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Let’s start with this piece by Seymour “Sy” Hersh:

CIA aware of widespread corruption in Ukraine, embezzlement of US aid, claims Seymour Hersh

The issue of corruption was raised during a meeting between CIA Director William Burns and Zelensky in January

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. AP

New Delhi: Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has published a report that alleged the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was aware of widespread corruption in Ukraine and the embezzlement of US aid.

The report said the Ukrainian government has been using US taxpayer money to purchase diesel from Russia to fuel its military. The report further suggested that Ukrainian officials are also “competing” to set up front companies for export contracts to private arms dealers around the world.

The issue of corruption was raised during a meeting between CIA Director William Burns and Zelensky in January. An intelligence official with direct knowledge of the meeting told Hersh that Burns delivered a stunning message to Zelensky.

Hersh wrote: “The senior generals and government officials in Kiev were angry at what they saw as Zelensky’s greed, so Burns told the Ukrainian president, because ‘he was taking a larger share of the skim money than was going to the generals.’”

The Pentagon Leaks

Over the past few weeks, several classified documents, some even marked “top secret”, found their way on the internet.

The intelligence leak is shaping up to be one of the most damaging in decades, officials said.

But what exactly has been revealed in the documents? The leaked documents offer a very tantalising and unique view of the Russia-Ukraine war, which began in February 2022. The cache of documents reveal that Ukraine is suffering heavy losses in the war, especially in Bakhmut. It also outlines the “critical shortages of air defense munitions”.

The documents also included training schedules of 12 Ukraine combat brigades, revealing that nine of them were being trained by US and NATO forces, and needed 250 tanks and more than 350 mechanised vehicles. They also include details of expenditure rates for munitions under Ukraine military control, including the HIMARS rocket systems.

The leaked documents also reveal how deeply Russia’s security and intelligence services have been penetrated by the United States. The documents contain daily real-time warnings to US intelligence agencies on the timing of Moscow’s strikes and even its specific targets. This has enabled Washington to prepare Kyiv for the attacks and its defence.

The leaks also seem to indicate that the United States is also spying on Ukraine’s top military and political leaders. And the spying doesn’t stop there. The leaked documents have also shown that Washington is spying on its allies — something that could hurt US diplomatically.

The leaked documents revealed that South Korea, a key ally of the US, is torn about supplying ammunition to Ukraine. This is because of its official policy of not providing lethal weapons to countries at war.

Ukraine’s long battle with corruption

Widespread systemic corruption is steeped in Ukraine long before Russia’s invasion last February.

A 2016 report by the watchdog group Transparency International found that between 38 per cent to 42 per cent of Ukrainian households said they paid bribes to access basic public services such as education or healthcare, reported Time.

Al Jazeera noted that year Ukraine was the second most corrupt nation in Europe, with Russia being the most corrupt at 136.

Ukraine performed slightly better and was placed in 116th position out of 180 nations in the 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index released on Tuesday (31 January). Russia was ranked 137th on the index.

“Unfortunately, this type of widespread systemic corruption is complicated to tackle and requires sustained efforts for at least a generation or even more,” Cristian Nitoiu, a lecturer in diplomacy and international governance at Loughborough University, told Al Jazeera in June last year.

“The legacy of the Soviet Union plays an important role, as citizens had to learn how to navigate a system of informal relations and rules, where everyone had equal rights on paper, but in practice, some people were more ‘equal’ than others”.

“These developments are not unique to Ukraine, as most post-Soviet and Communist countries experienced them, including Russia, but Ukraine, alongside Moldova, were extreme cases,” Nitoiu explained further.

With inputs from agencies

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WAR ROOM COLD OPEN

Oh, there’s more…

The Ukraine government, headed by Volodymyr Zelensky, has been using American taxpayers’ funds to pay dearly for the vitally needed diesel fuel that is keeping the Ukrainian army on the move in its war with Russia. It is unknown how much the Zelensky government is paying per gallon for the fuel, but the Pentagon was paying as much as $400 per gallon to transport gasoline from a port in Pakistan, via truck or parachute, into Afghanistan during the decades-long American war there.

What also is unknown is that Zelensky has been buying the fuel from Russia, the country with which it, and Washington, are at war, and the Ukrainian president and many in his entourage have been skimming untold millions from the American dollars earmarked for diesel fuel payments. One estimate by analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency put the embezzled funds at $400 million last year, at least; another expert compared the level of corruption in Kiev as approaching that of the Afghan war, “although there will be no professional audit reports emerging from the Ukraine.”

“Zelensky’s been buying discount diesel from the Russians,” one knowledgeable American intelligence official told me. “And who’s paying for the gas and oil? We are. Putin and his oligarchs are making millions” on it.

Many government ministries in Kiev have been literally “competing,” I was told, to set up front companies for export contracts for weapons and ammunition with private arms dealers around the world, all of which provide kickbacks. Many of those companies are in Poland and Czechia, but others are thought to exist in the Persian Gulf and Israel. “I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are others in places like the Cayman Islands and Panama, and there are lots of Americans involved,” an American expert on international trade told me. 

The issue of corruption was directly raised with Zelensky in a meeting last January in Kiev with CIA Director William Burns. His message to the Ukrainian president, I was told by an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the meeting, was out of a 1950s mob movie. The senior generals and government officials in Kiev were angry at what they saw as Zelensky’s greed, so Burns told the Ukrainian president, because “he was taking a larger share of the skim money than was going to the generals.” 

Burns also presented Zelensky with a list of thirty-five generals and senior officials whose corruption was known to the CIA and others in the American government. Zelensky responded to the American pressure ten days later by publicly dismissing ten of the most ostentatious officials on the list and doing little else. “The ten he got rid of were brazenly bragging about the money they had—driving around Kiev in their new Mercedes,” the intelligence official told me.