trump's wars are really helping gas prices.
Zelensky is back in Canada
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In Ukraine, Fraud and Waste Are Rewarded With More Weapons Contracts
Secret military audits reveal a military procurement system riddled with mismanagement. In 2024 alone, Ukraine lost $1.2 billion to fraud and waste.
Andrew E. Kramer, Bianca Pallaro and Evelina Riabenko
Sept. 6, 2026
As Russian soldiers attacked trench lines in eastern Ukraine in 2024, Ukrainian artillery crews opened fire. But the rounds, instead of exploding near the advancing troops, flopped out of launch tubes or landed with quiet thumps, kicking up puffs of dust.
A Ukrainian arms factory, it turned out, had supplied the military with thousands of defective mortar rounds. A burly weapons factory boss, Leonid Shyman, would eventually be arrested and charged in one of the war’s most public examples of defense-industry fraud.
But even as the officials noticed that weapons were arriving faulty, government audits obtained by The New York Times show, Ukraine’s Defense Procurement Agency continued to award Mr. Shyman’s factory new contracts.
The case reflects a persistent phenomenon of the war in Ukraine. Seven of Ukraine’s top 10 military contractors won new business despite open criminal investigations for fraud, failures to deliver on earlier deals or the arrest of chief executives for corruption, according to the government audits obtained by The Times, court records and Ukrainian news accounts.
Mr. Shyman, for example, had been the subject of multiple investigations by anti-corruption agencies, including for embezzlement and fraud, when he won that first mortar contract. The government awarded the $280 million deal while he was out on bail on corruption charges.
Confidential reviews by the State Audit Service and an internal Ministry of Defense auditing department reveal a military procurement system riddled with mismanagement. Warning signs go unheeded, the records show, and there are seldom consequences for overcharging or failing to deliver.
Companies won contracts without demonstrating that they could supply the weapons, or without licenses to deliver them. Auditors identified 18 companies that signed deals despite defaulting on previous agreements. Six of those companies failed to fulfill a single contract.
Military contractors around the globe, including the world’s richest arms dealer as well as Ukrainian and American companies, have gotten wealthy through this system.
The internal government audits showed that in 2024 alone, Ukraine lost about $1.2 billion to fraud, waste and mismanagement.
https://archive.ph/o/kJ7sk/https://...09/03/t-magazine/best-decorative-mirrors.html
Those losses, which have not been made public, piled up even as President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed to allies for more weaponry and financial aid.
“The army doesn’t get what it needs and the budget shrinks from non-deliveries and overpayment,” Tamerlan Vahabov, a former adviser to Ukraine’s Defense Procurement Agency, said in an interview. “As a result, we don’t have money to order more weapons. And we don’t have the quantity of ammunition we need. And it is a recurring pattern.”
About $126 million was lost by bypassing lower bids and overpaying for weapons. Contracts were awarded without legal justification, the auditors said. In one case, companies remain locked in a fight over what happened to at least $100 million in prepayments for a deal that fell apart.
The audits obtained by The Times cover the years 2024 and 2025. It is unclear what, if anything, the Defense Procurement Agency did in response to the audits. Because they are classified, they have never been subject to public scrutiny.
The director of the procurement agency, Arsen Zhumadilov, declined a request to comment. Mr. Zhumadilov resigned and left the position on Monday.
During nearly five years of combat, Ukraine’s government has stayed intact as its military fought against the odds. Soldiers resisted Russia’s larger army and reinvented the battlefield with drones and robots. The government rode out the loss of support from its largest ally, the United States, by winning financial backing in Europe.
But the same procurement process that kept Ukraine in the fight and enabled the drone revolution has become a vulnerability in itself, one that has shaken domestic politics. A former defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, tried to overhaul the system and said defense contractors ran him out of office for doing so.
“There is a lot of corruption,” Mr. Fedorov said after his firing. His ouster sparked the largest street protests since the war began. Mr. Zelensky has said he fired Mr. Fedorov because of his clashes with military leaders.
