Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy is racing to contain the fallout from a high-level corruption scandal that could undermine his authority, just as his country’s soldiers and civilians face potentially their toughest winter of the war with Russia.
A week after anti-corruption investigators said they had smashed an alleged $100 million (€86 million) kickback scheme centred on state nuclear power firm Energoatom, the furore is still swirling around Zelenskiy even as Ukraine’s troops are under severe pressure on the battlefield and its ailing energy grid suffers nightly attacks.
After a Sunday morning meeting, Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Svyrydenko and Zelenskiy said they had decided on a raft of measures “to clean up and reboot the management of the energy sector and the institutions related to it”.
That came a day after he announced that energy firms would face “a full audit of their financial activities (and) the management of these companies is to be renewed.
“I have also instructed Government officials to maintain constant and meaningful communication with law enforcement and anti-corruption bodies,” he added.
“Any scheme uncovered in these companies must receive a swift and just response.”
Justice minister Herman Halushchenko and energy minister Svitlana Hrynchuk have resigned over the scandal, but more damaging for the president is the alleged involvement of businessman Timur Mindich, co-owner of the media company that Zelenskiy founded before entering politics in 2019.
Mindich reportedly fled Ukraine shortly before last Monday’s raids and arrests, and he has not publicly commented on the alleged corruption scandal, but Zelenskiy has imposed sanctions on him and another businessman implicated in the case and vowed that anyone caught stealing from state coffers will be punished.
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It is not clear whether further revelations could yet embroil Zelenskiy or more political allies, however.
The scandal has also reminded Ukrainians of how the president curbed the independence of the nation’s top anti-corruption agencies in July – before being forced to backtrack by street protests and international criticism – in what critics called a brazen attempt to shield associates from scrutiny.
It threatens to become the biggest political crisis of the war for Zelenskiy, and comes at a time when Ukrainian troops are under severe pressure in parts of four regions – Donetsk, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk.
Meanwhile, fierce fighting continues in the small city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk region, where Kyiv’s outnumbered forces are engaged in street fighting and intense drone warfare to keep supply lines open and avert the threat of encirclement, and in Kupiansk in Kharkiv region – but the situation in both sectors has not fundamentally changed for weeks.
An area of rapidly growing concern for Kyiv is the Zaporizhzhia region, where Russia claimed on Sunday to have taken two more villages as it threatens to advance on the severely damaged towns of Huliaipole and Orikhiv.
In a rare admission of battlefield setbacks, the Ukrainian military acknowledged in recent days that it had withdrawn from several villages in the region.
The front line is less than 30km (18.6 miles) from Zaporizhzhia city, which Zelenskiy described as “key” when he visited troops in the sector last week: “The enemy, of course, wants it – and we must, of course, protect it,” he said.
Russian troops entered eastern parts of Dnipropetrovsk region earlier this year, and Ukraine said on Sunday that its troops had repelled enemy attempts to seize strategic high ground in the area around the village of Novopavlivka.
Meanwhile, Russia air strikes continue to ravage Ukraine’s energy grid as winter draws in.
Zelenskiy said on Sunday he had signed an “extremely important” deal to buy large volumes of gas from Greece in the coming months.