Riddle me this: You’re negotiating a tenuous peace between two fighting nations. One has received overwhelming financial and materiel support from an entire bloc of nations.
Those nations, democratic institutions all and all with some measure of accountability for corruption, have strangely never called for a comprehensive and transparent audit of the money and materiel being sent. Furthermore, said country receiving the aid — a noted hotbed of corruption before the war began — is consumed with yet another corruption scandal.
What do you do? Demand accountability via an audit, of course. Unless it’s Ukraine. Then shut up and put a Ukrainian flag in your X user name, or else you’re a Putinist stooge.
According to a Wall Street Journal report from last week that’s just getting more play in the social media sphere, it turns out that the U.S.-proffered version of a brokered peace between Kyiv and Moscow eliminated, at Ukraine’s request, a call for an audit like the one described above.
This comes as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been under fire at home for a major corruption scandal involving close associates of his who were allegedly involved in a $100 million energy-sector embezzlement scheme.
I know, right? Corruption in Ukraine’s energy sector? Who would have ever thought it?
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— Autism Capital 🧩 (@AutismCapital) July 21, 2025
Aside from him.
Anyhow, the major takeaway from the Journal piece, when it hit the street, was that the Trump administration wanted “sweeping territorial and security concessions from Kyiv while offering Moscow major economic and political incentives, including U.S. recognition of its claims to parts of Ukraine.”
Whether or not you think this is a good idea is beside the point, although not wanting peace at this juncture — as if sacrificing the Ukrainian people in a meat-grinder no-win situation to keep Vladimir Putin busy was somehow the moral high-ground in this debate — seems fewer steps removed from the last Japanese World War II holdouts being found on Philippine islands in the 1960s than it should. But I digress.
Buried in the report, however, is a relatively damning point, considering the billions that the United States has dumped in on Kyiv’s side:
A senior U.S. official said that Ukraine significantly changed one of the 28 points in the version that appeared online. In an apparent move to expose alleged corruption, the draft had called for an audit of all international aid Ukraine had received. The language was changed to say all parties will receive “full amnesty for their actions during the war.”
[Ukrainian national security secretary Rustem] Umerov in his statement Friday denied that Ukraine had altered the provision.
wow pic.twitter.com/2U6VTFrLJr
— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) November 25, 2025
As for what secretary Umerov had to say, the immortal words of Mandy Rice-Davies apply again here: “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” As of Tuesday, Umerov was saying that Zelenskyy hoped for a direct meeting with the White House to “complete final steps and make a deal with President Trump,” although Trump had made it clear that meetings with Zelenskyy and Putin would only happen after a deal was finalized.
That’s somewhat important since, as the Journal reported, Ukrainian “officials said they left crucial issues such as what territorial concessions Ukraine has to consider and whether it can eventually join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for a direct presidential discussion.”
However, there’s limited talk about whether or not Zelenskyy’s government would hold elections within 100 days. That’s kind of a big deal when you consider the immensity of the scandal in Ukraine’s energy sector, which Politico said has turned Zelenskyy into a “lame duck” on the home front in an article published Thursday:
Involving a plot to extort around $100 million from Ukraine’s energy sector, the scandal has so far engulfed Zelenskyy’s Justice Minister German Galushchenko, Energy Minister Svitlana Hrynchuk, as well as officials from the country’s atomic energy agency and senior officials from the State Bureau of Investigation.
Most damaging to Zelenskyy, however, is that the allegations extend to his most trusted allies: Former business partner Tymur Mindich is said to be at the center of the schemes. And the highly powerful yet unpopular Chief of Staff Andriy Yermak is being accused by adversaries of subverting and impeding the work of the country’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor, whose offices uncovered the widespread conspiracy — now called “Mindichgate.”
Domestically, these revelations are already causing a seismic shift in Zelenskyy’s political fortunes, contributing to widespread anger. And while there’s no evidence of personal corruption by the president, his style of rule and reliance on governing with the help of a group of pals and cronies has worn thin.
I’m shocked. Shocked! And, as the Financial Times noted in its reporting, the scandal features “bags of cash and a gold toilet.” In other words, not only are top officials in Zelenskyy’s government corrupt, they’re cartoonishly Scrooge McDuck corrupt.
Ukraine has never been among the cleanest countries in the world when it comes to money changing hands throughout the governmental food chain; not that this says anything laudatory about Moscow, mind you, but we’re not on their side, nor giving them scads of cash and weapons and then making a particular point of not asking where it goes.
Now, not only are we not looking at this, we’re continuing to make a point of not looking at this — presumably to entice a leader who’s suspended elections in Zelenskyy, who only stands to look worse when it’s all over.
Not that he’s the genesis of all this corruption, mind you, but the fact remains that he was a candidate elected on an anti-corruption platform who hadn’t done an exceptionally good job of carrying it out until the war started in 2022. At that point, he became the avatar of All That Is Right And Good for most in the West, and anybody who looked at him askance risked getting called a partisan of Vlad the Invader.
Zelenskyy’s wartime performance has been, from all contemporary accounts, inspiring, although history might write a different story once we see how the sausage was being made in Kyiv. Funny, then, that a guy whose political life (and afterlife, if free and fair elections don’t go his way) is dependent on how deeply the West audits how Ukraine was using the vast resources they were being given is begging us to do anything but, and wants us to give him “full amnesty.”
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