Ian Proud
The $100 million corruption scandal around Ukraine’s energy system that broke this past week is critical to ordinary Ukrainians for its timing. Russia has been bombarding the country’s energy infrastructure on a daily basis to deny ordinary citizens heat and electricity during the cold and dark winter months.
In November 2024, a separate scandal broke that $1.6 billion set aside to build protective bunkers around electricity sub-stations had not led to any being built.
With this in mind, many have responded that the highly publicized nature of this latest scandal, which resulted in the resignations of both the energy and justice ministers, offers visible proof that progress is being made in tackling corruption in Ukraine. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) of Ukraine, which is often at the spearhead of such investigations, was first established by Presidential Decree in April 2015. That it continues to function is indeed a positive sign.
It's not possible, however, to claim that corruption has emerged as a specifically wartime phenomena. This energy scandal is hardly a one-off. In September 2021, with Zelensky having already been in power for two and a half years, the European Court of Auditors reported that state corruption and capture were still widespread in Ukraine. It pointed out that “tens of billions of Euros are lost annually as a result of corruption,” and that EU support delivered over 20 years had not delivered the desired results.
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