Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has vowed to “overhaul” state-owned energy companies, after a major corruption scandal engulfed the country’s energy sector.
Around $100 million (£76m) has been embezzled, anti-graft investigators said, causing outrage in a country where Russian attacks have resulted in crippling power outages.
“Alongside a full audit of their financial activities, the management of these companies is to be renewed,” Zelensky wrote in a post on X on Saturday.
A solid gold toilet and cupboards loaded with bagfuls of €200 bills are among the treasures linked to the prominent Ukrainian businessman Timur Mindich, after an investigation by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (Nabu). Mindich is big in real estate, fertilisers, banking and diamond trading – but he is best known as a long-time co-owner of Volodymyr Zelensky’s Kvartal 95 television production company. Nabu’s 15-month long investigation into what it describes as ‘high level’ corruption at the top of Ukraine’s political elite is likely to have momentous consequences for Zelensky’s political future.
Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand says Canada remains committed to supporting Ukraine, and that it has offered accountability support in light of an unfolding $100 million corruption scandal involving the Ukraine’s nuclear agency.
Canada is a “long-time supporter of Ukraine’s reform efforts” and continued reform is “essential for transparency, accountability and good governance,” Anand said, according to The Globe and Mail. She noted that Canada has offered to help Ukraine tighten oversight and accountability in government to prevent such corruption.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has moved to contain growing public outrage in Ukraine over a corruption scandal in the energy sector by firing two ministers who are accused of involvement in a large-scale bribery scheme.
Ukraine’s president said the justice minister Herman Halushchenko and energy minister Svitlana Grynchuk could no longer remain in their jobs. He also called for personal sanctions against his friend and former business partner Timur Mindich, the scheme’s alleged organiser.
Acknowledging popular anger, Zelenskyy said: “There must be maximum integrity in the energy sector, in absolutely all processes. I support every investigation carried out by law enforcement and anti-corruption officials. This is an absolutely clear and consistent position for everyone.”
In yet another sign of the rampant corruption in Ukraine, Ukrainian security forces raided the apartment of Timur Mindich, a businessman associated with President Volodymyr Zelensky. However, the oligarch had already left the country just hours before, likely after being tipped off by an insider.
Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) says that $100 million is believed to have been siphoned off due to a “money laundering operation,” and other associates were involved. The 15-month investigation featured 1,000 hours of wiretapping and resulted in 70 raids, according to NABU.
Ukraine faces a major draft evasion problem, but no place is quite like Vylkove, a Danube River town where men of draft age have all but vanished, many of them trying to avoid military service.
Draft officers picked Ivan up at a traffic stop and dropped him off at a training base, but he went absent without leave from the army after three days. Since then, he has been hiding at home in Vylkove, a small town in southernmost Ukraine, rarely stepping outside.
Almost four years after the full-scale Russian invasion, Ukraine faces the twin challenges of not having enough troops and men avoiding military service. Many men of draft age, 25 to 60, have broken the law that prohibits most of them from leaving the country, while others play a cat-and-mouse game with conscription officers or just hunker down at home.
The unique geography and history of Vylkove, a run-down Danube River fishing port, have made it an exaggerated version of Ukraine in miniature, where draft-age men have all but vanished.
BERLIN—For three years, a crack team of detectives gathered each weekday morning around a whiteboard at the German Federal Police headquarters in Potsdam, near Berlin. Now their investigation into who was behind the greatest act of sabotage in modern history—the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines—is threatening to splinter support for Ukraine, the country they hold responsible.
Poland already has refused to extradite one of the suspects to stand trial in Germany. It instead views him a hero for destroying a vital source of revenue for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war machine. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who has long questioned Germany’s dependence on Russian energy, ridiculed the investigation. The problem isn’t that the pipeline was blown up, he said. The “problem is that it was built.”
The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) said it is conducting a “large-scale operation” jointly with the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office to expose corruption involving “a high-level criminal organization” in the energy sector.
NABU said in a post on social media on November 10 that the investigation has been ongoing for 15 months with some 1,000 hours of audio recordings gathered. It added that the “activities of a high-level criminal organization have been documented,” with members having built “a large-scale corruption scheme to influence strategic enterprises in the public sector, in particular JSC ‘Energoatom.'”
BREAKING: Black day for Zelensky.
Today, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine conducted 70 searches related to corruption in the energy sector.
Audio recordings were also made public, in which top Ukrainian officials and businessmen close to Zelensky are heard… pic.twitter.com/QEYv2eVcpR
— Oleksandr Dubinskyi (@Dubinsky_pro) November 10, 2025
h/t Mauser
All wars breed corruption. But when your young men flee the country rather than enlist to defend their nation you have to wonder at the reasons why.
OTTAWA – Seven weeks ago, Prime Minister Mark Carney assigned former cabinet minister Chrystia Freeland to be Canada’s new special envoy for the reconstruction of Ukraine.
Canadians haven’t heard much about the job since, and nothing at all about how Ukraine can be rebuilt while Russia continues its wide-scale bombing of critical infrastructure.
But experts say Canada has a major opportunity now to help preserve Ukraine’s sovereignty and international law — and to turn a profit in multiple sectors.
There is no shortage of videos on social media apparently showing men being taken off the streets of Ukraine—some while walking their dog, or even out with their wife and children—to be forcibly conscripted into the military.
Reports are even making it into Western mainstream media publications, something that may force European leaders to take notice.
Almost 100,000 fighting-age Ukrainian men have left the country in the past two months after Volodymyr Zelensky eased departure rules, new figures show.
Poland’s border guard said 99,000 Ukrainian men aged between 18 and 22 had crossed the frontier – the primary route out of the country – since regulations to ensure that Kyiv had enough soldiers were relaxed at the end of August.
In comparison, the entire British Army has around 70,000 personnel.
This week’s trial of three undercover operatives, accused of helping the Kremlin to wage a hybrid warfare campaign to “destabilise” France, sounds like a surefire recipe for drama, sophistication, and intrigue.
If only.
Over the course of three days, in a spacious, pine-panelled courtroom on the northern edge of Paris, the case against three seemingly unremarkable Bulgarian men, seated behind glass and shadowed by three police officers who seemed absorbed with their own mobile phones, unfolded with all the panache and excitement of a half-whispered lecture in a library.
Ukraine’s young men are fleeing the country, and that’s potentially fatal news for its increasingly desperate war effort. In August the Kyiv government allowed men aged 18 to 22 to leave the country for the first time the invasion, and since then some 100,000 have crossed the border into Poland.
At the same time increasingly violent Ukrainian army press gangs are helping to recruit some 30,000 new recruits a month, according to MP Fedir Venislavskyi. But thousands, perhaps as many as 20,000, desert or go absent every four weeks. Since the beginning of the war Ukrainian prosecutors have launched some 290,000 formal criminal cases for desertion.
Millions of dollars of Canadian technology has been shipped through a sprawling network of Hong Kong-based shell companies to feed Russia’s war machine, according to an investigation by a human-rights watchdog.
The Washington-based Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation (CFHK), in collaboration with the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, combed through Ukrainian battlefield forensics, Hong Kong public records and three years of Russian customs data.
He described how the war has changed in the past three-and-a-half years, since the time he sent back video of him guiding mortar fire from a hide 600 metres away from the Russian lines.
“The fast progression of this war was unreal. It started with (the Russians being in the) next building beside you, close quarters combat. The next time I went back, there were a few drones for reconnaissance and they were armed. And then all of sudden I came back after that and joined the Vendetta group (59th brigade, 10th battalion Ukrainian Army). And when I got there, the place was littered with $400 drones with IEDs (improvised explosive devices) on them.