Mr. Zelensky has failed to clean up the procurement system, and the problems have reached into his inner circle. Last year, corruption investigators secretly recorded his former business partner urging officials to buy armored vests that had failed safety tests. Investigators say the man fled Ukraine amid the investigation. Mr. Zelensky has not been implicated and has said that he supports the investigation.
The government audits amount to an autopsy of the military contracting process. And they offer detailed looks at the players, at home and abroad, who have profited from the war.
“Anything that isn’t nailed down in Ukraine will be stolen,” said James Wasserstrom, an American anticorruption expert who has tried throughout the war to draw attention to defense industry fraud. “This has been a longstanding tradition.”
Failure. Multimillion-Dollar Contracts. And More Failure.
The mortar failures were a high-profile battlefield embarrassment.
Censor.net, a Ukrainian news outlet, broke the story. Parliament investigated and in April 2025 the police arrested Mr. Shyman, the factory director. He was charged with fraud worth about $68 million — the cost of inspecting and replacing tens of thousands of faulty mortars.
A court later ruled that Mr. Shyman’s company, Pavlohrad Chemical Plant, had sold the army 233,000 unusable mortar rounds, many with flawed fuses or gunpowder propellant, according to court records provided by the Ukrainian data company YouControl.
Pavlohrad is a state-owned company but Mr. Shyman, a chemical engineer, has been its factory boss since the early 2000s. He was widely recognized as Ukraine’s king of explosives. Parliament had written his name into one law on the industry, citing him as an authority.
With his sprawling real estate portfolio, he lived large by rural Ukrainian standards. Investigators said they found that $9 million had passed through a bank account in Liechtenstein linked to Mr. Shyman’s wife.
He kept a herd of buffalo, along with deer and moose, on the factory grounds. He said it was to prove that his factory was not polluting, but anticorruption activists said it was so his executives could hunt the animals.
When auditors reviewed the company’s mortar contract, they found something odd. Pavlohrad had initially said that it lacked that capacity to fulfill the order. Then, without explanation, it restated its production abilities and the government awarded the contract.
Government auditors found no evidence that anyone had tried to verify that the factory could fill the order.
When faulty mortars began arriving, auditors said that the procurement agency “did not draw proper conclusions.” Instead, it gave Pavlohrad even more business, including the contract to supply nearly all of the military’s 122-millimeter artillery rounds in 2025.
The audits do not say who decided to give Pavlohrad the contracts or why. The company declined to comment. In August, the procurement agency’s director, Arsen Zhumadilov, resigned.
Mr. Shyman was sentenced last month to five years in prison in a separate case for orchestrating a corruption scheme to sell explosives at inflated prices.
Mr. Shyman intends to appeal that conviction and has asserted his innocence in the mortar case, his lawyer, Oleksandr Protas, said.
In the arms business, Mr. Protas said, “nothing is black and white and everything is in shades of gray.”
The World’s Richest Arms Dealer
In 2024, the Defense Procurement Agency sought bids to buy hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of rocket artillery.
Three companies responded. One said it could supply the rockets at the equivalent of about $4,200 apiece. Another wanted $4,600. A third said the price was $5,100.
The rockets were all the same — made in the same factory, by the same company in Turkey. The only difference was the price.
The Turkish manufacturer, Arca Defense, offered the lowest bid, suggesting a sale direct from the factory.
But auditors found that the contract went to the highest bidder, a subsidiary of the Czechoslovak Group, a major Czech holding company. Rather than buy direct, the government decided to pay the Czech company to serve as an intermediary.
Auditors found “no justification for the decision.” Previous audits had warned against buying through intermediaries. The government did not follow that advice.
The decision added about $130 million to Ukraine’s bill for the rockets, according to a Times analysis of the competing bids described in the audits.
