Why do Ukrainians fight? A $100 million graft case shows why

There are at least two legitimate responses to allegations that a group of highly placed Ukrainian officials have skimmed $100 million from contracts to repair and protect their nation’s critical energy infrastructure, even as Russian attacks plunge the nation into darkness and cold. One is to despair, the other to celebrate. The second, strange as it may sound, is more logical.

This episode goes to the heart of why Ukrainians are fighting at all. The war began in 2014, after then President Viktor Yanukovych was toppled by mass protests against the epic scale of his corruption and the captivity to Moscow this created. Graft was the glue with which the Kremlin had held its neighbor in check since the 1991 Soviet collapse, infiltrated its security services, manipulated its leaders and gutted its military.

It can’t be repeated often enough that it was a trade and association deal with Europe — threatening this whole mechanism of Anacondian absorption — that precipitated Vladimir Putin’s eventual resort to force. And Putin knew his man. He offered Yanukovych $15 billion to forego the European Union’s pact, precipitating the so-called Maidan revolution when Ukraine’s leader agreed not to sign. That was followed by Yanukovych’s flight, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, its launch of a hybrid war in Eastern Ukraine — and, finally, full-scale invasion.

It shouldn’t be shocking that the bureaucracies formed amid such systemic corruption are now alleged to have found ways to make money from war. Likewise, it should come as no surprise if there proves to have been a Russian connection at the heart of the operation. According to statements from the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (Nabu) and Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office conducting the investigation, there was: Andrii Derkach, who fled to Moscow shortly after the February 2022 invasion, was charged in absentia with treason the following year, and became a senator in the Russian legislature in 2024. His office is now alleged to have laundered the skimmed money.

It should be no more surprising if the alleged ringleader of this scheme turns out to be a businessman close to the current president, in the form of Timur Mindich, who owns Kvartal, the TV production studio that he co-founded with Volodymyr Zelenskiy. This is the outfit that made Servant of the People, the hit satire of Ukraine’s endemic political corruption that catapulted Zelenskiy to the presidency, with life following art. Nabu didn’t name Mindich and has produced no evidence against him. Yet the agency searched his properties, leading Ukrainian media to identify him as the probe’s target. According to those reports, he left the country shortly before raids began.

Russia’s propagandists, trolls, bots and fellow travelers will have a field day. For here, surely, is proof positive that Ukraine is not worth helping, that any money given will be stolen, that it is — for all high-flying talk of democracy — no better than or different from its attacker. Kyiv’s EU membership bid, surely, just took a great leap backward.

Yet the true surprise should be that an alleged conspiracy to skim $100 million from the nation’s life and death efforts to keep lights and heat on has been exposed. Not just that, but that the exposure was official, made public after a 15-month investigation into operations at the state nuclear power company JSC Energoatom.

Nabu and the prosecutors conducting the joint investigation are independent. Their offices were created in the wake of the 2014 Maidan anti-corruption protests and under intense pressure from the US and the EU. These are the same organizations Zelenskiy sought to decapitate and bring under his own control in July, when word of the current investigations escaped. Instant street protests – even in the midst of war – forced the president to back down and allow the probe to continue. The president may have thought the war would deter people from coming out; it didn’t.

This time, Zelenskiy has endorsed Nabu’s investigation and ordered government agencies to cooperate. “There must be convictions,” he said on Monday. And this is what EU candidacy demands — not the absence of corruption, but government support for an independent judiciary in the fight against it, no matter where that leads.

Prosecutors haven’t alleged that Zelenskiy or other senior members of his staff may have been involved with the Energoatom scam or the others to come at which Nabu hinted. That could change. The agencies claim to have amassed 1,000 hours of tapped conversations, so we can expect more revelations and turmoil. But I can name a few prominent countries within NATO and the EU whose governments have either succeeded in capturing the courts and investigators tasked with uncovering their corruption, or have sought to discredit judges and arrest prosecutors for doing their jobs.

Zelenskiy was unable to stop Nabu because the checks and balances of Ukrainian democracy don’t lie in its core institutions. They rest, instead, in the sure knowledge its leaders have — based on repeated experience — that if they try to steal an election, or roll back hard-won gains such as the creation of genuinely independent law enforcement, Ukrainians will take to the streets in their millions.

This is not an ideal model that any society would willingly create as a constitutional order, or should imitate. It’s an expression of deep distrust in the state, and is chaotic, explosive and inefficient. But it is Ukraine’s reality, it prevents tyranny and, at least for now, it’s working.