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Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Energy Minister siphoned off $100,000,000 of aid money and fled the country, always a good sign that the war is going well.
I'm surprised they didn't send a hit squad after him. Stealing $100 million during war time isn't low level treason.
Corvus oculum corvi non eruit. The whole scheme was run by one of Zelensky's old business partners.
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Amazing how buried this was. I can't help but wonder if Ukraine would have been able to "succeed" in some way by this point if they weren't so relentlessly corrupt.
On the other hand, I'd wonder if Ukraine's leadership wouldn't have jumped ship and left the country headless by now if they saw that there is no opportunity for profiteering. Kickbacks are the superstar CEO salaries of politics.
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Trust me - the amounts stolen in Ukraine since the first year of the war are probably $100,000,000 per day. Just Eastern European things. I think that also the reason so many Russian nouveau riche decided to commit suicide by jumping from tall buildings - Putin was sending a message that right now is not business as usual and the rules about state money have changed for the duration of the war.
The whole operation was just a shot over the bow towards Zelensky from EU.
That would be around a quarter of their pre-war GDP, so it is less implausible than I first thought.
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It gets buried under the general mythology, but WWII was full of war profiteering and corruption within the US Armed Forces and on the homefront.
I'm not sure that individual incidents of corruption are all that strong a signal. We'd need to really have a strong idea of what the base rate of corruption is.
Let's just say that if you cremate all of the honest government officials and big company CEOs in eastern Europe, you will be able to cram their remains in a matchbox.
What do you mean, cram? Gently pour.
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Hey, if they can steal so much and the front still doesn't collapse, what does that say about the state of the war?
Well per Sun Tzu or whoever it was, the first casualty of war is always the truth. Anyone who doesn’t keep their ear close to the ground on the propaganda on both sides is at high risk for concealing themselves in their own bubble. My own personal digest every other day or week has been HistoryLegends who’s actually dedicated some videos specifically to debunking the western propaganda narrative, and Defense Politics Asia who looks at things directly from an operational perspective. I know what I’m going to get from the BBC or CNN and I know what I’m going to get from RT, so I seldom bother with those from the get go.
That said, whether you agree with Russia or Ukraine is beside the point. I’d much rather want to be on the Russian side of the front line than the Ukrainian one.
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