The rocket contract was one of many Ukrainian deals that have helped transform the Czechoslovak Group into a global defense powerhouse. The company went public this year, turning its 33-year-old majority owner, Michal Strnad, into the wealthiest arms manufacturer on Forbes’ billionaires list.
It was the largest-ever defense industry initial public offering. The company told investors that it benefited from a military spending “super cycle” from wars in Europe and elsewhere. In 2024, more than 40 percent of its revenue came from Ukraine-related sales.
A Czechoslovak Group spokesman, Andrej Cirtek, said bidding questions were for the government to answer. There are no accusations in the audit that the company did anything wrong. “We are not a party to other bidders’ proposals and do not have access to their commercial terms, contractual conditions or the contracting authority’s evaluation,” he wrote in an email.
Despite the auditors’ concerns, Ukraine considered contracting with the Czechoslovak Group again, this time to replace its arsenal of Kalashnikov rifles with a Czech-designed, NATO-caliber rifle model. No deal has been announced.
The company spokesman said the group was diversifying sales to European nations and the United States but that Ukraine remained an important customer.
Red Flags and an American Contractor
In another instance, records show, Ukraine plowed ahead with a complicated arms purchase despite warning signs — only to see the deal collapse.
In 2024, the Defense Procurement Agency wanted to buy Soviet-style rockets from a Serbian manufacturer. Because of Serbia’s Russia-friendly politics, Ukraine relied on a chain of intermediaries to get the rockets.
The government contracted with a Ukrainian state-owned weapons broker, Spetstechnoexport (pronounced SPETS-tek-no-export). The company had a history of unfulfilled contracts, auditors said.
Anti-corruption authorities had also publicly announced that they were investigating former company executives for possible embezzlement and money laundering, according to HACC Decided, a platform developed by Transparency International Ukraine that tracks high-profile corruption cases.
Spetstechnoexport also did not have a Serbian export license for the rockets, auditors wrote. In place of a license, the company submitted a “guarantee letter” from Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, the auditors found. Auditors said that the preferential treatment had no legal justification and came despite the
company’s history of defaults.
The company did not respond to repeated messages and calls.
Spetstechnoexport subcontracted with an American weapons company, Regulus Global. The company, run by a former Merrill Lynch stockbroker, William Somerindyke Jr., had a history of supplying Ukraine’s army as well as U.S.-backed rebels in Syria. But this deal would be particularly complex.
The contract was among several between Regulus and Spetstechnoexport, worth a combined $1.7 billion, that were intended to funnel weapons to the war zone. Mr. Somerindyke, in an interview, said the partnership had delivered crucial weaponry that had benefited Ukraine’s defense and American foreign policy.
The rocket deal, though, began unraveling.
The defense minister at the time, Rustem Umerov, wanted to cut intermediaries out of Ukraine’s wartime weapons business. He asked Regulus to deal with the government procurement agency directly, effectively cutting out Spetstechnoexport, Mr. Somerindyke recalled.
The deal collapsed, and by early 2025, Spetstechnoexport had become the largest debtor to the arms purchasing agency, with more unfulfilled contracts than any other supplier, auditors found.
In the fallout, the Ukrainian government sued Spetstechnoexport for late penalties and interest. Spetstechnoexport, in turn, demanded money from Regulus.
Mr. Somerindyke said his company did nothing wrong and was merely “caught in the middle” of a Ukrainian procurement shake-up.
Secret military audits reveal a military procurement system riddled with mismanagement. In 2024 alone, Ukraine lost $1.2 billion to fraud and waste.
Andrew E. Kramer, Bianca Pallaro and Evelina Riabenko
Sept. 6, 2026
As Russian soldiers attacked trench lines in eastern Ukraine in 2024, Ukrainian artillery crews opened fire. But the rounds, instead of exploding near the advancing troops, flopped out of launch tubes or landed with quiet thumps, kicking up puffs of dust.
