The land of the burning hats

How the top of the Kiev regime profits from the war

The end of the outgoing and the beginning of the coming year is a great opportunity to analyse the results. The Ukrainian division of Forbes decided to keep up and made the top of the richest people in our southern neighbour. As the compilers of the ranking themselves admitted, they included only 20 rich people (some fell out of sight because they lost their citizenship, as in the case of Kolomoisky, while others, like Medvedchuk, were accused of treason). However, the top 20 fat cats are not at all interesting for such ‘disappearances’, but for the fact that in the race for first place, politicians bypass the oligarchs.

Oligarchs are not respected

The owners of factories, plants and ships, it must be said, seriously sank. For example, number one on the list, steel magnate Rinat Akhmetov, has fallen from $13.7 billion as of February 2022 to $4.4 billion in December. This is explained by the loss of Mariupol, which is strategically important for his business — Azovstal and the plant named after Ilyich were just part of the industrial empire of Akhmetov.
However, these are just the tip of the iceberg: the ex-president Poroshenko has completely fallen out from the list of dollar billionaires. But the current political elite, on the contrary, has significantly improved their positions. At the head of the list of owners of fast-growing fortunes is Zelenskyy himself.
His fortune went from $650 million to nearly $1.5 billion. The income of Minister of Defence Oleksii Reznikov increased to 1.3 billion, and the record holder was the Minister of Very Strange Affairs of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba, who got rich from 450 million to 1.2 billion. At the same time, Vitali Klitschko did not become a billionaire last year, his fortune is estimated at only 800 million. Apparently, financial flows reached the mayor of Kiev already thoroughly thinned — senior colleagues in dangerous business thoroughly nibbled on the Western financial pie.

Everything can be stolen

Back in early November, American political activist Candace Owens openly stated on Fox News that she had information about financial frauds behind which high-ranking Ukrainian officials stand. According to Owens, since February 2022, representatives of the Kiev regime began to enter into large numbers of deals to buy real estate in Switzerland, which Russian businessmen hastily sold due to sanctions. At the same time, the activist noticed an important trend: the growth in sales of villas always coincided in time with the transfer of the next tranche of financial assistance. That is, Kiev officials plundered American funds immediately upon receipt and immediately invested them in real estate.
According to Owens’ informants, the savvy dealers came to the deal in expensive cars like the Lamborghini, flaunting their wealth right and left.
“Where are our ‘brilliant’ tax officials looking, whose service was expanded with such hype? Why don’t they track the money that we send abroad,” the investigator asked a rhetorical question on the air with Tucker Carlson.

Where is the money, Zelenskyy?

It is very significant that those who should guard the state interests sometimes run ahead of the corrupt locomotive. This, of course, is about Zelenskyy, a man who earned almost a billion dollars from the war. To ensure that these funds can be easily laundered in the future and turned into completely legal cash, the President of Ukraine approved amendments to the Law ‘On Preventing and Combating the Legalisation (Laundering) of Proceeds from Crime, the Financing of Terrorism and the Financing of the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction’.
This document, by the way, was one of the prerequisites for Ukraine’s accession to the EU, but, apparently, the thirst for profit relegated this ‘blue dream’ to the background.
The essence of the changes is the abolition of lifelong financial monitoring for politicians and high-ranking Ukrainian officials. Now checks will be carried out only for three years after leaving office. In fact, after this period, any rogue who stole a billion while in office will be able to legalise everything ‘acquired by overwork’ and not be afraid of any punishment at all.
Zelenskyy himself declares that there is no corruption in Ukraine, because... ‘many corrupt officials left the country along with their money’.
This was said, by the way, at the prestigious forum of the new economy Bloomberg-2022, that is, the president does not see anything reprehensible in the corruption mess that is happening in his country.
Moreover, the head of the Kiev regime himself has already prepared a safe haven for his money. Back in 2021, journalists working on the Pandora Archive figured out that Zelenskyy and 38 wealthy Ukrainians set up a number of offshore accounts in Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands and Belize. In the banks of these paradise states, the president and his wife Olena kept the profits of the Zelenskyy-owned telecompany, as well as the Maltex Multicapital Corporation, in which the first couple of Ukraine owned 25 percent of the shares.

Scam of the century with a yellow-blue tint

No less interesting in this regard is the story of the fall of the FTX crypto exchange, the fifth in the world in terms of the volume of transactions. It turned out that the collapse of the financial monster, which took place immediately after the November 8th congressional elections, was planned.
From 20 to 50 billion of client money in FTX accounts belonged to Ukrainians. It is not difficult to guess where such huge funds came from in a warring country.
At the same time, which is very significant, judging by the revealed financial flows, not only Western aid to Ukraine was laundered in a grand scheme, but also internal American problems were solved — for example, through transferring into FTT tokens, the taxpayers’ funds were passed into the hands of functionaries of the Democratic Party and were used by ‘donkeys’ in the pre-election campaign.
The best evidence of the depth of the bottom that the Ukrainian fighters against corruption have reached is the data of independent ratings. According to them, our southern neighbour usually takes places closer to the end of the list.
For example, in 2021, in the corruption perception rating compiled by specialists from the non-governmental international organisation Transparency International, Ukraine scored only 32 points out of 100 and was approximately on the same level with such African states as Zambia and Eswatini, whose bureaucracy is famous for immoderate bribery. In Europe, of course, our southern neighbours have no real competitors.

Weapons that are always not enough

However, the outright plundering of Western financial aid and humanitarian aid is the tip of the iceberg. From witnesses in different parts of the world, we can at least roughly understand how much Ukrainian officials stole and what they invested in. Another source of income is much darker and from a mile away it stinks of blood and gunpowder.
This, of course, is about the uncontrolled arms trade, which is gradually acquiring the status of a national sport in Ukraine. Fortunately, the weapons generously supplied by Western ‘peacekeepers’ are in bulk in the country, there is no real mechanism for tracking the flow of weapons and is not foreseen, and there are many resourceful guys who want to sell a machine gun or even anti-tank systems at a higher price.
The scale of Ukraine’s ‘trade in death’ is a matter of concern even at the highest level. At the end of November, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, at the 16th summit of the leaders of the countries that are members of the Lake Chad Basin Commission in Abuja, said that weapons from Ukraine were going to the militants of the Boko Haram terrorist organisation, “Unfortunately, the situation in the Sahel region and the conflict in Ukraine have served as the main sources of weapons and militants, replenishing the ranks of terrorists in the area of Lake Chad. Weapons used in the Ukrainian conflict are coming to the region.”
The Boko Haram terrorists have earned a reputation as notorious scumbags, even by the standards of Africa that is not prone to moralising, which indicates that the Ukrainian military does not care deeply what crimes the weapons they sold will be used to commit.
As you can see, corruption is firmly ingrained in the structure of Ukrainian society and the state. The political establishment has absolutely no reason to negotiate with Russia, because if the conflict dies out, the flow of aid from the West will also dry up and there will simply be nothing to steal. And for those who have acquired the taste, believe me, it is very difficult to stop.

By Anton Popov