By Ian Proud, Responsible Statecraft, 1/24/25

Russia has spent the past five months swallowing up ever bigger tracts of Ukrainian coal, lithium, and uranium in the Donbass. Yet Western politicians still cling to the belief that they will be able to tap these resources to repay Ukraine’s ever mounting pile of debt. This is economic madness.

In the summer of 2024, most Western politico-military commentators were predicting that Russia was focussed on storming the strategically important military hub of Pokrovsk in Donetsk. Russian troops had advanced slowly, inexorably westward in a straight line following the bloody attritional battle for Avdiivka which was captured in February 2024.

But from August, Russian tactics shifted. First from the south of Donetsk they stormed Vuhledar, literally translated as “Gift of Coal,” a site of significant reserves, capturing it on October 1. That opened the way to swallow up large swaths of land in the south. Following the apparent encirclement of Velyka Novosilka in the past two days, one of Ukraine’s three licensed blocks of extractable lithium is now within short reach in Shevchenko.

Russian armed forces skirted Pokrovsk, instead battling through Selydove and in a straight line for about 20 miles, capturing a Uranium mine in a village called Shevchenko (not the same Shevchenko where the lithium is located). In recent weeks, Russian forces have taken Ukraine’s most important mine for coking coal in Pishchane and two related coking coal shafts in Udachne and Kotlyne. Together, these mines alone had produced the coking coal for 65% of Ukraine’s steel production. There are now fears that Ukrainian steel production could plummet to 10% of its prewar level in 2025.

Since President Trump was elected in November, and the prospect of an enforced ceasefire grew brighter, Russia’s advance has progressively accelerated. Today it is on the verge of completing its capture of the coal-rich bastion of Toretsk, the only town on the line of contact that hadn’t moved since 2014.

That’s bad news for Ukraine, not just because of a potential loss of further territory.

Prior to the crisis in Ukraine starting in late 2013, the extractives sector accounted for over a third of total exports, with agricultural products a third of that value. Today, the situation has been flipped, with agriculture by far the largest export sector.

By capturing every coal, uranium, and lithium mine that they can, Russia is cutting off an important source of Ukrainian wealth. Ukraine faces deeper current account deficits as its agriculture sector is unable to make up the difference for lost exports of minerals, especially with President Zelensky wanting to give away Ukrainian grain to Syria.

Fitch ratings has predicted Ukraine will record current account deficits of 6.5% of and 5.7% of GDP respectively in 2024 and 2025.

As I have pointed out before, with Ukraine still cut off from international lending markets because of its junk sovereign credit rating, that means the only way it can make up the difference is foreign aid or loans from foreign governments. With debt now about 100% of GDP, Ukraine has had to dip into the domestic bond market.

However, as Ukrainian banks are largely state owned, that amounts to borrowing from itself. Ukraine’s central bank governor has denied that the country will need to print money in 2025 to keep the lights on. If it does, hyperinflation and a collapse of the hrynia will beckon, rendering Ukraine’s debt impossible to pay, at which point Western governments will need to bail the country out.

Fear not, though, as Western politicians have a cunning plan to repay Ukrainian debt. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has been outspoken this year in saying that Ukraine could pay back U.S. loans with its mineral wealth. He first raised this in a CBS interview in February 2024 as Congress worked hard to unlock former President Biden’s $61 billion aid package to Ukraine. He repeated this position one month later in Kyiv. Standing beside President Zelensky, he said, “they’re sitting on trillion dollars of minerals that could be good for our economy.”

A month later, Congress passed the long-delayed $61 billion U.S. aid package to Ukraine. That included just $9 billion in forgivable loans, short of the two-thirds Sen. Graham had hinted at in February.

Nonetheless, it marked another step on the road towards shouldering more debt onto Ukraine in the belief that this might one day be repaid in Ukrainian uranium, lithium, and other bountiful minerals. This was solidified by the G7 Extraordinary Revenue Acceleration loan of $50 billion agreed in June 2024, to which the United States contributed $20 billion at the end of 2024.