A Ukrainian arms factory, it turned out, had supplied the military with thousands of defective mortar rounds. A burly weapons factory boss, Leonid Shyman, would eventually be arrested and charged in one of the war’s most public examples of defense-industry fraud.
But even as the officials noticed that weapons were arriving faulty, government audits obtained by The New York Times show, Ukraine’s Defense Procurement Agency continued to award Mr. Shyman’s factory new contracts.
The case reflects a persistent phenomenon of the war in Ukraine. Seven of Ukraine’s top 10 military contractors won new business despite open criminal investigations for fraud, failures to deliver on earlier deals or the arrest of chief executives for corruption, according to the government audits obtained by The Times, court records and Ukrainian news accounts.
Mr. Shyman, for example, had been the subject of multiple investigations by anti-corruption agencies, including for embezzlement and fraud, when he won that first mortar contract. The government awarded the $280 million deal while he was out on bail on corruption charges.
Confidential reviews by the State Audit Service and an internal Ministry of Defense auditing department reveal a military procurement system riddled with mismanagement. Warning signs go unheeded, the records show, and there are seldom consequences for overcharging or failing to deliver.
Companies won contracts without demonstrating that they could supply the weapons, or without licenses to deliver them. Auditors identified 18 companies that signed deals despite defaulting on previous agreements. Six of those companies failed to fulfill a single contract.
Military contractors around the globe, including the world’s richest arms dealer as well as Ukrainian and American companies, have gotten wealthy through this system.
The internal government audits showed that in 2024 alone, Ukraine lost about $1.2 billion to fraud, waste and mismanagement.
https://archive.ph/o/kJ7sk/https://...09/03/t-magazine/best-decorative-mirrors.html
Those losses, which have not been made public, piled up even as President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed to allies for more weaponry and financial aid.
“The army doesn’t get what it needs and the budget shrinks from non-deliveries and overpayment,” Tamerlan Vahabov, a former adviser to Ukraine’s Defense Procurement Agency, said in an interview. “As a result, we don’t have money to order more weapons. And we don’t have the quantity of ammunition we need. And it is a recurring pattern.”
About $126 million was lost by bypassing lower bids and overpaying for weapons. Contracts were awarded without legal justification, the auditors said. In one case, companies remain locked in a fight over what happened to at least $100 million in prepayments for a deal that fell apart.
The audits obtained by The Times cover the years 2024 and 2025. It is unclear what, if anything, the Defense Procurement Agency did in response to the audits. Because they are classified, they have never been subject to public scrutiny.
The director of the procurement agency, Arsen Zhumadilov, declined a request to comment. Mr. Zhumadilov resigned and left the position on Monday.
During nearly five years of combat, Ukraine’s government has stayed intact as its military fought against the odds. Soldiers resisted Russia’s larger army and reinvented the battlefield with drones and robots. The government rode out the loss of support from its largest ally, the United States, by winning financial backing in Europe.
But the same procurement process that kept Ukraine in the fight and enabled the drone revolution has become a vulnerability in itself, one that has shaken domestic politics. A former defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, tried to overhaul the system and said defense contractors ran him out of office for doing so.
“There is a lot of corruption,” Mr. Fedorov said after his firing. His ouster sparked the largest street protests since the war began. Mr. Zelensky has said he fired Mr. Fedorov because of his clashes with military leaders.
Mr. Zelensky has failed to clean up the procurement system, and the problems have reached into his inner circle. Last year, corruption investigators secretly recorded his former business partner urging officials to buy armored vests that had failed safety tests. Investigators say the man fled Ukraine amid the investigation. Mr. Zelensky has not been implicated and has said that he supports the investigation.
The government audits amount to an autopsy of the military contracting process. And they offer detailed looks at the players, at home and abroad, who have profited from the war.
“Anything that isn’t nailed down in Ukraine will be stolen,” said James Wasserstrom, an American anticorruption expert who has tried throughout the war to draw attention to defense industry fraud. “This has been a longstanding tradition.”
