Good morning. President Trump was the host of the Kennedy Center Honors last night, an event he once shunned. China’s trade surplus officially surpassed $1 trillion, an excess of exports to imports that no country had ever reached. And Volodymyr Zelensky plans to meet with European leaders today. Let’s start there, with Ukraine, and look at how a corruption scandal is testing the government.
Corruption chaos“Is it possible to become president and not steal?” Volodymyr Zelensky asked before he became president of Ukraine in 2019. “It’s a rhetorical question, as no one has tried so far.” Now his top advisers are tangled in a graft investigation. It threatens his popularity and his government — all while Russia advances on the battlefield and President Trump pushes a peace plan that favors Moscow. A New York Times investigation details how that happened. The allegationsUkrainian investigators say that a criminal organization led by Zelensky’s former business partner embezzled $100 million from the country’s publicly owned nuclear power company, Energoatom. Even as Ukrainians endured blackouts caused by Russian bombing, members of the president’s inner circle skimmed money from Energoatom contracts. Here’s how the scheme worked: Energoatom awarded contracts to get work done. Then, a criminal group that included Energoatom employees and a former government adviser demanded that the recipients quietly give them up to 15 percent of those funds — basically after-the-fact bribes if they wanted to keep getting paid. New detailsWhen the war began, Ukraine’s Western allies wanted to figure out how to send money to Kyiv without seeing it vanish into the pockets of corrupt officials. To protect the money, they insisted that Zelensky’s government allow groups of outside experts, known as supervisory boards, to work as watchdogs. But the Ukrainian government has sabotaged that oversight, allowing corruption to flourish, the Times investigation found. Zelensky’s administration stacked the supervisory boards with loyalists, left seats empty or prevented boards from being set up at all. Leaders in Kyiv even rewrote various company charters to limit oversight, which allowed the government to spend hundreds of millions of dollars without outsiders asking questions about where that money was going. Zelensky has blamed Energoatom’s supervisory board for failing to stop the corruption. But, according to documents and interviews with officials, it was the government itself that prevented the board from doing its job. Zelensky’s roleZelensky himself has not been directly implicated in the corruption. But his policies may have enabled it. After Russia’s invasion, Zelensky relaxed anti-corruption rules in the name of boosting the war effort. He worked with political and business figures he had once called criminals, and, this summer, he tried to curtail the independence of anticorruption investigators as they pursued the case that ultimately implicated his associates. (He reversed course after Ukrainians poured into the streets in the country’s first large antigovernment protests during the war, saying that Zelensky was threatening Ukraine’s fragile democracy.) In the course of the investigation, Zelensky asked for the resignation of two ministers and his powerful chief of staff, Andriy Yermak. A backlashThe scandal has thrown Zelensky’s government into chaos. Political opponents are coalescing around the first major anti-Zelensky movement since the Russian invasion began. And Yermak, now gone, had been running the country’s peace negotiations with Trump and others. It’s an awkward situation for Ukraine’s supporters abroad. They saw a smaller nation stand up to a larger bully that wants to tear it apart. It’s difficult to cast the victim as virtuous, though, when its government is engulfed in a corruption scandal. Let’s be clear: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had nothing to do with a domestic graft scandal. But the corruption does make it harder to tell a simplistic story about justice. More on Ukraine
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