Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy famously rose to fame as the lead actor in a TV series that skewered the rampant corruption of the country’s political elites. In “Servant of the People,” Zelenskyy played a high school history teacher named Vasyl Holoborodko, who unexpectedly wins a presidential election after his anti-corruption rant goes viral on social media. |
It is somehow fitting, then, that the most serious graft scandal to hit Zelenskyy’s inner circle since Russia’s invasion in 2022 has been unfolding in a series of slickly produced online videos that Ukrainians have likened to a Netflix series. |
The country’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau says Timur Mindich, Zelenskyy’s friend and business partner who co-founded the president’s production studio, led a high-level “criminal organization” that collected $100 million in kickbacks and bribes from contractors of the state-owned nuclear energy company, Energoatom. |
But instead of publicizing their findings the traditional way, in court filings and press conferences, investigators have been dramatizing it in a series of viral online videos. The clips feature cliffhangers, explosions and audio evidence gathered from wiretaps. Targets of the investigation, dubbed Operation Midas, were revealed to have used code names with each other, like “Rocket,” “Che Guevara” and “Sugarman.” |
The video strategy is clearly designed to build public support for the investigation amid concerns that powerful Ukrainian officials could try to downplay or scuttle it. Those fears are well-justified: In July, as the investigation was building, Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency—which reports directly to the Office of the President—raided the homes of investigators working on the case and jailed two of them. At the time, Zelenskyy himself got parliament to pass a bill stripping anti-corruption bodies of their independence, only to backtrack and reverse the measure after widespread protests. |
In addition to Mindich, high-ranking Ukrainian officials have been implicated in the conspiracy, including former Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Chernishov and two Cabinet ministers, both of whom were sacked last week. (All three deny any wrongdoing.) Mindich himself fled the country hours before investigators showed up at his apartment to arrest him and is now believed to be hiding out in Israel. |
Ukrainian media outlets have reported that Chernishov used his ill-gotten gains to finance the construction of high-end apartments for himself, Mindich and other high-level officials. In audio tapes published by the Anti-Corruption Bureau, businessman Oleksander Tsukerman (codenamed Sugarman) can be heard in March proposing to give $500,000 to Chernishov (Che Guevara) for “construction.” Tsukerman has also fled the country. |
As the German Marshall Fund’s Josh Rudolph and Olena Prokopenko recently pointed out, the scandal has touched a raw nerve in Ukraine because Energoatom is the agency responsible for managing international aid funds to secure the country’s energy infrastructure against Russia’s relentless aerial bombardment. As Ukrainians gird for another frigid winter with daily outages, senior officials entrusted with protecting the nation’s power supply were instead building luxury villas. |
Zelenskyy himself has not been directly implicated in the scandal, at least not yet. But his proximity to the central figures involved makes this a dire political crisis for him. He faces fierce criticism from opposition parties and his approval rating has dropped to around 50 percent, down from 90 percent shortly after Russia invaded in 2022. |
Even opposition figures agree that Zelenskyy himself cannot be removed from office while the country is at war with Russia. Instead, there are mounting calls for him to fire the powerful director of the Office of the President, Andriy Yermak. Sometimes referred to as a “co-president,” Yermak has amassed a tremendous amount of power despite not being elected to any position. And this week, a Ukrainian lawmaker alleged that one of the participants in the embezzlement scheme, who goes by the codename Ali Baba and can be heard in the tapes discussing ways to undermine the Anti-Corruption Bureau’s investigation, is actually Yermak. |
Firing Yermak would be politically risky for Zelenskyy given how close the two men have become. “For Zelenskyy, dismissing Yermak would be like chopping off his own right hand,” Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Penta Center for Political Studies in Kyiv, told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. “After Yermak's dismissal, the opposition's main target would be Zelenskyy himself.” |
At the same time, there may be no other way for Zelenskyy to wea |