The biggest corruption scandal of Zelensky’s presidency couldn’t have come at a worse time, but it is also a sign of Ukraine’s progress.
On the morning of Nov. 10, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) announced that it had uncovered a “high-level criminal organization,” whose members “built a large-scale corruption scheme to influence strategic enterprises” in Ukraine’s energy sector.
NABU, along with its sister organization, the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), work together on corruption cases concerning public officials. The two agencies were created as part of an anti-corruption reform after the Euromaidan in 2014, and have worked outside of the traditional vertical hierarchy of law enforcement that answers to the president—specifically so that they can go after the top echelons of the government.
The scheme uncovered by NABU concerned mainly a firm called Energoatom—the state-owned operator of all Ukrainian nuclear power plants, four of which currently generate half of the country’s electricity.
According to NABU, Energoatom’s contractors were forced to pay 10 to 15 percent of the contract value in kickbacks to a criminal organization to avoid losing their supplier status and get paid for their services. The bureau said that there were two leaders of that criminal organization, and they cooperated with an adviser to the former energy minister, among a number of other individuals, to carry out the scheme.
Although NABU didn’t name names, it didn’t take long for them to get leaked to the media.
The former adviser in question is believed to be Ihor Myroniuk; he was an adviser to Ukraine’s ex-Minister of Energy Herman Halushchenko.
Before landing that job, Myroniuk was an aide to an infamous Ukrainian lawmaker, Andriy Derkach, who was indicted in the United States as a Russian agent and sanctions evader and left Ukraine for Russia after the full-scale invasion, where he became a senator. Derkach is wanted in Ukraine for corruption and treason.
According to NABU, the criminal group operated a cash-laundromat office in central Kyiv, set up in an apartment owned by Derkach’s family. There, the group handled its off-the-books accounting and devised plans to launder money abroad through shell companies and various countries, including Russia.
The siphoned cash amounted to at least $100 million.
“Using their official connections in the ministry [of Energy] and the state-owned company [Energoatom], they ensured control over personnel decisions, procurement processes, and financial flows,” NABU said.
“The management of a strategic enterprise with an annual income of over UAH 200 billion (almost $5 billion) was carried out … by third parties who had no formal authority.”
NABU also published snippets of tapped conversations between the individuals involved in the scheme, who can be heard discussing everything from the kickbacks and their legalization to personnel reshuffles in the Energy Ministry and Energoatom.
In one especially maddening episode from NABU’s tapes, one of the conspirators, an Energoatom employee, asks: “So we won’t build protective structures (for energy sites) anymore?” Another conspirator, Halushchenko’s former adviser, replies: “I would wait … It’s a waste of money—not worth it.”
The revelations come at a precarious time for Ukraine and its energy sector.
In an article on Thursday, I described Russia’s annual efforts to destroy Ukraine’s energy infrastructure ahead of winter. I argued that this year’s campaign, which has been ongoing since September, may be the most dangerous to date because of Russia’s enhanced capabilities and tactics. The Russian attacks have already caused rolling power outages nationwide, some lasting as long as 12 hours, as well as problems with heating and water supply, prompting debates about whether the authorities did everything they could to prepare the country for winter.
This is undoubtedly the worst possible time for the Ukrainian people to find out about large-scale corruption in the energy sector.
Adding insult to injury is the fact that while the Energoatom scheme implicates two sitting members of the cabinet and a number of President Zelensky’s friends, the administration has pinned the energy sector’s problems on another energy official—a well-respected manager who appears to be innocent—prosecuting him for corruption and using him as a scapegoat for the country’s energy woes.
But despite all the recent scandal, there is a crucial silver lining: An investigation that reaches as high and wide as the Energoatom case is ultimately a good thing for Ukraine, as it shows that the country’s institutions are capable of standing up even to the highest echelons of Ukrainian power.
All the President’s Friends
Although the anti-corruption agencies haven’t officially confirmed who was involved in the scheme, the names have nevertheless been leaked to numerous reputable Ukrainian media outlets, and corroborated by several lawmakers.
