Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, along with government officials and 35 generals embezzled $400 million in U.S. aid to the country, according to an estimate from the Central Intelligence Agency.
The funds originally meant to purchase diesel fuel for Ukraine’s army were instead reportedly used to purchase luxury vehicles.
According to a member of American intelligence, “Zelensky’s been buying discount diesel from the Russians.”
“And who’s paying for the gas and oil? We are. Putin and his oligarchs are making millions” from the purchases,” the source added.
Reporting from Seymour Hersh:
Many government ministries in Kiev have been literally “competing,” I was told, to set up front companies for export contracts for weapons and ammunition with private arms dealers around the world, all of which provide kickbacks. Many of those companies are in Poland and Czechia, but others are thought to exist in the Persian Gulf and Israel. “I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are others in places like the Cayman Islands and Panama, and there are lots of Americans involved,” an American expert on international trade told me. The issue of corruption was directly raised with Zelensky in a meeting last January in Kiev with CIA Director William Burns. His message to the Ukrainian president, I was told by an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the meeting, was out of a 1950s mob movie. The senior generals and government officials in Kiev were angry at what they saw as Zelensky’s greed, so Burns told the Ukrainian president, because “he was taking a larger share of the skim money than was going to the generals.”
