As Russian troops and missiles streamed over Ukraine’s borders on the first day of its invasion, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy took a moment to shake hands with his main rival, former president Petro Poroshenko. The show of unity quieted Ukrainian politics for years and bolstered his wartime leadership.
That truce is now gone. A sprawling investigation into a multimillion-dollar kickback scheme has implicated close associates of Zelenskiy, jolting the country’s politics back to life and weakening the Ukrainian president at home as pressure on the battlefield intensifies.
As the most significant corruption scandal of Zelenskiy’s tenure unfolds, opponents who had lain low are coalescing into the first major anti-Zelenskiy movement since the invasion began in 2022. These adversaries include Ukraine’s independent anti-corruption agencies, opposition parties, political activists and media outlets.
With the handshake forgotten and the gloves now off, Zelenskiy’s critics are speaking in once-unthinkable terms, including accusing presidential allies of betraying the country. Many Ukrainians have reacted with disgust to accusations that his allies enriched themselves while the country’s soldiers are dying in a fight for national survival.
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“The country has finally seen what the expression ‘blood money’ means,” Poroshenko’s political party said in a statement about the corruption scandal. Zelenskiy’s wartime cabinet, the statement said, is “unprofessional and corrupt.”
No significant politicians in Ukraine are calling for Zelenskiy to resign, and with elections suspended under martial law, he can’t be voted out of office. But the movement coming together around corruption poses serious risks to him, analysts say.
The swelling opposition could threaten Zelenskiy’s control of parliament as members of his party defect to become independents, eroding his ability to pass legislation, which has been vital for quick decision-making during the war.
Poroshenko’s party is collecting signatures for a no-confidence vote in the wartime cabinet. And Zelenskiy’s inner circle has also come under pressure. Yaroslav Zheleznyak, a member of the opposition Holos party, has called for the resignation of Zelenskiy’s powerful chief of staff, Andriy Yermak. Zelenskiy, Yermak and a small coterie of advisers hold tight control over power in Ukraine, analysts say.
“The only way forward for Zelenskiy is essentially getting rid of everyone” on his wartime leadership team, said Balazs Jarabik, a former political adviser for the European Union in Kyiv.
The movement against Zelenskiy began with street protests in July after he had moved to neutralise the anti-corruption agencies that were investigating his inner circle. He quickly reversed course, but the corruption revelations this month have renewed discontent with Zelenskiy, as many Ukrainians demand greater transparency and accountability from the government.
Polls show that trust in Zelenskiy has fallen to close to 50 per cent, after soaring to about 90 per cent after the invasion.
Zelenskiy, who has been in office for nearly seven years, has not said whether he will run once elections are resumed, if Russia eventually agrees to a ceasefire, allowing martial law to be lifted.
Revelations of corruption began emerging last week, and they have touched people close to the president.
The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine said that a former business partner of Zelenskiy’s, Timur Mindich, had organised the scheme, in which at least $100 million was stolen over the last 15 months from the state nuclear power company through kickbacks to contractors.
The independent investigative agency was established in 2015 with backing from the International Monetary Fund and western donors.
Investigators said they had bugged an apartment and an office in Kyiv where Mindich and others, including a government minister and an executive at the nuclear company, discussed divvying up hundreds of thousands of dollars and moving money to Switzerland and Israel. The anti-corruption agency has been publishing the audio online.
The accusations of theft from the energy sector were all the more galling for Ukrainians – and politically sensitive for Zelenskiy – as the country endures long electrical blackouts after recent Russian missile and drone attacks on power plants.
Zelenskiy has responded by asking the justice minister, Herman Halushchenko, and the energy minister, Svitlana Hrynchuk, to resign. Both submitted letters of resignation.
The National Security and Defence Council placed sanctions on the former business partner, Mindich, a part owner of the comedic television studio that Zelenskiy founded before becoming president. Mindich fled Ukraine shortly before a search of his home.
The government has also announced overhauls of regulatory agencies and corporate governance practices at state companies.
A former deputy prime minister, Oleksiy Chernyshov, who investigators said had accepted payments of more than $1 million, said that he was innocent and that investigators had published excerpts from the recordings out of context.
At a hearing on Monday, Zheleznyak, the opposition member of parliament, said the government’s moves to address the corruption accusations were insufficient. He levelled criticism against government ministers who attended the hearing. It has been rare during the war for ministers to attend hearings.
The accusations of high-level corruption could cause a realignment against Zelenskiy in parliament, political analysts say, returning to a norm through most of Ukraine’s recent history of presidents deadlocked with an opposition-controlled chamber. In wartime conditions, Russia could exploit those internal divisions.
Ukrainska Pravda, a leading Ukrainian news outlet, reported that a faction in Zelenskiy’s political party, Servant of the People, was pressing for the resignation of Yermak, the chief of staff, and threatening to leave the party if he remained in his post.
In a sign that Zelenskiy may be losing his ability to pass legislation, voting on next year’s budget, which was scheduled for this week, has been delayed. Opposition politicians said they intended to use debate on the budget bill to demand that new anti-graft protections be included.
Even before the scandal, Zelenskiy had effectively lost majority control in parliament because of defections and resignations in his party. But he had been able to pass legislation in coalition with former members of a now-banned pro-Russia party.
“The current steps are not enough to convince Ukrainian society that something really changed, not something cosmetically,” said Volodymyr Ariev, a member of Poroshenko’s European Solidarity Party, speaking of the two ministerial resignations and the swiftly announced regulatory overhauls.
He has called for the formation of a national unity government that would include opposition figures. But he conceded that Zelenskiy was unlikely to cede power in this way.
Standing by aides, ministers or other officials implicated in the investigation, Ariev said, will not only “weaken him as a politician and president but it will weaken Ukraine”.
– This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