Individuals implicated in the scheme include Zelensky’s friend and former business partner, Timur Mindich, Zelensky’s friend and Ukraine’s former deputy prime minister, Oleksiy Chernyshov, as well as Ukraine’s current minister of energy and minister of justice, among others.
One of the two leaders of the criminal group is believed to be Mindich, who co-owns Kvartal-95, a production company co-founded by Zelensky in 2003.
Mindich was virtually absent from public political life until last year, and very little is known about his private and professional life. According to public records, he made a career in the entertainment industry, co-owning a firm that co-founded film production studios in Russia, and also co-owning Kvartal-95 together with Zelensky before the latter became president and gave up his shares. Mindich was also a friend and business partner of Ukraine’s once most powerful oligarch, Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who’s been behind bars for financial crimes since 2023.
According to an investigation by Ukraine’s leading outlet, Ukrainska Pravda, Mindich began amassing political influence in 2024 after pushing through several of his associates to cabinet posts, including Herman Halushchenko—whose adviser was involved in the scheme—for energy minister and Svitlana Hrynchuk for ecology minister.
During a government reshuffle in the summer of 2025, the two got promotions: Halushchenko, despite a string of corruption scandals (his deputy was arrested while receiving a $500,000 bribe), controversially became—of all things—the minister of justice, and Hrynchuk replaced him as the minister of energy. Halushchenko, however, reportedly retained his influence over the Energy Ministry, calling the shots instead of Hrynchuk, who had no experience in the energy sector.
Both Halushchenko and Hrynchuk are mentioned in NABU’s tapes, suggesting their involvement. In one episode, you can hear President Zelensky calling Minister Halushchenko at the request from Mindich, though it’s unclear what the conversation was about.
Another person allegedly involved in the plot is Ukraine’s former deputy prime minister, Oleksiy Chernyshov. He too is a close friend of both Mindich and Zelensky: According to media reports, First Lady Olena Zelenska is the godmother of Chernyshov’s child.
In the summer of 2025, NABU named Chernyshov—who was deputy prime minister at the time—a suspect in an illegal land grab case, making him the highest-ranking official in Ukrainian history to face such charges while in office. He lost the job during the 2025 government reshuffle.
According to NABU, Chernyshov was a frequent visitor to the criminal group’s cash laundry in central Kyiv where he received hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on a real estate project.
Running the laundry was the group’s leader, the person believed to be Mindich, who, according to NABU, “coordinated influence on officials in central government bodies to resolve issues in his own interests—particularly in the energy and defense sectors.”
Mindich’s apparent connection to Ukraine’s increasingly lucrative domestic defense sector has previously been revealed by the Kyiv Independent, which reported over the summer that NABU was investigating whether Mindich could be the ultimate beneficiary of Fire Point, Ukraine’s famous manufacturer of deep-strike drones and Flamingo missiles.
Hours before the agents searched Mindich’s home on the morning of Nov. 10, he miraculously fled the country after being tipped off by a mole inside one of the anti-corruption agencies. According to Ukrainian lawmaker Yaroslav Zhelezniak, he is now in Israel.
The second leader of the alleged criminal group has not yet been revealed.
The Scapegoat
The Energoatom scheme stands in stark contrast to another scandal rocking Ukraine’s energy industry at the same time: the government’s prosecution of Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, who previously ran Ukraine’s state-owned grid operator, Ukrenergo.
Thirty-nine-year-old Kudrytskyi became the head of Ukrenergo, Ukraine’s sole operator of high-voltage transmission power lines, in 2020. In line with the country’s corporate governance reform, he was appointed by an independent supervisory board after an open competition.
In his four years at the job, Kudrytskyi was reportedly seen as a reformer and an efficient manager. On the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukrenergo, under Kudrytskyi’s leadership, disconnected Ukraine’s grid from Russia and Belarus, eventually connecting it to the European transmission system, ENTSO-E. That switch was done in a remarkably short time, a matter of weeks, and it prevented Russia from destabilizing Ukraine’s grid to aid its invasion.
