The vast majority of Ukrainians believe that President Vladimir Zelensky is at fault for widespread corruption in the country’s government and military, a new study has revealed.
The poll, released on Monday [9/11/23], found that 78% of Ukrainian adults see Zelensky as “directly responsible” for Kiev’s corruption problem. It was conducted by the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Charitable Foundation and the Kiev International Institute of Sociology.
Prior to the launch of Russia’s military offensive in February 2022, Ukraine consistently ranked among the world’s most corrupt nations, but it was touted as a bastion of freedom and democracy as the US and its NATO allies rallied public support for massive aid to Kiev. However, Ukrainian corruption remains a concern and could hinder the country’s bid to join the European Union, an unidentified Western diplomat told Politico on Monday.
Ukraine is a “very corrupt country,” the diplomat said, adding that Zelensky’s plan to use the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) to prosecute graft cases could “send the wrong message.” Upon landing in Kiev for a surprise visit on Monday, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock reportedly said Ukraine needed to step up its efforts to fight corruption.
The Ukrainian poll was conducted from July 3 to July 17 in face-to-face interviews with thousands of citizens across the country. There were no major differences in findings based on region or socioeconomic factors. Respondents aged 60 and older took a harsher view, with 81% saying Zelensky was responsible for government corruption. The rate was 70% in the youngest segment, ages 17 to 29. Overall, only 18% of Ukrainian adults disagreed with the statement that Zelensky bears responsibility.
Documents obtained by the International Association of Investigative Journalists in 2021 showed that Zelensky and his business partners set up offshore companies to purchase lavish properties in central London. Zelensky transferred his stake in one of the companies to an aide just before he was elected president in 2019. Supporters of former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko accused Zelensky and his associates of using their offshore accounts to evade taxes.
Zelensky has purged officials in his government for alleged corruption, including an embezzlement scheme involving humanitarian aid. Just this month, he sacked Defense Minister Aleksey Reznikov, who came under fire earlier this year over purchases of military rations at inflated prices. However, the new defense chief, Rustem Umerov, is reportedly under investigation for alleged crimes in his previous job.
By Michael Gfoeller and David H. Rundell, Newsweek, 9/7/23
In 1919, John Maynard Keynes was a young economist with the British delegation negotiating the Versailles Treaty. Keynes strongly objected to the harsh economic treatment being meted out to Germany. He resigned and went home to write “The Economic Consequences of the Peace,” which accurately predicted how the treaty would sow the seeds for future conflict. Had Keynes been alive last year, he might well have written “The Economic Consequences of the War,” predicting how the economic sanctions being placed on Russia would, in fact, unravel Europe’s political order.
Few products contribute more to economic prosperity and political stability than affordable food and energy. Increased energy costs retard every aspect of economic growth. Rising food costs act much like a regressive tax increase. By imposing economic sanctions on Russia, Europe destroyed its own access to inexpensive food and energy. One did not need John Maynard Keynes to predict that as a result of the sanctions, Europe’s prices would rise and economic growth stall. We made that prediction in these pages a year ago.
Between February and May of 2022, the OPEC basket oil price rose from $75 to $125 per barrel. During the same period wheat prices in Germany increased from $350 to $530 per ton. Germany had imported half of its natural gas from Russia. According to the Center for Global Energy Policy, last year the cost of heating the average German single family home went from $1,500 to $5,250. As a result, the German government took advantage of the EU‘s Temporary Crisis Framework to provide a $200 billion package, which has ultimately cost German taxpayers more than all the military equipment the United States has sent Ukraine.
While the price on some commodities has since eased, the fact remains that overall levels remain substantially higher than before the war.
In 2022, the Eurozone’s annual inflation rate rose to over 10 percent and although the rate at which prices are rising has now stabilized at prewar levels, the overall price level in Europe remains much higher than it was two years ago. Moreover, the Eurozone’s average inflation rate disguises the fact that in places like Poland and Hungary the inflation rate remains 10 and 17 percent respectively.
