The Never-Ending Ukrainian Corruption, the Never-Ending Ukrainian War

On Wednesday, January 14, 2026, Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAP) informed long-time Ukrainian politician Yulia Tymoshenko, leader of the Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party, that she is suspected of running a system of regular, long-term payments to members of her party in exchange for voting for or against certain laws.

As evidence, NABU released a recording in which Yulia Tymoshenko discussed with an unnamed Ukrainian MP from her party a system of payments for specific parliamentary votes. On January 12, one day ahead of the vote on the dismissal of Defense Minister Denys Shmyhal and First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov, Tymoshenko was heard on the recording saying:

‘We pay “ten” for two sessions, we pay after signing for two sessions.’

In the conversation, Tymoshenko emphasized:

‘We vote for dismissals, not for appointment.’

CELSIUS Assorted Flavo... Check Amazon for Pricing. On the following day the January 13, the Ukrainian parliament approved the removal of Denys Shmyhal from the position of Defense Minister and the dismissal of Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov from his position. Thus, the question arose: who was the ultimate client and payer for the votes of Batkivshchyna MPs, given that it was Volodymyr Zelenskyy who requested the parliament to dismiss these ministers. Neither NABU nor SAP addressed this question in their charges—either because they lacked recordings of conversations in which these votes were commissioned, or because they did not wish to target the Ukrainian president.

The logic of this question was so clear that it also raised the issue of where of from whom NABU and SAP obtained this recording and how many such recordings existed when they accused Yulia Tymoshenko of systematically bribing Batkivshchyna MPs. No evidence other than this one phone conversation was made public. Everything suggests that Ukraine’s political elite is just as riddled with corruption as it was during the rule of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. Let us recall that in the summer of 2025, the Ukrainian parliament, at the proposal of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, passed a law by a majority vote that abolished the independence of anti-corruption bodies from state power. Let us also remember that the European Union, at the time, did not seek to remove President Zelenskyy from office following this his move. Nevertheless, the investigation into Yulia Tymoshenko’s corrupt practices did not lead to charges against Volodymyr Zelensky, allowing him to continue the war against Russia over territories that—according to pre-2014 opinion polls—never expressed a desire to join the European Union and even rebelled against becoming part of it: namely, Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions

According to a public opinion poll published on February 2, 2026, by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, 50% of Ukrainians were against Ukraine ceding Donbas to Russia, while 40% were in favor. However, according to a survey of Ukrainian public opinion conducted by the British Gallup Institute in the summer of 2025, 69% of Ukrainians supported ending the war, even at the cost of territorial concessions. Which of these institutes was more trustworthy, given that the Ukrainian poll was conducted during wartime?

The Ukrainian army can currently continue fighting for Donbas only because the European Union supports the Ukrainian government in this effort. The United States, at this point, would cede Donbas to Russia in order to secure its allegiance in the struggle for power with China. However, since the U.S. also needs the EU’s alliance in this geopolitical competition, it is yielding to the EU’s stance on supporting Ukraine in the war over Donbas. The EU’s support, in turn, is based on Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s refusal to voluntarily surrender Donbas to Russia.

For Zelenskyy, continuing the war is a way to remain in power in Ukraine and avoid accusations of involvement in the corruption of the Ukrainian government. According to a public opinion poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology on February 4, 2026, 42% of Ukrainians believed that the people currently leading Ukraine should not remain in power after the war, while 48% thought that they were competent leaders who should stay in power. These numbers could easily shift against the current government as investigations by Ukrainian anti-corruption bodies into already open cases continue.

The newly appointed Ukrainian Minister of Defense, Mykhailo Fedorov, admitted in the Ukrainian parliament that approximately 200,000 soldiers have deserted from the Ukrainian army, and an additional two million Ukrainians are intentionally avoiding military service, while tens of thousands fled abroad to avoid mobilization. It is estimated that Ukraine has around 730,000 soldiers under arms.

On February 6, 2026, Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander Oleksandr Syrskyi stated at a press conference that 90% of mobilized soldiers are being provided by Ukrainian military administrations. Among Ukrainians, there is little interest in volunteering for the war. Military administrations are ‘mobilizing’ men of military age on the streets, in entertainment venues, and even in gyms. In recent days, Ukrainian newspapers have been reporting almost daily on attacks against members of military administrations who are conscripting soldiers into the Ukrainian army, as well as incidents of physical assaults by military administration personnel on mobilized men. In Odesa, on the evening of February 4, a group of military administration officers and police approached a man of military age on the street and asked for his military documents; the man sprayed them with pepper spray, stabbed one of the soldiers with a knife, and then fled.

In Chernivtsi, on February 7, 2025, members of the military administration, together with police officers, stopped a car and checked the military documents of its passengers. One of them refused to present his documents and injured a member of the military administration so badly that he had to be taken to hospital. On the same day, police in the Dnipropetrovsk region detained three members of the military administration suspected of killing a 55-year-old man, whom they wanted to mobilize, with several blows, including a blow to the head. On February 9, 2026, in the city of Cherkasy in the Cherkasy region, a 55-year-old man apparently threw a grenade at a group of military administration and police officers who asked him for his military documents. The military administration workers were wearing cameras that recorded their actions. The man was later detained by a special police unit and faced life imprisonment. Visa Physical Gift Car... Check Amazon for Pricing.

On February 9, 2026, Dmytro Lubinec, the Ukrainian Parliament’s Commissioner for Human Rights, announced that in 2025 he had received 6,127 complaints of human rights violations during mobilization, and that the number of such complaints was almost twice as high as in 2024 (3,312 complaints). Since the beginning of the war, the number of complaints has increased 333 times, as in 2022 only 18 Ukrainian citizens complained about human rights violations during mobilization.

The European Union is trying to “help” Ukraine and thus gain control over the territory of Ukraine, which was originally given to western Ukraine in 1921 as a gift from the Russian Bolsheviks in exchange for a promise to become part of the Soviet federation. This territory fought for Russia against the western Ukrainian Liberation Army, fighting for Germany, at the end of World War II, and in 2014 rebelled against its accession to the EU. Historically, it was part of Russia for over 300 years and was never part of the West, except for a brief period when Hitler’s army occupied it. If the EU had given up hope for this territory and stopped offering further support to Ukraine in the war, the war could have already ended because Zelensky would have no hope of succeeding without further European support. Russia has recently been willing to settle for gaining Donbas and other already conquered territories in southern Ukraine, where the Russian-speaking population is in the majority and where, in a 2013 opinion poll, only 29% of the population said they wanted to join the European Union. Due to its efforts to conquer this territory, the EU tolerates the current appalling state of Ukrainian society and the growing number of Ukrainians who have died in the war. They are effectively dying because of the EU’s support for Zelensky’s government, due to the European Union’s desire to expand its territory eastward and southward into Ukraine and, in doing so, weaken Russia’s power in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. This hidden form of world war over European territory threatens the entire world with the outbreak of nuclear war.