Failure. Multimillion-Dollar Contracts. And More Failure.
The mortar failures were a high-profile battlefield embarrassment.
Censor.net, a Ukrainian news outlet, broke the story. Parliament investigated and in April 2025 the police arrested Mr. Shyman, the factory director. He was charged with fraud worth about $68 million — the cost of inspecting and replacing tens of thousands of faulty mortars.
A court later ruled that Mr. Shyman’s company, Pavlohrad Chemical Plant, had sold the army 233,000 unusable mortar rounds, many with flawed fuses or gunpowder propellant, according to court records provided by the Ukrainian data company YouControl.
Pavlohrad is a state-owned company but Mr. Shyman, a chemical engineer, has been its factory boss since the early 2000s. He was widely recognized as Ukraine’s king of explosives. Parliament had written his name into one law on the industry, citing him as an authority.
With his sprawling real estate portfolio, he lived large by rural Ukrainian standards. Investigators said they found that $9 million had passed through a bank account in Liechtenstein linked to Mr. Shyman’s wife.
He kept a herd of buffalo, along with deer and moose, on the factory grounds. He said it was to prove that his factory was not polluting, but anticorruption activists said it was so his executives could hunt the animals.
When auditors reviewed the company’s mortar contract, they found something odd. Pavlohrad had initially said that it lacked that capacity to fulfill the order. Then, without explanation, it restated its production abilities and the government awarded the contract.
Government auditors found no evidence that anyone had tried to verify that the factory could fill the order.
When faulty mortars began arriving, auditors said that the procurement agency “did not draw proper conclusions.” Instead, it gave Pavlohrad even more business, including the contract to supply nearly all of the military’s 122-millimeter artillery rounds in 2025.
The audits do not say who decided to give Pavlohrad the contracts or why. The company declined to comment. In August, the procurement agency’s director, Arsen Zhumadilov, resigned.
Mr. Shyman was sentenced last month to five years in prison in a separate case for orchestrating a corruption scheme to sell explosives at inflated prices.
Mr. Shyman intends to appeal that conviction and has asserted his innocence in the mortar case, his lawyer, Oleksandr Protas, said.
In the arms business, Mr. Protas said, “nothing is black and white and everything is in shades of gray.”
The World’s Richest Arms Dealer
In 2024, the Defense Procurement Agency sought bids to buy hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of rocket artillery.
Three companies responded. One said it could supply the rockets at the equivalent of about $4,200 apiece. Another wanted $4,600. A third said the price was $5,100.
The rockets were all the same — made in the same factory, by the same company in Turkey. The only difference was the price.
The Turkish manufacturer, Arca Defense, offered the lowest bid, suggesting a sale direct from the factory.
But auditors found that the contract went to the highest bidder, a subsidiary of the Czechoslovak Group, a major Czech holding company. Rather than buy direct, the government decided to pay the Czech company to serve as an intermediary.
Auditors found “no justification for the decision.” Previous audits had warned against buying through intermediaries. The government did not follow that advice.
The decision added about $130 million to Ukraine’s bill for the rockets, according to a Times analysis of the competing bids described in the audits.
The rocket contract was one of many Ukrainian deals that have helped transform the Czechoslovak Group into a global defense powerhouse. The company went public this year, turning its 33-year-old majority owner, Michal Strnad, into the wealthiest arms manufacturer on Forbes’ billionaires list.
It was the largest-ever defense industry initial public offering. The company told investors that it benefited from a military spending “super cycle” from wars in Europe and elsewhere. In 2024, more than 40 percent of its revenue came from Ukraine-related sales.
A Czechoslovak Group spokesman, Andrej Cirtek, said bidding questions were for the government to answer. There are no accusations in the audit that the company did anything wrong. “We are not a party to other bidders’ proposals and do not have access to their commercial terms, contractual conditions or the contracting authority’s evaluation,” he wrote in an email.