Meanwhile, Eurozone GDP growth continues to collapse from 5.3 percent in 2021 to 3.5 percent in 2022 and an IMF predicted rate of less than 1.0 percent this year. Again, this overall figure conceals the fact that some nations like Germany, Poland, and Hungary will see no economic growth at all in 2023. Europe’s unemployment rate remains nearly twice that of the United States while European wages, productivity, and hours worked all remain at or below pre-Covid levels.
Europe’s economic difficulties were compounded by a massive wave of Ukrainian refugees that has strained public services and government budgets across the continent. According to the United Nations, more than 8 million refugees have fled Ukraine.
Most have gone to Poland, Russia and Germany. However all EU nations were affected because for the first time the European Union implemented a temporary protective directive (TPD). This allowed Ukrainians to enter without formal asylum procedures, something that had never been done for African and Middle Eastern refugees. The TPD guaranteed Ukrainian refugees residency, housing, education, employment, medical, and social services benefits. Tensions rose as schools and hospitals became overcrowded and citizens perceived that refugees were receiving preferential treatment.
These economic problems have had very substantial political consequences. Over the past 18 months, more than a third of European Union governments have fallen. It would be inaccurate to blame these changes solely on the war in Ukraine. In many instances, local issues played a major role. Nevertheless, it would be equally misleading to ignore the fact that economic hardship created an atmosphere of anger and apprehension which contributed to political change.
Here is a selection of some of those changes:
In Italy, Giorgia Meloni, a conservative who openly criticizes EU refugee policies became prime minister.
In Sweden, the ruling Socialist Party was defeated by a coalition of conservative parties.
Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin was ousted after her Social-Democratic Party lost parliamentary elections to two conservative parties.
Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, lost power when his coalition government collapsed.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called snap parliamentary elections after his Socialist Workers Party did extremely poorly in local elections. The conservative People’s Party won a plurality in the snap election, securing 136 seats in the 350 seat Spanish parliament but no one has yet been able to form a new government.
The government of Moldova fell in February 2023.
Romanian Prime Minister Nicolae Ciucă resigned in June 2023, together with his entire cabinet.
Bulgaria has been in a state of chronic political instability throughout 2022 and 2023 and held its fifth snap parliamentary election in two years last April.
More ominously, the governments in Europe’s three largest economies look increasingly shaky. In France, economic growth has fallen from 7 percent in 2021 to 2.5 percent last year and is predicted to be only .8 percent for 2023. Economic frustrations are growing and recent opinion polls indicate that the leader of France’s far-right opposition party, Marine Le Pen, would defeat incumbent Emmanuel Macron if a presidential election were held today. Great Britain has had three prime ministers since the war in Ukraine began and few expect its adamantly pro-war government to remain in power after the next general election.
In Germany, the once marginal right wing opposition party “Alternative for Germany” is now the second largest party in the country and is polling ahead of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrat Party. Sensing these changing winds, the German government appears unlikely to increase defense spending to the NATO target of 2 percent of GDP in 2024.
Only one issue unites these diverse outcomes—all of these nations are struggling economically due to the sanctions placed on Russia. Those sanctions have been strikingly ineffective. It now seems very doubtful that Ukraine will defeat Russia or that peace can be restored without significant Ukrainian concessions. Once European voters perceive that their economic sacrifices have been in vain, we expect more governments to fall. Ultimately, the most enduring effect of NATO’s war with Russia may well be the rise of conservative, nationalist-populist governments in much of Europe.
David H. Rundell is a former chief of mission at the American Embassy in Saudi Arabia and the author of Vision or Mirage, Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads. Ambassador Michael Gfoeller is a former political advisor to the U.S. Central Command. He served for 15 years in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
The views expressed in this article are the writers’ own.
In the week since the 15th Summit meeting of BRICS in Johannesburg closed, there has been a lot of commentary in Western media directed at quashing the notion that something substantial occurred there which will further the emergence of a multipolar world, which had been the message of the five member states in their closing Declaration.