In the following years, Kudrytskyi earned the trust of Ukraine’s international partners and secured more than $1.7 billion in foreign funding to repair Ukrenergo’s damaged infrastructure and keep the company afloat. Despite the war, Ukrenergo was even profitable in 2022 and 2023.
Yet those years were also marked by unsuccessful attempts by the Energy Ministry to exert control over the company, which, according to corporate governance laws, must be insulated from political interference. In interviews, Kudrytskyi has described how former Minister of Energy Halushchenko—the same man now implicated by NABU in the corruption scandal—tried to take control of Ukrenergo, including by trying to appoint his associates to the company. Kudrytskyi says he repeatedly had to shield Ukrenergo from such attempts.
Then, in 2024, Kudrytskyi was suddenly fired. His sacking was controversial, prompting two international members of the supervisory board, including its head, to resign in protest, saying Kudrytskyi’s dismissal was “politically motivated” and groundless.
Most recently, in October 2025, Kudrytskyi was charged with fraud and embezzlement.
The charges were brought forward by the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI), Ukraine’s attempted analogue of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States. Unlike the independent anti-corruption agencies NABU and SAPO, the SBI is controlled by and reports to the president.
The charges concern a procurement contract signed by Kudrytskyi in 2018, when he was at a lower-level job at Ukrenergo. The contract was for the services of a company that agreed—and ultimately failed—to rebuild the fencing around one of Ukrenergo’s substations.
The company provided Ukrenergo with a banking guarantee, which is a bank’s obligation to reimburse the beneficiary if the client doesn’t fulfill obligations. Ukrenergo then paid the company an advance to get the work started, but ultimately, the job wasn’t completed. Ukrenergo used the banking guarantee to successfully reimburse the lost advance, which means that neither Ukrenergo, nor the state, incurred any losses.
The prosecutors now allege that the entity that unfairly incurred losses was the bank—a relatively small private bank that was disbanded in 2023—and that Kudrytskyi colluded with the company to embezzle the money.
The case against Kudrytskyi has brought widespread condemnation from Ukrainian civil society and lawmakers. A consortium of four leading Ukrainian think tanks published an open letter, calling on the government to avoid using the criminal justice system for political reprisals.
Asked about the case during a briefing, Zelensky blamed Kudrytskyi for failing to safeguard the electricity grid from Russian attacks. The president didn’t provide any evidence of this failure, nor did he explain how that alleged failure relates to the 2018 contract at the center of the recent charges.
Critics allege that the case is the government’s attempt to increase its control over the energy sector.
“Kudrytskyi dared to criticize the authorities for their failure to prepare critical infrastructure facilities for Russian shelling. And instead of punishing the saboteur Halushchenko, who, as Energy Minister, botched the preparations, they decided to shut up Kudrytskiy,” Ukrainian anti-corruption activist Daria Kaleniuk said in a Facebook post.
“The case looks no different than pressure,” said Ukrainian lawmaker Anastasiia Radina. “The (State Bureau of Investigations) not only demonstrates its incompetence, but also successfully advocates the need for its reboot.”
Kudrytskyi has denied any wrongdoing, saying that the government’s goal was to scapegoat him for his successor’s failures and “show what happens to people who allow themselves to criticize the authorities.”
Making Sense of It All
The two cases lay bare what’s long been obvious to anyone paying attention: While Zelensky is lionized abroad and has had some dramatic accomplishments, his centralization of power, made possible by the extreme mandate of the war and the genuine impossibility of safe and fair elections, has created a system of governance that favors loyalty and personal relationships over efficiency. While there is little evidence that Zelensky is personally corrupt, his friends have benefited from proximity to him and often act with impunity.
The cases also highlight the continuing struggle between the old and new guard of Ukraine’s law enforcement agencies, and the dangerous willingness of the Ukrainian government to use the agencies it controls for political means.