Despite the auditors’ concerns, Ukraine considered contracting with the Czechoslovak Group again, this time to replace its arsenal of Kalashnikov rifles with a Czech-designed, NATO-caliber rifle model. No deal has been announced.
The company spokesman said the group was diversifying sales to European nations and the United States but that Ukraine remained an important customer.
Red Flags and an American Contractor
In another instance, records show, Ukraine plowed ahead with a complicated arms purchase despite warning signs — only to see the deal collapse.
In 2024, the Defense Procurement Agency wanted to buy Soviet-style rockets from a Serbian manufacturer. Because of Serbia’s Russia-friendly politics, Ukraine relied on a chain of intermediaries to get the rockets.
The government contracted with a Ukrainian state-owned weapons broker, Spetstechnoexport (pronounced SPETS-tek-no-export). The company had a history of unfulfilled contracts, auditors said.
Anti-corruption authorities had also publicly announced that they were investigating former company executives for possible embezzlement and money laundering, according to HACC Decided, a platform developed by Transparency International Ukraine that tracks high-profile corruption cases.
Spetstechnoexport also did not have a Serbian export license for the rockets, auditors wrote. In place of a license, the company submitted a “guarantee letter” from Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, the auditors found. Auditors said that the preferential treatment had no legal justification and came despite the
company’s history of defaults.
The company did not respond to repeated messages and calls.
Spetstechnoexport subcontracted with an American weapons company, Regulus Global. The company, run by a former Merrill Lynch stockbroker, William Somerindyke Jr., had a history of supplying Ukraine’s army as well as U.S.-backed rebels in Syria. But this deal would be particularly complex.
The contract was among several between Regulus and Spetstechnoexport, worth a combined $1.7 billion, that were intended to funnel weapons to the war zone. Mr. Somerindyke, in an interview, said the partnership had delivered crucial weaponry that had benefited Ukraine’s defense and American foreign policy.
The rocket deal, though, began unraveling.
The defense minister at the time, Rustem Umerov, wanted to cut intermediaries out of Ukraine’s wartime weapons business. He asked Regulus to deal with the government procurement agency directly, effectively cutting out Spetstechnoexport, Mr. Somerindyke recalled.
The deal collapsed, and by early 2025, Spetstechnoexport had become the largest debtor to the arms purchasing agency, with more unfulfilled contracts than any other supplier, auditors found.
In the fallout, the Ukrainian government sued Spetstechnoexport for late penalties and interest. Spetstechnoexport, in turn, demanded money from Regulus.
Mr. Somerindyke said his company did nothing wrong and was merely “caught in the middle” of a Ukrainian procurement shake-up.
lmfao , yeah looks like you're not even following DeepState UA maps which is forced to acknowledge Russian advances much to the chagrin of the UA. you can keep your head up your ass if that makes you feel better. Even this pro Ukraine maniac writing for a mainstream British publication acknowledges Ukraine is getting spanked and spanked hard: https://spectator.com/article/ukraine-is-losing-the-war-kushner-witkoff/
Just one example Ukraine also about to lose it's last stronghold in Zaporizhzhia , literally would be nothing left between Orihiv and Zaporizhzhia city. Let me guess, you still refuse to acknowledge the fall of Pokrovsk and Myrnograd? lalalalalalaa no russia success can't happen not in my mind. lets just project ukraine's mass casualties and manpower issues and mass graves onto Russia and claim it's their problem. let's also keeep calling them degrading names and view them as sub human.
Another smooth brained response from someone who has no clue what they are saying....You fall into the trap of the ignorant, believing the so-called "far-left" (which is what exactly? anyone who thinks Trump is a moron?) support Nazi's is pretty fucking idiotic. Is there corruption in the Ukraine? Yes, sadly, but they are working to improve it. But Russia is more corrupt.
I see that some of the righties on here got their marching orders and still consider Russia justified and right. Is it because Trump loves Putin?
