Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov was removed from his post by the Ukrainian president on Sunday. Volodymyr Zelensky argued in a video address on Telegram that the Defense Ministry required “new approaches and other formats of interaction with both the military and society in general.” The chief of the Ukrainian State Property Fund, Rustem Umerov, will take over the country's defense department.
The military leadership reshuffle comes against the backdrop of a botched counteroffensive, vast manpower losses, obliteration of billions' worth of NATO weaponry, and corruption plaguing Ukraine.
Sputnik takes a closer look at the scandals and failures of the Kiev regime.
Corruption Rows
After the overhyped "counteroffensive" failed to produce any meaningful gains, but horrific losses, speculation was rife in Ukrainian political circles about the prospects of Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov.
But it was not the lack of battlefield success that fed the rumors. Reznikov had held his post since November 2021, and throughout that time, a slew of corruption scandals shook Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense. Here are some of them, with the most notable ones linked to the Ukrainian military’s supply system.
Inflated Prices on Army Food Supplies
One of the most memorable scandals was when contractors providing food supplies to Ukrainian troops were found to be charging above-market rates. The supplies in question, notably, included eggs. According to findings made public in media reports, the prices at which suppliers were prepared to deliver eggs, potatoes, cabbage, apples, and canned beans, for example, to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, purportedly often ranged from two to three times the level of the purchase prices reported to tax officials. As to the abovementioned eggs, one investigation cited in media outlets found a Kiev-based military supplier was charging the government nearly 2.5 times the retail price for the product.
Then-Defense Minister Reznikov initially claimed that a "technical error" had resulted in the overpriced eggs at $0.46 per egg instead of per kilogram, opening him up at the time to a slew of social media memes and trolling.
Military Jacket Scandal
A winter jacket procurement row also made big headlines. The jackets were being supplied to the Ukrainian Armed Forces by a Turkish company. In total, 233,000 winter jackets were bought from Turkiye ostensibly for $20 million. However, their price appeared to “surge” in the course of their shipment to Ukraine.
Thus, one shipment saw the price of a batch of 4,900 jackets from Turkiye triple, up from $142,000 to $421,000. Just to make it clear, it was a per-jacket rise from $29 to $86, according to a Ukrainian journalist, citing sources at the State Customs Service of Ukraine. And to make matters worse, the jackets marketed as "winter wear" were in fact summer ones.
As for arms procurement, unnamed sources involved in Ukraine's arms purchases were cited by media reports as complaining that in early spring 2023, Kiev had ostensibly paid hundreds of millions of dollars, including to Ukrainian state-owned companies, for weapons that were either never delivered, or the arrival of which was "delayed for months."
Besides the Army procurement scandals, a long list of graft and bribery rows has pursued the Ukrainian government institutions. The head of Ukraine's Supreme Court was detained in a bribery investigation in May, and just recently there were reports of a court setting bail for a former deputy minister of economy accused of embezzling humanitarian aid.
Draft Evasion Row
The Ukrainian military has also been plagued by rampant corruption in the registration and enlistment offices. It was revealed that a corrupt draft evasion scheme involving military commissars and volunteer organizations in Ukraine had sold deferrals to those hoping to dodge being sent to the battlefront. The scheme became known to Russian security forces from sources among Ukrainian troops.
"According to information received from sources in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, a corruption scheme of draft evasion has been established in Ukraine. The entrance tariff is $10,000. It is a one-time payment to a military commissar in order to enroll a potential recruit in a volunteer organization operating at each Recruitment and Social Support Center of the Ukrainian army. This is how the military enlistment offices are called there now," a source was cited as saying in February.
Each volunteer was expected to collect voluntary donations through social networks from citizens in favor of the Army, the source added. President Volodymyr Zelensky was reported to have fired officials in charge of conscription in every region across the country in August after the conscription-related corruption charges gained international attention.
The draft evasion scheme comes as Ukraine's "permanent mobilization" campaign has suffered setbacks amid the outflow of fighting-age men from the country as the counteroffensive flounders, and manpower losses pile up in the country's military. Growing difficulties have been facing Ukrainian authorities in recruiting more conscripts, alternative media and even some legacy outlets in the country have reported. There have been widespread reports of draft officers grabbing men off the street.
Kiev’s Botched Counteroffensive
The reports of draft evasion come amid Kiev’s faltering counteroffensive. No amount of sophisticated weaponry appears to be able to jumpstart it so far. The so-called counteroffensive was delayed for months during the summer, as the West pumped advanced weapons, including several hundred Warsaw Pact-era tanks, along with Leopard 1, Leopard 2, and Challenger 2 tanks, a slew of armored vehicles, etc., to fan the flames of NATO’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Kiev finally started the offensive on June 4, but failed to break through Russia’s sophisticated defenses, losing tens of thousands of men, and hundreds units of weaponry.
In an ignominious display, over 800 types of Western and Ukrainian weaponry and military vehicles captured by Russian forces in the Ukrainian conflict zone were put on display during the ARMY-2023 military expo recently held in Kubinka, Moscow region.
Weapons Black Market
Meanwhile, ever since Western countries began to supply all sorts of armaments to Ukraine, the Kremlin has repeatedly warned that the array of military hardware might end up in the wrong hands via the black market. Europol already braced itself for an influx of illegal weapons in Europe originally shipped to Ukraine by Western countries early last year.
The warnings from Russia fell on deaf ears. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu revealed last July that some of the weapons supplied by the West to Ukraine were already spreading across the Middle East. Denis Pushilin, acting head of the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), which became part of Russia last year, likewise told Sputnik that foreign weapons being supplied to Ukraine, including the Javelin anti-tank systems, were on sale on the black market, with "this kind of weaponry" being "moved in large quantities to African countries, too."
The lack of ability to use some of the NATO-shipped weapons, insufficient training, and logistical challenges were all prompting Ukraine to sell Western weapons on the black market, former senior Pentagon adviser Karen Kwiatkowski told Sputnik.
"Given that these items are ‘free,’ a great deal of profit can be made… selling what is not needed or cannot be easily used," Kwiatkowski said.