The relationship between Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies and the president-controlled agencies, like the SBI or the prosecutor general’s office, has always been hostile. Such is the unfortunate design of the system: The former exists to investigate officials as high as the president’s office, while the latter has always been at the whim of that very office.
For evidence, look no further than this summer, when Zelensky signed a bill that subordinated NABU and SAPO to the prosecutor general, effectively killing their independence.
That bill was such an obvious power grab that it kicked off Ukraine’s first mass protests since Russia’s full-scale invasion, forcing Zelensky to backtrack and reverse the changes. That crisis, according to Ukrainian media, was caused by Zelensky’s desire to shield his friends from an ongoing investigation—which was likely the Energoatom scheme revealed on Nov. 10.
Consider also the many other elements of government pressure against NABU and SAPO, like the fact that one of NABU’s detectives—who, according to the agency, gathered key evidence in the Energoatom scheme—is currently in pretrial detention on what looks like groundless charges, brought forward by another institution loyal to the president: the State Security Service.
All of which is to say that despite the sturm und drang and the genuine drama of Monday’s events, those events reveal nothing fundamentally new about Ukrainian political culture.
Ukraine’s corruption problems are as old as the modern state itself. The energy sector’s strategic importance and massive financial flows have always made it a breeding ground for political drama and large-scale graft. It has long been an open secret that Zelensky’s inner circle is engaged in corruption. Nor is Zelensky the first president to go after anti-corruption agencies; his predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, tried to subjugate NABU and SAPO for all the same reasons.
Meet the new boss—who is the same as the old boss.
What’s uniquely appalling about the recent revelations is, for one, their timing: officials illegally profiting from the energy sector even as scores of Ukrainians live without electricity, heating, and water.
Equally shocking is the scale of the alleged scheme: the enormous amounts of dirty money, yes, but also the involvement of some of Zelensky’s closest associates and family friends.
But that last observation—NABU’s and SAPO’s ability to get so close to the president’s inner circle—paradoxically contains reason to be hopeful about Ukraine and its future.
The scheme is already being called the biggest scandal of Zelensky’s presidency.
But I think it is worth focusing as much on the fact of the investigation itself as on its findings.
Because there was a nontrivial chance that no one would ever know about the Energoatom scheme.
Just months ago, it was entirely possible that NABU and SAPO would be forced to kill their investigation as a result of the government’s disastrous bill. The agencies survived primarily because tens of thousands of overwhelmingly young Ukrainians with posters decided that the agencies were worth saving.
The very fact that it was not journalists or activists but detectives with real authority that work at a relatively young state institution who carried out a 15-months-long investigation into individuals so close to the president is a notable achievement. It’s more than the United States can boast of right now.
The very fact that the truth was revealed is an achievement—and the uglier that truth is, the more its revelation should bring out hope, rather than despair.
Because the closer the investigation gets to the president, the greater is the government’s desire and effort to bury it, and the fact that it failed to do that is a sign that forces on the other side—the anti-corruption agencies, as imperfect as they are, the activists, the average Ukrainians who care enough to protest, the international partners who, though timid, voice concern when it matters most—are stronger even than a popular president in the middle of fighting a war.
Which is why the president ultimately cannot choose to ignore this scandal. It is why he decided that the minister of energy and the minister of justice, both implicated in the scheme, must be fired. It is why he decided to sanction his friend Mindich. It is why he announced an urgent reboot of management of not only Energoatom but other state energy companies, as well as their audit.
What happened on Monday is exactly how a country, where an official investigation of this scale was unthinkable less than a decade ago, reforms itself. The process is slow, and the revelations are ugly, but it would have been—and very well could have been—a lot uglier if the truth was never uncovered at all.
– Anastasiia Lapatina is a Ukraine Fellow at Lawfare. She previously worked as a national reporter at Kyiv Independent, writing about social and political issues. She also hosted and produced podcasts “This Week in Ukraine” and “Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World.” For her work, she was featured in the “25 Under 25” list of top young journalists by Ukraine’s Media Development Foundation, as well as “Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe” class of 2022 in the category Media and Marketing. Published courtesy of Lawfare.
