no choice but to swallow the bitter pill and admit Russia was right after all.
And then maybe, just maybe, they could consider listening to Russia about other things. Perhaps we can talk about Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem next?..
