Ukraine has been using US aid to purchase diesel from Russia, the country Kiev and Washington are at war with, even as the West continues to lecture and pressurize India to stop purchasing discounted Russian energy.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government, accused of rampant corruption in foreign aids, has been purchasing Russian diesel to fuel its tanks fighting against Moscow.
According to a report by celebrated US journalist Seymour Hersh, Ukraine – like many other countries around the world – has also received a discount on Russian energy.
“Zelensky’s been buying discount diesel from the Russians,” an American intelligence official privy to the developments told him.
Quoting top US intelligence officials, the report said that Zelenskyy and his top aides are indulged in widespread embezzlement of funds provided by the US and its allies.
“One estimate by analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency put the embezzled funds at $400 million last year, at least,” he wrote.
ALSO READ: Damning proof of Pakistan Army’s exorbitant profits from arms exports to Ukraine
Another expert Hersh spoke to compared the level of corruption in Kiev as nearing the level of corruption in the Afghan war. “Although there will be no professional audit reports emerging from Ukraine,” he quoted an analyst as saying.
Not just corruption, government officials in Kiev are also exporting weapons received from the US and Western allies to private arms dealers around the world. Many Ukrainian ministries have been literally “competing” to set up front companies for export contracts for weapons and ammunition to gain kickbacks.
Many of those companies are in Poland and Czechia, but others are thought to exist in the Persian Gulf and Israel.
The report said that Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director William Burns raised the issue of corruption directly with Zelensky in a meeting in Kiev in January this year.
ALSO READ: How China & Russia might seek to end US dominance
It also claimed that Burns told the Ukrainian president that he was taking “larger share of the skim money” than was going to his military generals in Kiev, who, it said, were angry with Zelensky for his greed.
Ten days after the meeting, Zelensky fired 10 out 35 generals and senior officials whose corruption, as Burns told him, was known to the US. An official in Washington described his action as “little”
“The ten he got rid of were brazenly bragging about the money they had — driving around Kiev in their new Mercedes,” the intelligence official told Hersh, who received the Pulitzer in 1970 for an expose related to the Vietnam war.
Since the beginning of the war in February last year, India has faced constant pressure from the US and its Western allies not to purchase discounted Russian oil and gas – though New Delhi has not paid heed to their lectures and vowed to prioritize its national interests.
The world is already aware of Western nations purchasing Russian oil processed in India.