During this same period, the shift in focus towards Ukraine giving up its natural resources to secure Western aid gathered steam. In October 2024 when President Zelensky unveiled his so-called victory plan, giving up Ukraine’s natural resources became codified. He claimed that Ukraine would sign an agreement with the U.S., EU and others that would allow for use of Ukraine’s natural resources, which were worth “trillions of dollars.”

Just last week, shortly before President Trump’s inauguration, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer penned a “100-year partnership deal” between the United Kingdom and Ukraine. While the document has yet to be made public, 10 Downing Street said that it would cement the UK as “a preferred partner for Ukraine’s energy sector, critical minerals strategy and green steel production.”

US and UK politicians see great potential profit in accessing Ukraine’s wealth when war finally comes to an end, with Forbes Ukraine valuing minerals at $14.8 trillion.

However, just over half of that is located in the four eastern Ukrainian regions that Russia has occupied and where it gains new ground each day.

Back in August, in a typically foul-mouthed tirade, former Russia President Dmitry Medvedev took to his Telegram channel, among other things, to pillory Sen. Graham, who he called a “fat toilet maggot.” He continued, “To get access to the coveted minerals, the Western parasites shamelessly demand that their wards wage war to the last Ukrainian… ‘You’ll have to pay off your debts very soon. Hurry up, dear friends!’”

Leading European politicians still urge Ukraine to continue its war using credit in the hopes it might be repaid with a stock of natural resources that Russia captures with ever greater speed and covetousness. That is the economic equivalent of Russian roulette with a fully-loaded revolver that President Putin is gladly pointing at us.

President Trump’s efforts to end this madness can’t come soon enough.

By Gordon Hahn, Russian & Eurasian Politics, 1/16/25

Westerners are fond of citing a statement falsely attributed to Russian President Vladimir Putin that “Ukraine is not even a state.” This quote is marshaled in order to support the equally false and truly absurd claim that Putin’s decision to undertake his ‘special military operation’ and invade Ukraine on February 24, 2022 was intended to conquer all of Ukraine in an effort to conquer all of the former Soviet states and Russian Imperial territories before moving into Europe. In actuality, the West has treated Ukraine as a less than sovereign, independent state and as a tool – a sacrificial lamb — for the attainment of maximum U.S./Western hegemony in Eurasia by way of NATO expansion. Now, as the fateful and potentially fatal war for Ukraine – the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War – approaches its end game, the statement attributed to Putin may become a simple, if sad, statement of fact. And the wiping of the Ukrainian state off the map of eastern Europe, western Eurasia, and the world is more likely to come as a result of Western actions as it is of Russian forces’ drive westward.  

It is the U.S. and West that drove NATO expansion despite the Ukrainian constitution’s now former clause stipulating the country’s non-bloc, neutral status but repealed by Volodomyr Zelenskiy’s predecessor in Ukraine’s Office of the President, Petro Poroshenko, and despite the Ukrainian population’s divided, if not majority opposition opinion to Ukraine’s membership in NATO.

It is the U.S. and the West that refused to negotiate NATO expansion and a general European security architecture and instead push Ukraine forward to the frontline in NATO’s confrontation with ‘Putin’s Russia’, despite the West’s own claims that Putin and his Russia were dangerous and expansionist.

It is the U.S. and the West that conned Zelenskiy into continuing the war with Russia that Moscow escalated after losing all hope in January 2022 for any negotiations with the West over these issues. Putin opted to engage in coercive diplomacy by initiating the ‘special military operation’ and invading Ukraine and almost simultaneously offering peace talks to Ukraine in February 2022 in order to achieve with Kiev the kind of security agreement that eluded Moscow in relations with the West. The Minsk, then Istanbul talks that resulted reached a preliminary agreement only to see the West scuttle the agreement by refusing to provide the security guarantees envisaged in it any by dispatching then British Premier Boris Johnson to issue the NATO message that Kiev should fight and Washington and Brussels would provide everything Ukraine needed ‘for as long as it takes.’ The Western-Ukrainian relationship that has developed in the course of the war is reminiscent of that of a vassalage—Ukraine being the vassal with little to no sovereignty.