Russia is more corrupt? where's your evidence for this? and what does russian corruption have anything to do with ukrainian corruption? we're not sending our hard earned tax dollars to russia
You don't think Russia is corrupt? I'm not even sure if I should type this out or write it in crayon for you...
I think the thing to understand is that Ukraine is not perfect, but they have been working for years to improve things and make things more transparent. The issue is corruption stems back from the Soviet era, and it is ingrained and hard to root out. So, no, Ukraine is not perfect. However, they still deserve our help. I think in virtually any war there is probably someone lining their pockets to some extent. But that doesn't mean allies should abandon them.
I know there are many on the right here who think that Ukraine should just surrender. I also get the feeling, from reading other threads, that they also think Canada should just give in to Trump and become the 51st state. Fuck that noise.
i never said russia is not corrupt you clown. I asked you for evidence for your claim that Russia is more corrupt as it appears you were just pulling that outta your ass to cope for Ukraine's publicized and obvious corruption affecting it's war efforts. Where are these similar significant allegations of corruption in the Russian war effort or government? i suspect there's some form of corruption in most governments worldwide. but yes please write it out in crayon for me. I suspect you have no idea wtf you're talking about and simply pumping out general statements based on shit that's happened years ago and has no bearing on how this conflict will unfold.
Ukraine really has no choice now because they chose to prolong this war when Russia gave them off ramps which could've preserved much of Ukraine and saved 100000s of lives. and that's easy for you to say since you're probably not the one fighting this brutal war. You're not the one hiding from forced conscription (literally kidnapping), you're not the one sitting in a building or a trench getting hit by fab bombs, drones and artillery all day, you're not the one being forced to fight a losing war. fuck that noise? so keep kidnapping civilians who don't want to fight, engineer conscription laws to force women to fight now, for what? just to prolong suffering and ensure more destruction. yeah fuck that noise...
Oh, I'm sorry that I didn't pass the muster with a rigorous rebuttal of Russian corruption....But, since you asked:
Russian corruption fuels massive casualties in Ukraine
Estimates show Russian forces have suffered more than one million casualties in the war against Ukraine. At the same time, its territorial gains have been some of the slowest in modern history. Special correspondent Simon Ostrovsky has a rare look at the Kremlin’s war machine and reveals the...
www.pbs.org
Corruption Risk: Russian Federation vs Ukraine
www.corruptionrisk.org
Russian soldiers were being sent to the front line with cardboard body armour. They had and still have equipment that was never properly maintained and prone to chronic breakdowns. Don't even get me started on the rations. Then you have a system where they lie to people to join the army. Say they will be working way behind the front lines, then get marched up to the front. Training is nearly non-existent. Nearly anyone with a functioning brain and the ability to read above the grade three level would be able to tell you that Russia is about as corrupt as a country could possibly be. Look at the oligarch system. Jesus, are you really that fucking dense?
As for what you say was Russia's off ramp....what would that have been? Ceding territory that Russia has stolen? Becoming a Russian vassal state? You might be a bitch that just rolls over. But most Ukrainians understand the consequences. You obviously do not. I am not hiding. I am not Ukrainian. I don't really have skin in the game, except for the fact that letting bullies win is usually never the end of it. Look at Hitler and what he did. He re-militarized the Rhineland, he annexed Austria, he annexed Czechoslovakia and the western allies did nothing because they thought appeasing Hitler would stop him from being aggressive. But he kept taking until he decided Poland was an easy target. History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Russia stole Crimea from Ukraine, they crushed Georgia from moving closer to Europe. They have fucked up Dagestan. Putin wants to get the old band back together, so maybe he looks to Lithuania or Estonia next.
Finally, Russian corruption and incompetence is why they haven't been able to crush Ukraine. I mean, they are literally invading a neighbour who is like nearly four time smaller. Yet they can't get their shit together. I stand with Ukraine. It is a brutal war, but they are sort of like the canary in the coal mine. Allowing Russia to take whatever it wants has made Trump think its alright to grab Venezuela, and eventually maybe China wants to take Taiwan back. Maybe you're so far down that rabbit hole that those things make sense to you...
