Bags of cash and a gold toilet: the corruption crisis engulfing Zelenskyy’s government

Law enforcement searches inside opulent Kyiv apartments, one with a golden toilet. Pictures of duffel bags filled with cash. Audio recordings of officials discussing money laundering strategies.

These are among the details that have shocked Ukrainians over the past week as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s administration was engulfed in the biggest corruption scandal since he took office, destabilising Kyiv’s leadership at a critical moment in the war.

Zelenskyy and his closest aides had tried this summer to neuter independent anti-corruption agencies as they were finalising a sprawling probe targeting the president’s inner circle. But the Ukrainian president and his allies were forced to abandon the attempt after mass protests and outrage from the country’s western partners.

Undeterred, investigators this week released a trove of detailed evidence, including damning claims that senior figures were taking kickbacks on construction projects to protect power stations from Russian missile attacks, at a time when Ukrainians are living with daily rolling blackouts.

The revelations prompted a wave of public anger — “how the president’s friends robbed the country in wartime” read a typical headline on the news website Ukrainska Pravda — and forced a change of tack.

Zelenskyy finally turned on the suspects in an attempt to protect his presidency. On Wednesday, the Ukrainian president demanded the resignations of justice minister German Galushchenko and energy minister Svitlana Hrynchuk, both of whom were subsequently removed from the national security council.

He also imposed sanctions on Timur Mindich, a friend and former business partner charged in the case. Investigators said Mindich was the “co-organiser” of the alleged scheme, and that some $100mn of illicit funds passed through his office.

“He controlled the work of the so-called ‘laundry room’, where criminally-obtained funds were laundered,” Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (Nabu) said. Mindich could not immediately be reached for comment.

Despite the swerve in Zelenskyy’s approach, his response has been criticised as hesitant, while politicians are braced for further revelations that could further harm close allies of the man leading Ukraine through its brutal conflict with Russia.

Serhiy Fursa, a Ukrainian investment banker and political commentator, wrote on Wednesday: “We cannot afford for the Ukrainian president, for the Ukrainian government, to lose its remnants of legitimacy during the war.

“Otherwise, we risk losing the state in the same way as during the first world war, when desertion at the front came on top of mass despair and political discord.”

Nabu said earlier this week it had carried out more than 70 searches and arrested five people in a “large-scale operation” with the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (Sapo) to expose graft in the energy sector.

Investigators said officials and business figures had conspired to force suppliers to Energoatom, the country’s nuclear power company, to pay kickbacks worth 10 to 15 per cent of each contract’s value.

The outcome of the 15-month investigation, which Nabu said gathered more than 1,000 hours of wiretap evidence, sparked fury in Ukraine. Nabu said some kickbacks were taken from contractors hired to build structures to protect substations from Russian drone and missile attacks.

“Now Zelenskyy is keeping his distance [from] the people implicated in the case, and he is especially trying to avoid being associated with Mindich,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, a political scientist based in Kyiv.

Mindich, who co-owns the Kvartal 95 entertainment company of which Zelenskyy was a co-founder, was tipped off in advance and fled Ukraine hours before the investigation, according to Nabu chief detective Oleksandr Abakumov.

Another close Zelenskyy friend and ally, former deputy prime minister Oleksiy Chernyshov, was accused by Nabu of receiving cash to the tune of $1.2mn in dollars and €100,000 of euros.

He has been charged with illegal enrichment, but denies wrongdoing, as does Galuschenko. Hrynchuk, the energy minister, has not been directly implicated in the case.

Zelenskyy’s handling of the scandal has “been very slow, and very weak”, said Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, a Kyiv-based watchdog.

Zelenskyy first commented on the new claims against his associates on Monday evening, voicing support for the investigation without committing to any actions.

His demand that the two ministers resign came on Tuesday, several hours after Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko announced Galushchenko’s suspension, a decision immediately blasted by civil society figures as inadequate.

“A temporary suspension, not even dismissal . . . would this be the reaction of a president who genuinely knew nothing?” said Vitaliy Shabunin, a prominent anti-corruption activist, immediately after the suspension.

The Ukrainian president then moved to dismiss the two ministers and imposed sanctions on Mindich and another businessman accused in the case.

Svyrydenko said on Thursday she had ordered a “comprehensive audit” of major state energy and defence companies.

Zelenskyy’s ratings fell in the summer after rare wartime street protests forced him to cut short an attempt to put the Nabu and Sapo under the control of the prosecutor-general, a figure appointed by Zelenskyy himself.

“But in July it was about a general feeling of injustice . . . it was still fairly abstract,” said Anastasia Radina, a lawmaker with Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party and head of the parliament’s anti-corruption committee. “Right now it is about very specific misconduct, very specific names, very specific sums of money.”

A special parliamentary commission will on Monday question key law enforcement agencies about “systemic actions undertaken to eliminate corruption risks in procedures, and in Energoatom first and foremost”, said Radina.

Allies of the president and some anti-corruption activists have praised the fact that Nabu could conduct a large-scale investigation targeting senior government officials and figures directly linked to the head of state even in wartime. They said this showed the resilience of the anti-corruption agencies set up after the 2014 pro-western Maidan revolution.

The situation “convincingly demonstrates Ukraine’s transformation,” Mykhailo Podolyak, adviser to the head of the presidential office, wrote on X. The EU ambassador to Kyiv, Katarína Mathernová, said the probe and the authorities’ response were “a strong signal that Ukraine’s independent institutions are working”.

The investigation “is a success story yes, a positive sign,” said Kaleniuk. “However the pressure that Nabu and Sapo have faced is insane . . . It’s a story that can be positive, but only if Zelenskyy picks the side of Nabu and Sapo, and of the people of Ukraine.”

Campaigners say law enforcement agencies loyal to the president have a pattern of pressuring independent anti-corruption institutions. In July, Ukraine’s security service (SBU) detained a Nabu detective; Ruslan Mahamedrasulov, who remains in pre-trial detention and is accused of facilitating the export of hemp to Russia’s Dagestan region.

Anti-corruption activists dismissed the accusation as politically motivated. This week, chief Nabu detective Abakumov said Mahamedrasulov had been investigating corruption inside Energoatom.

Navigating the crisis is particularly perilous for Ukraine’s vibrant civil society as well as the country’s opposition. Both have largely refrained from criticising Zelenskyy following the 2022 full-scale Russian invasion, and have agreed that elections would be impossible in wartime.

European Solidarity, an opposition party led by former president and longtime Zelenskyy rival Petro Poroshenko, has reiterated its demand that the current government be replaced by a technocratic “government of unity” to include opposition figures.

But it has stopped short of asking for Zelenskyy to step down. “We’re still at war,” said Rostyslav Pavlenko, an MP and Poroshenko ally.

Analysts and political figures have noted that new revelations from the investigation could further destabilise the president.

A Sapo prosecutor claimed during a Tuesday hearing of the high anti-corruption court that former defence minister Rustem Umerov, a trusted ally of Zelenskyy, could have been “influenced” by Mindich. Umerov has not been charged and denies any involvement.

“I think that right now, both society and the political class understand that a political crisis would be too dangerous,” said Fesenko, the political analyst.

“A lot depends on the next steps of the investigation, if new information comes out that involves Zelenskyy or the office of the president . . . then of course, it’ll be a new round.”