It is the U.S. and the West that have refused to begin peace talks with Moscow or pressure Kiev to do so and instead continuously escalated a war that is attritting Ukraine both in terms of its population and its territory even as Russian forces’ drive westward accelerates with each passing month (as I predicted in January 2024; see https://youtu.be/P_MJi5H6HKU?si=rxRiaE0EglSgbclw at the 1:00:45 mark), despite Putin’s and other top Russian officials’ repeated statements that they are open to any negotiations.  

Now the Ukrainian state’s control over its territories is being whittled away by Russia’s mounting, if cautious offensive. It has been stated by Zelenskiy and Western leaders that Ukrainian forces’ ill-advised, costly, and failed incursion into Russia’s Kursk region in July 2024 provides Kiev with collateral to trade for its Russian-occupied regions. But Russia has stated that no talks with Kiev are possible so long as Ukrainian troops remain on Russian territory, and Russia’s advancing troops in Ukraine are moving deeper into regions beyond the Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhia regions Russia has laid claim to and annexed. Thus, rather than Ukraine being able to trade Kursk for one or more of those regions in any future talks, it will be Russia that will be able to demand concessions for the return of regions or parts thereof such as Kharkiv (Kharkov), Sumy, Dnipro (Dnepropetrovsk), Mikolaev, and even eastern Kiev.

Moreover, the danger of Russian forces crossing the Dnieper River into western Ukraine is just over the horizon. So it now is becoming more in NATO’s perceived self-interest in its pursuit of encroachment on Russia’s borders and encircling her to destroy what is Russia’s Ukrainian buffer than it is to preserve any Ukraine that is a non-bloc, neutral state. Russia has repeatedly declared that it is in its self-interestthat Ukraine be a non-bloc, neutral state and never become a member of NATO. This is because Russia prefers a buffer be situated between it and the Western alliance for all the obvious and not so obvious (to many) reasons. Therefore, the party in the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War that is most interested in destroying Ukraine as a state is not Russia but NATO.

The elimination of Ukraine will achieve the key goal that NATO’s expansion to Ukraine has been intended to achieve: NATO’s acquisition of members along all of Russia’s western and southwestern borders (the Transcaucasus). In comparison with having Ukraine as a member-state, Ukraine’s absorption by Russia has only two downsides for Washington and Brussels. First, they will have to forego the control over the Black Sea they coveted as the second goal of NATO expansion, though perhaps Georgia remains an option, however less liable in the wake of the recent elections and failed attempt to repeat the color of ‘rose’ revolution there. Second, there will be a blow to Western prestige in light of its failure to save Ukraine and deal a strategic defeat to Russia.

There are numerous ways in which the West or elements therein can facilitate or bring about Ukraine’s demise. The most likely is another scuttling of peace talks – this time those being worked on by the Trump Administration – forcing Ukraine to continue fighting a losing war of attrition with Russian advancing forces right up to the Polish, Hungarian, and Rumanian borders. This is precisely what hardline former Russian Security Council Secretary and FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev was warning in his much discussed Moskovskii Komsomolets interview. For Trump this will be a soon forgotten political defeat. But many in DC and Brussels will rejoice at the prospect of a long war for Russia that lasts until Putin’s physical or political health fails, sparking a power struggle that might offer the prospect of a Russian collapse on the Soviet model.

A less likely scenario would be the previous one with annexations of Transcarpathian and western provinces of Ukraine by Hungary, Rumania, and Poland added in. Elements in all three of these countries are pushing for returns of traditional national territories given to the USSR’s Ukraine SSR by Joseph Stalin after World War Two. Midwives of Ukraine’s dissolution could also emerge as a result of NATO’s insertion of troops into Ukraine west of the Dnieper, as was proposed by some earlier in the war. Recent talk of British and French ‘peacekeepers’ in Ukraine could perform the same function. Although this variation is unlikely, such a ‘protectorate Ukraine’ could eventually be dissolved and its parts incorporated by its neighbors as noted above.

With Ukraine’s disappearance, the Beltway and Brussels can and will assuage themselves with the knowledge that NATO has reached Russia’s borders in yet another sector and has the option of fomenting Ukrainian separatists inside Russia.

The one thing that would likely trump or delay the abovementioned scenarios, besides Trump and any innovative schemes his team might conjure up, is some form of direct Western intervention in the war on the ground. In this case, there is still no guarantee of Ukraine’s survival as Western and Russian troops rampage through the country in the long war over NATO expansion.

