‘Talking About This for Years’: Ukraine’s Corruption is Partly Responsible for Their Defeat

According to a CBS news report from 2022, just 30 - 40% of supplies sent to Ukraine reaches its final destination, though the source they cited has claimed the situation has improved since then.

Sputnik’s Jamarl Thomas reported on Thursday that Ukraine’s loss of territory and inability to build a defense is the result of them embezzling funds. Meanwhile, Ukraine President Vladimir Zelensky has criticized the West for hesitating to send aid to his regime, and has cited it as the reason for his military failures.

On Thursday, Andrii Telizhenko - a Ukrainian whistleblower and a former diplomat - joined Sputnik’s Fault Lines to discuss the corruption in Ukraine.

“We've been talking about this for years - about the corruption in the high-level Ukrainian government, and we've talked for the last two years how the Kiev regime under Zelensky is stealing and basically making money on this war - together with the military industrial complex in Washington,” said Telizhenko. “And the fortification of the Kharkov region and Sumy region, which is now basically losing a couple of kilometers every hour and it has not been built. The money was lost.”

“You know what they were building? They were building roads. They're not building fortifications. They're officially building roads that border Russia,” he continued. “That's where they're [using] money, because building roads can make much more money than you can make on fortifications.”

Kiev previously allocated almost 38 billion hryvnia ($960 million) to build a multi-layered network of fortifications yet Ukrainian troops testified that those lines of defense do not exist, according to a recent Sputnik report which cited the Associated Press.

“The Biden administration put in the wrong guys. And there's now information coming out from the Congress that there's $175 million which was not accounted for in one case, then there's $300 million not accounted for in another case,” he added.

This week, a chairwoman for the Ukrainian anti-corruption group Mezha reported that Kharkov's Department of Housing and Community Services in regional military administration had 7 billion hryvnias, or $176.5 million, to build fortifications to hold back the Russian advance. She found that much of this money was embezzled.

“Multi-million contracts for the construction of fortification structures, for which a total of 7 billion hryvnias [roughly $176 million] was spent, were [transferred] by the Kharkov Regional State Administration to dummy companies,” said Martina Bougslavets.

“The rich are not fighting this war. This is the war of the poor. Because only the poor get sent to the front lines,” the former diplomat explained. “Only the poor are dying. Only the poor in Ukraine are sent to fight and are being killed, and they're not being paid anything for this.”

“There's no morale on the Ukrainian front lines right now. The moral is: 63% of Ukrainians don't want to fight because they know how you cannot get your body back, you're not going to get compensated, how you are going to lose your life and that's it. Your family is going to be on their own. That's why the men are not going to go fight, because there's corruption in Ukraine,” said Telizhenko.

On Tuesday, it was reported that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Ukraine will hold elections when all Ukrainians, including those who now live in Russia, decide to participate. A recent article from RT suggests that doing so essentially permits Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky to postpone a vote unless Ukrainian territories are recaptured. Ukraine was scheduled to hold a presidential election on March 31, but Zelensky canceled the vote last year citing martial law and the ongoing conflict with Russia.

“Our men are being just drafted as animals taken off the street and thrown on the front line. The people are fed up with this. Zelensky's term ends on May 20th. He's not the president by the Constitution of Ukraine after that, by the act of Article 103. So the people are raising up to change Zelensky,” Telizhenko said.

“They hate him and they hate what he's becoming. And because of the losing of the front lines, in Ukraine, today, they understand they lost. This war should have never happened.”