Some analysts have said that the addition of six new members taking effect on 1 January 2024 and plans for still greater enlargement next year to take in more of the 23 nations which had expressed an interest in joining amounts to little more than the recreation of the Bloc of Nonaligned Nations, which was a talking shop among Global South countries and little more during the Cold War. Other critics point out that there are serious contradictions between the national interests of the founding members India and China, and that this problem will arise between the new members, as for example between Iran and Saudi Arabia, so that the chances of BRICS arriving at consensus in policy matters and geopolitics in particular will be slim; its weight on the world stage will be correspondingly small, they say.
As for the first line of attack on BRICS, it overlooks the changes in weighting of the economies and political stature of Global South countries since the 1970s and 1980s when the nonaligned movement was in its heyday. BRICS countries presently account for 37% of global GDP by purchasing power parity versus 30% for the G7. If and when all the countries now in line to join are admitted, it will account for more than 50% of global GDP and a still greater share of global population. The strength of any policies it recommends to the international community will go far beyond mere moral force, and must be reckoned with.
As for the second line of attack on BRICS, the commentators have not understood the logic of its expansion, which is precisely to bring together countries which have been in conflict in regions of major importance and to reconcile them with the assistance of global peers. The reconciliation of Iran and Saudi Arabia that was brokered this spring by China can be consolidated with the support of fellow BRICS members in confidential regular meetings at the working level as well as at the periodic summits behind closed doors. This is the peace mission of BRICS which will be acting in an ad hoc manner as adjunct to the United Nations.
The lesson here is one that the United States has not begun to learn: that inclusion of fractious nations is a far better way of arriving at policy moderation and coexistence than exclusion and creation of ‘pariah states’ through sanctions.
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Several political observers in the West have remarked upon the decision announced a couple of days ago by Chinese authorities that President Xi will not be attending the next G20 gathering in India. Like Vladimir Putin, Xi appears to have found no room in his busy agenda for an institution that had been promoted since 2009 as a more effective and widely accepted board of global economic and political governance than the G7.
Western observers have not yet put this downgrading of the G20 into the context of the newly purposed BRICS. Let us do that now.
First, let us take a step back to the decision taken in March 2014 by G7 members not to attend the planned G8 gathering in Sochi and to suspend Russia’s membership in their group. That was to punish Russia for its move to take control of and annex Crimea following the February 2014 US-engineered coup d’état in Kiev.
Punishment? I believe that for Vladimir Putin it was pure relief not to be obliged to join the seven other members of that Collective West club. At every turn, Russia was in the humiliating minority of one during the G8 deliberations in the years since G8 membership was thrown to Boris Yeltsin as a sop for not being admitted to NATO. The suspension spared Putin the need to be the first to end what had become deeply unpleasant and unproductive sessions.
The latest meeting of the G20 in Indonesia in November 2022 demonstrated that this club suffered greatly from geopolitical fracture lines between Russia-China on one side and the Collective West members on the other side. The acrimony and politicization of every issue on the agenda compromised the utility of such gatherings. Is it any surprise, then, that both Russia and China have chosen demonstratively not to send their number one officials to the summit and that this decision came in the wake of the very successful BRICS gathering in South Africa?
BRICS is precisely the institution in formation where the Global South can meet on its own without wasting time and effort defending itself from the pressures that the United States and its allies bring to every international gathering in which they take part.
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As one of the two superpowers in the bipolar world of the Cold War days, Russia was, of course, not a member of the Nonaligned Bloc, though it sought friends there. The USSR gave substantial financial and military assistance to independence movements in European colonies, especially in Africa. And the newly liberated states sent their talented youth to study in Moscow. Their leaders often had strong ideological affinity with Soviet Marxism.
Moscow’s leading role in the creation and expansion of BRICS has a lot more to explain it than its loss of superpower status and its imperative need to cultivate friends in the Global South.
I mentioned in an article published several days ago that I occasionally pick up novel perspectives on Russia and global politics from one or another panelist on Russia’s talk shows on state television. That is the source for what I am about to say as I expand upon the foregoing point, namely that Russia’s approach to the Global South is dramatically different today from the USSR’s approach to the Nonaligned Bloc and to Developing Nations more broadly.