By Sergey Poletaev, RT, 1/22/25

Over the past month, the Russian military has advanced along seven directions in Donbass and Kursk Region, with significant progress reported in key areas. The Kurakhovo operation in the western part of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) is nearing completion, while Russian forces are beginning to encircle the Pokrovsk urban agglomeration, further north. What follows is a detailed account of recent developments.

Kursk Region: Kiev’s failed attack

In late 2024, Moscow’s forces significantly reduced the Ukrainian military’s foothold in Kursk Region — part of ‘old Russia’ — mitigating threats and preventing the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) from advancing toward strategic locations like Lgov and Rylsk. The strategy of attrition warfare has kept this section of the front relatively static.

On January 5–6, approximately three Ukrainian battalions launched an attack on the settlement of Berdin. However, Russian troops detected their preparations early and executed counterattacks in the directions of Russkoye and Cherkasskoye, liberating Russkoye Porechnoye. Another counterattack targeted Malaya Loknya.

Photographic evidence indicates that a Ukrainian battalion was destroyed near Berdin, marking one of the AFU’s largest operations since the disastrous 2023 counteroffensive. Despite their efforts, the Ukrainian column failed to penetrate Russian minefields.

The front line remains stable following these engagements, with no signs of an imminent large-scale Russian push. Instead, attrition tactics are likely to persist until Ukrainian resources are depleted or a retreat is ordered.

Toretsk and Chasov Yar: First steps toward Konstantinovka

Months of intense fighting for Toretsk and Chasov Yar in Donetsk have started to yield results. By mid-January, Russian forces had captured a fire-retardant factory in Chasov Yar, followed by the city center, including the city council building, by January 20. The western part of the city remains under Ukrainian control, but these gains position Russian forces closer to Konstantinovka, a major target with a pre-war population of 75,000. But in order to advance in this direction, the Russian army needs to expand the area of control along the Seversky Donets-Donbass canal.

In Toretsk, Russian forces captured the Tsentralnaya mine, the city center, and multiple residential areas. The AFU retains control over the Toretskaya mine and parts of Krymskoye in the northeast. Securing Toretsk allows Russian troops to move towards Konstantinovka, which is 10–11 km further along the railway line.

However, operations in these areas face challenges. In Chasov Yar, supply routes via the Seversky Donets-Donbass canal are problematic due to the canal’s depth, which reaches up to ten meters in places. Meanwhile, Toretsk’s dense urban development and challenging terrain complicate Russian advances. Despite these hurdles, progress in these sectors marks steady, albeit incremental, gains.

Pokrovsk-Mirnograd: Encirclement in Progress

Pokrovsk is emerging as a focal point for Russia’s next major offensive following the Kurakhovo operation. The strategy appears to follow a familiar pattern: encircling the city, establishing fire control over supply routes, and depleting the Ukrainian garrison’s resources.

The southern flank of Pokrovsk was formed after the capture of Selidovo in late October 2024. This area also serves as the northern flank of Kurakhovo. Indicators suggest that Pokrovsk and Mirnograd — together forming an urban area of over 100,000 people — will be targeted as a single entity.

In January, Russian units advanced toward the Pokrovsk–Mezhevaya highway in the south and the village of Vozdvizhenka in the north, cutting off the Pokrovsk–Konstantinovka highway. These maneuvers are initial steps toward encircling Pokrovsk and Mirnograd while demonstrating the potential for a broader offensive that could extend into the Dnepropetrovsk region for the first time since 2022.

Kurakhovo: The final phase of the operation

The Kurakhovo operation began on October 1, 2024, with the capture of Ugledar. On January 6, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced the liberation of Kurakhovo and its extensive industrial zone. Russian troops entered the western part of the industrial zone around New Year’s Eve, facing minimal resistance as the weakened Ukrainian garrison abandoned its positions.

Over the course of three months, Russian forces systematically surrounded the city from three sides, establishing fire control over supply lines and forcing the AFU into retreat. The flanks extended 10–15 km west, encircling Ukrainian forces outside fortified urban and industrial zones.

The operation is not yet complete, however. The capture of Andreevka and Konstantinovka is essential to stabilize the front line and fully secure this strategic area.

