Not only is waning Western support eating away at Ukraine's military power - pertinacious corruption is eroding it from within.
Ukraine’s Defense Ministry claims it has exposed an attempt to acquire artillery shells for the country's armed forces at inflated prices. One senior Defense Ministry official has already been arrested. He is suspected of having embezzled the equivalent of around $40 million with the help of the fraudulent scheme. Legal proceedings have been launched against the individual, who has been removed from his duties. The suspect faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted.
“As a result of complex measures in Kiev the head of one of the Main Departments of the Ministry of Defense involved in the [procurement of] equipment has been detained," Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) said in a statement on social media, adding photos of the arrest.
Screenshot of Facebook post by Ukraine's Defense Ministry.
© Photo : Ukraine's Defense Ministry.
A joint probe by Ukraine’s Security Service and General Prosecutor’s Office had uncovered the scheme, with a subsequent audit discovering documents confirming the illegal activities at the suspect's workplace and home. The name of the apprehended official was not released.
Ukrainian prosecutors said in a statement on Telegram that the Defense Ministry's recently established procurement agency had jettisoned an earlier signed contract to buy artillery shells at higher than market prices in favor of a new one. The latter ostensibly removed intermediaries, bringing down costs and the delivery time. However, the detained ministry official opted to extend the previous contract, with a sum of around 1.5 billion hryvnias ($40 million) finding its way to a foreign intermediary firm's account.
According to Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, it is working to try and recover the embezzled money. The artillery shells have not yet been delivered. All the officials involved in the scheme will undergo a polygraph test, the Defense Ministry said on its website.
The new scandal is just one in a long line of corruption cases that the Kiev regime has been mired in. Ukraine’s Defense Minister Rustem Umerov vowed to stamp out corruption in the military sphere when he took over in September from Oleksii Reznikov, whose legacy was mired in corruption. At the time, President Volodymyr Zelensky scrambled to reshuffle the military leadership against the backdrop of a botched counteroffensive, vast manpower losses, obliteration of billions' worth of NATO weaponry, and corruption plaguing Ukraine.
Reports on graft, money laundering, misappropriation of funds, misuse of fuel, and the reselling of weapons supplied by the West have repeatedly surfaced. Just recently, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense revealed it would be using different color dyes for its fuel in order to stop a raging spate of thefts in the armed forces. It said in a statement that diesel would be dyed bright red, while gasoline would be colored green.
Earlier in the year, Ukrainian media released a report claiming that the food the ministry buys for servicemen is two or three times more expensive than in Kiev's ordinary food shops. At the time, then-Defense Minister Reznikov dismissed these stories as a smear campaign and said that the data from the published invoices has "an error in converting pieces into kilograms."
Another scandal took place in the autumn of 2022, when Ukrainian Defense Ministry bought 180,000 winter jackets from a Turkish firm at a cost of $86 million. However, it soon emerged that these jackets were for summer, and that their full cost amounted to only $29 million.
Another scandal took place in the autumn of 2022, when Ukrainian Defense Ministry bought 180,000 winter jackets from a Turkish firm at a cost of $86 million. However, it soon emerged that these jackets were for summer, and that their full cost amounted to only $29 million.