The profound difference can be seen in the speeches of Vladimir Putin to the visiting African delegations which held top level talks in Moscow before most traveled to South Africa for the BRICS gathering. You see it again in the speech Putin delivered to the BRICS Business Forum. And you see it in the language of the Declaration which closed the BRICS Summit.
To understand this difference you have to look closely and put on your thinking cap. It is not only Western media commentators who miss the point. I believe that the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Gennady Zyuganov also does not get it. When surrounded by all the guests from the Third World descending on Moscow, he seems to think that the good old days of the Soviet Union have returned.
They haven’t. Something very new is afoot.
The USSR’s ideology came from the West. Marxism, with or without the additions or distortions of Leninism, was deeply embedded in Western thinking about humankind and human society. The common denominator here is that all people are the same, that societal development over time follows the same course everywhere on earth.
This concept fits in nicely with globalism and economic Neo-Liberalism. It also fits in nicely with Neo-Conservative geopolitical ideology, which should not surprise anyone since the original Neocon thinkers in New York were former Communist sympathizers, as Francis Fukuyama tells us in his history of the movement.
Under pressure from the sanctions regimes first put in place in 2014 in the name of “the international community” and drastically increased since the start of the Special Military Operation in 2022, the Kremlin now flatly rejects the globalism of that U.S. dominated international community. The decision about to be taken to leave the WTO is confirmation of this.
Russia today flatly rejects the notion of a single path of development for all of mankind. Instead Russia is saying that each country should develop in keeping with its national traditions and values. Each must find its own path to realization of its economic and human potential. This is a new and more comprehensive version of the concept of each state having its own religion that neighbors may not interfere with as enshrined in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. As we know, Russia and China have long championed on the world stage the principle of noninterference in the affairs of sovereign states.. NB: Westphalia assumed a world of sovereign states, whereas Europe swept this aside when the European Community became the European Union.
Russia expects that this new approach to the Global South as defender of the sovereignty and distinctive character of each nation makes it and BRICS a much more attractive partner for the Global South than the USSR was in its time, or than the Collective West, with its arrogance and neocolonial prejudices, can be today.
Once denounced by Zelensky as a “criminal,” gun runner Serhiy Pashinksy has become the top private supplier of arms to Ukraine. Eyewitness testimony has fingered Pashinsky as the architect of a bloody false flag operation which propelled the 2014 Maidan coup and plunged the country into civil war.
Years before emerging as Kiev’s top private weapons trafficker, ex-legislator Serhiy Pashinsky played a key role in the 2014 US-backed coup which toppled Ukraine’s democratically-elected president and set the stage for a devastating civil war. Though the notoriously corrupt former Ukrainian parliamentarian was condemned by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “criminal” as recently as 2019, a lengthy exposé by the New York Times has now identified Pashinsky as the Ukrainian government’s “biggest private arms supplier.”
Perhaps predictably, the report makes no mention of evidence implicating Pashinsky in the 2014 massacre of 70 anti-government protesters in Kiev’s Maidan Square, an incident which pro-Western forces used to consummate their coup d’etat against then-President Viktor Yanukovych.
In an August 12 report on Ukraine’s new weapons-sourcing strategy, the New York Times alleged that “out of desperation,” Kiev had no option but to adopt increasingly amoral tactics. The shift, they say, has driven up prices of lethal imports at an exponential rate, “and added layer upon layer of profit-making” for the benefit of unscrupulous speculators like Pashinsky.
According to the Times, the strategy is simple: Pashinksy “buys and sells grenades, artillery shells and rockets through a trans-European network of middlemen,” then “sells them, then buys them again and sells them once more”:
“With each transaction, prices rise – as do the profits of Mr. Pashinsky’s associates – until the final buyer, Ukraine’s military, pays the most,” the Times explained, adding that while using multiple brokers may technically be legal, “it is a time-tested way to inflate profits.”