Broader Strategic Observations

Russian advances over the past month highlight a methodical approach characterized by encirclement, resource depletion, and steady territorial gains. While operations in Toretsk and Chasov Yar underscore the challenges of urban combat and logistical constraints, progress in Pokrovsk and Kurakhovo demonstrates the effectiveness of Russia’s offensive strategies.

The capture of Kurakhovo and advances toward Pokrovsk and Mirnograd could pave the way for operations extending into Dnepropetrovsk for the first time since 2022, potentially altering the strategic landscape.

As the conflict continues, the effectiveness of Russia’s strategy — coupled with its ability to manage logistical and operational challenges — will play a decisive role. For now, the focus remains on consolidating gains, securing supply lines, and preparing for the next phase of operations.

By Leonid Ragozin, Al Jazeera, 1/18/25

President Joe Biden is about to wrap up what many perceive as a disastrous presidency. His departure from the White House could potentially mark a turning point in both the Russia-Ukraine conflict and in the three decades of poorly thought-out Western policies which resulted in the alienation of Russia and the collapse of its democratic project. But that hinges on the incoming President Donald Trump’s ability not to repeat the mistakes of his predecessors.

It is Russian President Vladimir Putin who decided to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but the ground for this conflict was prepared by US securocrats in the 1990s. Back then, Russia had just emerged from the dissolution of the USSR much weaker and disoriented, while the Russian leadership, idealistic and inept as it was at the time, worked on the assumption that full-blown integration with the West was inevitable.

Decisions made at that time triggered confrontation between Russia and the West which arrived at its logical climax during Biden’s presidency.

The problem was never the eastward expansion of NATO – a security pact created to confront the Soviet Union – and the European Union per se, but Russia’s exclusion from this process.

Crucially, this approach set Ukraine on the course of Euro-Atlantic integration while Russia was kept out of it – creating a rift between two nations closely linked to each other by history, economic and interpersonal relations. It also precipitated Russia’s securitisation and backsliding on democracy under Putin.

This outcome was never pre-destined and it took relentless efforts by American securocrats to bring it about.

One of the lost chances for a different path was the Partnership for Peace programme, officially launched by the Clinton administration in 1994. It was designed to balance the desire of former Warsaw Pact countries to join NATO and the crucial goal of keeping Russia on board – as a major nuclear power and a new democracy with a clearly pro-Western government.

Russia joined it but, as the American historian Mary Sarotte writes in her book Not One Inch, this useful framework was derailed at its inception by a small number of securocrats in Washington.

She specifically talks about “the pro-expansion troika”, consisting of Daniel Fried, Alexander Vershbow, and Richard Holbrooke, who pushed for an aggressive expansion of NATO, disregarding protests from Moscow.

Sarotte also mentions John Herbst as the author of a later report on unofficial promises of NATO’s non-expansion made to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev which, as she suggests, shaped the US policy of ignoring Russia’s complaints about NATO expanding all the way to its borders for decades to come.

The unreflective arrogance and triumphalism that these securocrats embody can also be seen in Biden himself who back then was a prominent member of Congress. In a 1997 video, he mocked Moscow’s protests against NATO expansion by saying that Russia would have to embrace China and Iran if it kept being intransigent. He clearly assumed it to be an absurd and unrealistic scenario back then – believing, perhaps, that Russia had no choice but to stay in the Western orbit. But it turned out exactly along the lines of what he thought was a smart joke.

In his hawkish politics on Russia, Biden found a willing partner in the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It is hardly a coincidence that Zelenskyy’s massive U-turn on relations with Russia started as Biden took office.

The Ukrainian president had been elected on the promise that he would end the simmering conflict that began with the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. He met with Putin in Paris in December 2019 and the two agreed to a ceasefire in the Donbas region, which both sides had largely respected, reducing the number of deaths to near zero.

But once Biden set foot in the White House, Zelenskyy ordered a clampdown on Putin’s Ukrainian ally Viktor Medvedchuk, while simultaneously launching loud campaigns for Ukraine’s NATO membership, the return of Crimea, as well as for the derailing of the Russo-German Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project.

