But the graft that has long contaminated the country's political system unsettles Ukrainians far from the circles of power. "Huge corruption" is Ukraine's biggest problem, an 18-year-old at a Kyiv café told me bluntly. "I love Ukraine," she said — but she hesitates to give money to the military for fear a dishonest official will steal her donation. Earlier this year, investigative journalists revealed that the prices at which suppliers promised to deliver basics like potatoes and cabbage to Ukrainian troops were inflated two to three times beyond the purchase price reported to government tax officials....Before the war, Yermak came under fire for the air of corruption that seemed to surround him. In 2020, the Kyiv Post — in a scandal it dubbed "Yermakgate" ( https://archive.kyivpost.com/article/opinion/op-ed/bohdan-nahaylo-yermakgate-scandal-rocks-zelensky-administration.html) — reported on videos of Yermak's younger brother, Denys, appearing to discuss bribes in return for landing people jobs with the government and state-controlled companies. "Andriy Yermak insists he was not involved," ...Oligarchs have been deeply intertwined in Ukrainian politics ever since the fall of the Soviet Union three decades ago. The basic formula is simple. "A question of power is a question of money," Arestovych explained, "and a question of money is a question of power." The fancy term for this sleazy method of rule is "patronalism" — a feudal-like system in which rival clans, individually tied together by personal loyalties, predominate over the rule of law.Before Zelensky's rise to power, the business oligarchy in Ukraine, as in other post-Soviet countries, operated on a spoils system that amounted to might makes right. There was little incentive for an honest entrepreneur to launch a company with the knowledge that, with the company's success, one of the clans might muscle in on the venture and seize control, no matter what legal protections were on the books. As clan leaders became billionaires, through their capture of industrial and financial assets, Ukraine remained desperately poor, its wealth routinely pumped out of the country into offshore accounts. In 2018, the year before Zelensky's election, Ukraine ranked as the poorest country in Europe, with a GDP per capita income of just below $3,000 — 8% lower than that of Moldova, the second poorest....A decade later, on a second reporting trip to Odesa, I asked my Ukrainian companion for the name of the biggest owner of assets in the sprawling industrial city. The answer, he told me, was Ihor #Kolomoisky.Kolomoisky enjoyed a reputation as one of the most ruthless of the oligarchs in post-Soviet Ukraine. He had amassed substantial holdings in metals, banks, airlines, energy, and media. He was also connected to Zelensky: His 1+1 Media Group included a Ukrainian television channel that broadcast Zelensky's scripted shows and championed his run for the presidency. More than a few insiders in Kyiv's political, business, and media circles regarded Kolomoisky as the real victor of Zelensky's improbable triumph, the modern-day robber baron who would now run Ukraine behind his likable front man....Roman Ilto, another cosmopolitan type, works for the Swedish Embassy in Kyiv on energy and environmental issues. Unlike many critics of the oligarchs, he witnessed their rise firsthand. In the early 2000s, after studying at Harvard, he returned to Ukraine to work for a steel and mining company. That was his first exposure to "clan culture," he told me over breakfast at my hotel in central Kyiv. In those days, listening to the incessant talk about the rivalry between Kolomoisky and #Akhmetov, he began to understand oligarchs as the organizing principle of Ukrainian political and economic life. In 2016, he joined Ukrnafta, the state-controlled oil and natural-gas giant, and spent nearly seven years there, including stints as head of government relations and investor relations.Since the war began, Ilto said, control of the energy sector has been seized by a "nascent" oligarchic clan led by Yermak. Under a national security decree issued by Zelensky, the state had assumed full ownership of Ukrnafta and other strategically important companies....Ilto flagged another top Yermak deputy, Rostyslav #Shurma, who served the Akhmetov clan for years before assuming oversight of energy and other sectors of the economy for the Office for the President. Like Oleh #Tatarov, Shurma is cited in Kyiv circles as another cog in the Yermak machine. "He kind of acts as a cashier for Yermak and the Office of President," said an ex-Zelensky government official who declined to go on the record for fear, he said, of becoming a target of the Yermak team. In a lengthy September piece, Ukrainska Pravda portrayed Shurma as a mini-empire builder. The paper, which is owned by a private-equity firm headed by a Czech-born businessman who served on the board of Transparency International Ukraine, cited a "scandal" in which the state bought electricity from solar plants co-owned by Shurma's brother, even though the plants were no longer connected to the Ukraine energy grid. Asked by Time about the matter, Shurma called it a "piece of shit" thrown at him by Zelensky's political enemies....For #Biden, the issue of political corruption in Ukraine is both deeply familiar and especially thorny. As vice president, Biden handled the Ukraine portfolio for the Obama administration from 2009 to 2017. In 2015, a career State Department official raised concerns with a Biden aide that Hunter Biden's service on the board of the energy firm #Burisma could complicate President Barack Obama's efforts to prod Kyiv into battling corruption. But the official, who later related the story in closed-door testimony to Congress, said the aide told him Joe Biden did not have the "bandwidth" to deal with the matter involving his younger son as his older one, Beau, was dealing with cancer. It was a desire to dig up political dirt like this on Hunter Biden's activities in Ukraine that led Trump to threaten to withhold military aid to Ukraine, leading to his first impeachment. (The White House did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.)