As the seemingly endless supply of cash from Western taxpayers provides a bonanza for arms manufacturers such as Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, it similarly benefits war profiteers like Pashinsky. His company, Ukrainian Armored Technology, “reported its best year ever last year, with sales totaling more than $350 million” — a whopping 12,500% increase from its $2.8 million in sales the year before the war.
Pashinsky is not the only racketeer benefitting from the elimination of anti-corruption measures in wartime Ukraine. Several suppliers previously placed on an official blacklist after they “ripped off the military” are now free to sell again, according to the Times investigation. The outlet downplayed this as an unfortunate, but ultimately necessary measure.
“In the name of rushing weapons to the front line, leaders have resurrected figures from Ukraine’s rough-and-tumble past and undone, at least temporarily, years of anticorruption [sic] policies,” the Times asserted, describing “the re-emergence of figures like Mr. Pashinsky” as “one reason the American and British governments are buying ammunition for Ukraine rather than simply handing over money”:
“European and American officials are loath to discuss Mr. Pashinsky, for fear of playing into Russia’s narrative that Ukraine’s government is hopelessly corrupt and must be replaced.”
However, even the seemingly critical Times report overlooks a key aspect of Pashinsky’s unsavory biography. Conspicuously absent from the coverage was any explanation of his role in carrying out the infamous massacre of anti-government activists and police officers in Kiev’s Maidan Square in late February 2014.
A defining moment in the US-orchestrated overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government, the death of 70 at the hands of mysterious snipers triggered an avalanche of international outrage that led directly to the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych. Even today, these killings officially remain unsolved.
However, firsthand testimony by individuals who claimed to have helped carry out the false flag attack suggest Kiev’s most prolific gun runner was intimately involved in the grisly affair.
Maidan massacre organizer ‘takes no prisoners’
In November 2017, Italy’s Matrix TV channel published eyewitness accounts by three Georgians who say they were ordered to kill protesters by Mamuka Mamulashvili. Then the top-ranking military aide to Georgian president Mikhael Saakashvili, Mamulashvili later founded the infamous mercenary brigade known as the Georgian Legion, whose fighters were widely condemned after they published a gruesome video of themselves gleefully executing unarmed and bound Russian soldiers in April 2022.
The documentary, “Ukraine: The Hidden Truth,” features an Italian journalist’s interviews with three Georgian fighters allegedly sent to orchestrate the coup. All described Pashinsky as a key organizer and executor of the Maidan massacre, even alleging the corrupt arms dealers provided weapons and selected specific targets. The film also featured footage of him personally evacuating a shooter from the Square, after they had been caught with a rifle and a scope by protesters and surrounded.
One of the Georgian fighters recalled how he and his two associates arrived in Kiev in January, “to arrange provocations to push the police to charge the crowd.” For almost a month, however, “there were not many weapons around,” and “molotov [cocktails], shields and sticks were used to the maximum.”
This changed around mid-February, they said, when Mamualashvili personally visited them alongside a US soldier named Brian Christopher Boyenger, a former officer and sniper in the 101st Airborne Division, who personally gave them orders they “had to follow.”
Pashinky then personally moved them along with sniper rifles and ammunition to buildings overlooking Maidan Square, they alleged. At that point, Mamualashvili reportedly insisted that “we have to start shooting, so much, to sow some chaos.”
So it was that the Georgian fighters “started shooting two or three shots at a time” into the crowd below, having been ordered to “shoot the Berkut, the police, and the demonstrators, no matter what.” Once the killing was over, Boyenger moved to the Donbas front to fight in the ranks of the Georgian Legion, which Mamulashvili commands to this day.
In the meantime, Ukrainian journalist Volodymyr Boiko, who headed the civic council of the Prosecutor General Office of Ukraine after Maidan, has alleged that in order to obscure his role, Pashinsky personally hand-picked the figures leading the official investigation into the massacre, and even bribed the prosecutor who headed it.
Despite these shocking claims, Pashinsky’s involvement in the Maidan massacre has never been officially investigated, let alone punished, and his most recent experiences with the Ukrainian judicial system suggest it is unlikely to be heavily scrutinized by officials in Kiev. While a member of Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada, he was arrested for shooting and wounding a pedestrian in a traffic-related dispute, but was ultimately acquitted in 2021.