Two factors may have played into Zelenskyy’s decisions. Azerbaijan’s victory over Russian-backed Armenian forces in the fall of 2020, achieved largely thanks to Turkish Bayraktar drones, gave hopes that high-tech warfare against Russia could be successful. The other factor was that in December 2020, polls showed Medvedchuk’s party ahead of Zelenskyy’s.

Just a few days after Biden’s inauguration, Zelenskyy gave an interview to American outlet Axios in which he famously asked his US counterpart: “Why Ukraine is still not in NATO?” This was followed by an op-ed with the same question in the title by Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, published by Atlantic Council – a think tank that gets much of its funding from the US government and Pentagon contractors.

Unsurprisingly, some of the same personalities that shaped US policies towards Russia in the 1990s also egged on the Biden administration to adopt aggressive policies that contributed to making the invasion happen.

On March 5, Fried, Vershbow and Herbst, along with three others, published a report in the Atlantic Council with a list of recommendations for the Biden administration with regard to Ukraine and Russia. These boiled down to pressuring Putin by escalating on every front – from offering NATO membership plan to Ukraine to derailing Nord Stream 2 and “enhancing security” in the Black Sea.

Three weeks after that publication, Putin began deploying troops on the Ukrainian border, embarking on 11 months of hair-raising brinkmanship. This period saw the British warship HMS Defender entering what Russia had declared its territorial waters off the coast of occupied Crimea in June, the US starting secret supplies of weapons to Ukraine in September and finally the US and Ukraine announcing a strategic partnership in November – a move that amounted to casus belli in the eyes of Kremlin hawks.

It was around that time that Putin began preparing for the invasion in earnest before eventually triggering it in February 2022. The resulting war is now approaching its third anniversary.

Despite massive Western backing, Ukraine suffered terrible losses and gained nothing from challenging Putin to a fight. The war has brought Ukraine to the brink, causing a massive refugee crisis, economic collapse, social disintegration and ever-growing death toll.

If peace in Ukraine is achieved this year, it will likely be along the lines of the failed Istanbul agreements of 2022, which envisioned an Austria-styled neutral Ukraine with limits on the size of its army. Russia will likely insist on keeping much of the territory that it gained as punishment for Ukrainian intransigence. This will technically constitute a defeat for Ukraine, but it will be a clear win for the Ukrainian people, who have borne the brunt of this war, as well as for the rest of the world.

It will also be a major defeat for the securocratic class which has been pushing for a new standoff with Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The aggressive pursuit of expansion at the expense of Russia has clearly failed as a strategy. It is time for Western policymakers to do some soul-searching on how to reverse the situation and start a slow drift back towards rapprochement with Moscow.

This is not about absolving Putin’s government from accountability for the crime of aggression as well as war crimes committed by Russian troops. It is about removing conditions which caused Russia’s transformation into a militarised dictatorship and ending a conflict which will keep propping up Putin’s regime for as long as it lasts.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

By Laura Gozzi, BBC, 1/21/25

Ukraine has detained its army’s chief psychiatrist for alleged “illegal enrichment” charges related to earnings of more than $1m (£813,000) accrued since the start of Russia’s invasion in February 2022.

In a statement, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said the man sat on a commission deciding whether individuals were fit for military service.

The SBU statement did not name him – however, a man called Oleh Druz was previously identified as the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ chief psychiatrist.

The SBU said he owned three apartments in or near Kyiv, one in Odesa, two plots of land and several BMW luxury cars, and investigators searching his home also found $152,000 (£124,000) and €34,000 in cash.

The statement said the man did not declare the property, which was registered in the name of his wife, daughter, sons, and other third parties.

He now faces ten years in jail for the alleged charges of illegal enrichment and making a false declaration.

Druz was implicated in a similar case in 2017 which saw him fail to declare two SUVs and several properties, leading him to be suspended.

Ukraine has long battled endemic corruption.

In May, a Ukrainian MP was charged with embezzling £220,000, while in 2023 more than 30 conscription officials accused of taking bribes and smuggling people out of the country were sacked in an anti-corruption purge.

Last year, the Ukrainian parliament voted to abolish military medical commissions after several officials were accused of accepting bribes in exchange for issuing exemptions from military service.