When Israeli journalists confronted Pashinsky about his role in the Maidan massacre, the arms dealer warned that they would be tracked down in their home country, where his associates would “tear them apart.” They could be forgiven for believing it was not an idle threat; there is a troubling tendency for Pashinky’s detractors to end up viciously beaten or shot dead in the street.
Kyiv and Moscow will go up against each other today in the International Court of Justice in the Hague in a case that focuses on Russia’s claim that it invaded Ukraine to prevent “genocide”.
President Putin said last year that Kyiv’s “neo-Nazi” regime was guilty of genocide by deliberately targeting the Donbas region, a Russian-speaking area in eastern Ukraine.
Ukraine accused Moscow of distorting the concept of genocide to justify its invasion and filed a case with the top court of the United Nations two days after Russian tanks crossed its borders in the early hours of February 24 last year.
“Russia has turned the Genocide Convention on its head, making a false claim of genocide as a basis for actions on its part that constitute grave violations of the human rights of millions of people across Ukraine,” Kyiv said.
The UN defines genocide as “the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part”.
Moscow is seeking to have Ukraine’s case thrown out and objects to the ICJ’s jurisdiction. The hearings will last until next Wednesday, September 27.
The case comes as China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, begins a four-day trip to Moscow ahead of a possible trip by Putin to Beijing in October. Putin has not travelled abroad since the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for him in March over the illegal deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia. Wang will meet senior Russian officials, including Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s national security council.
The allegation that Ukraine was guilty of the systematic destruction of ethnic Russians in the Donbas is central to how Moscow has sought to convince its citizens that the war was unavoidable. Critics have accused Putin of lying about the nature and the scale of the casualties to justify an attempt to destroy Ukraine as an independent country.
More than 14,000 people died in the Donbas in the eight years preceding Russia’s full-scale invasion. The fighting began in 2014 after the Kremlin provided military support to a tiny separatist movement in the coal-mining region, sending in troops, security service agents and military equipment.
About 3,400 of the fatalities were among civilians, according to UN data. The remaining deaths were among Ukrainian and Russian forces and the vast majority came between 2014 and 2015. A series of shaky ceasefires meant fatalities declined sharply in the following years.
In 2021, the year before Russia’s invasion, seven civilians died as a result of hostilities in the Kremlin-backed Donetsk People’s Republic, according to its own figures. It is believed that most of the deaths were because of landmines.
The ICJ ruled in Kyiv’s favour in a preliminary decision on the case shortly after Russia’s invasion and ordered Moscow to cease military actions in Ukraine immediately. Russia has ignored the order and the court has no way to enforce its decisions. However, legal experts say a final ruling in favour of Kyiv could be important for any eventual reparations claims.
“If the court finds there was no lawful justification under the Genocide Convention for Russia’s acts, the decision can set up a future claim for compensation,” said Juliette McIntyre, an expert on the ICJ.
Kyiv has also accused Moscow of genocide in eastern Ukraine, as well as the forced deportations of Ukrainian children to Russia. The vast majority of the victims of the Kremlin’s invasion live in Russian-speaking towns and cities in eastern and southern Ukraine.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed, millions have become refugees and towns and cities have been flattened by Russian missiles since the start of the war. “What is Putin protecting us from? Our lives? Our homes?” a civilian in Ukraine’s Kherson region asked The Times recently.
Ukraine said on Monday that two people had been killed by Russian missile attacks in Kherson. It said its air forces had shot down 17 cruise missiles and 18 out of 24 attack drones in Moscow’s latest overnight bombardment.
Kyiv also said its forces had recaptured small areas in the south and east of the country, including near Bakhmut, the town that was destroyed by Russian forces.
Ukraine added that it was dismissing all six of its deputy defence ministers. It comes after President Zelensky named Rustem Umerov as his new defence minister. Umerov replaced Oleksii Reznikov, who has been tipped to become Ukraine’s next ambassador to Britain.