LOL. you buy all of that? wow. and how is any of that comparable to Ukraine's corruption? and now the narrative is Russian soldiers are being sent with cardboard body armour? LMFAO i bet you also believed russia was running out of missiles and weapons and were fighting with shovels. If an article starts out like this " Estimates show Russian forces have suffered more than one million casualties in the war against Ukraine " you know it's bullshit and a propaganda piece. honestly, that sounds like PBS projecting Ukraine's issues onto Russia.Oh, I'm sorry that I didn't pass the muster with a rigorous rebuttal of Russian corruption....But, since you asked:
Russian corruption fuels massive casualties in Ukraine
Estimates show Russian forces have suffered more than one million casualties in the war against Ukraine. At the same time, its territorial gains have been some of the slowest in modern history. Special correspondent Simon Ostrovsky has a rare look at the Kremlin’s war machine and reveals the...
Corruption Risk: Russian Federation vs Ukraine
Russian soldiers were being sent to the front line with cardboard body armour. They had and still have equipment that was never properly maintained and prone to chronic breakdowns. Don't even get me started on the rations. Then you have a system where they lie to people to join the army. Say they will be working way behind the front lines, then get marched up to the front. Training is nearly non-existent. Nearly anyone with a functioning brain and the ability to read above the grade three level would be able to tell you that Russia is about as corrupt as a country could possibly be. Look at the oligarch system. Jesus, are you really that fucking dense?
As for what you say was Russia's off ramp....what would that have been? Ceding territory that Russia has stolen? Becoming a Russian vassal state? You might be a bitch that just rolls over. But most Ukrainians understand the consequences. You obviously do not. I am not hiding. I am not Ukrainian. I don't really have skin in the game, except for the fact that letting bullies win is usually never the end of it. Look at Hitler and what he did. He re-militarized the Rhineland, he annexed Austria, he annexed Czechoslovakia and the western allies did nothing because they thought appeasing Hitler would stop him from being aggressive. But he kept taking until he decided Poland was an easy target. History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Russia stole Crimea from Ukraine, they crushed Georgia from moving closer to Europe. They have fucked up Dagestan. Putin wants to get the old band back together, so maybe he looks to Lithuania or Estonia next.
Finally, Russian corruption and incompetence is why they haven't been able to crush Ukraine. I mean, they are literally invading a neighbour who is like nearly four time smaller. Yet they can't get their shit together. I stand with Ukraine. It is a brutal war, but they are sort of like the canary in the coal mine. Allowing Russia to take whatever it wants has made Trump think its alright to grab Venezuela, and eventually maybe China wants to take Taiwan back. Maybe you're so far down that rabbit hole that those things make sense to you...
"Nearly anyone with a functioning brain and the ability to read above the grade three level would be able to tell you that Russia is about as corrupt as a country could possibly be. Look at the oligarch system. Jesus, are you really that fucking dense?" --> you really have no convincing evidence and you still rely on insults and generalities to get your nonsensical point across.good job you tool. Your claim was Russia was more corrupt than Ukraine. You haven't showed any convincing evidence and it's obvious you were pulling shitta outta your ass. and then you went to do a google search for recent Russian corruption articles or podcasts that align with what you want to be true and use that as a source. "Look at the oligarch system" ok? what about it? don't give me general statements and then call me dense. sounds like you're the one without the functioning brain and lack of aility to read above a grade three level.
This is from the Specator article posted previously:
At the same time, Zelensky faces a perfect political storm at home. A year of relentless corruption scandals in Kyiv – the latest featuring the arrest of a deputy prosecutor general on charges of protecting online scam centres – has seriously eroded trust in Zelensky’s administration. A dozen senior members of his team are now in jail, under investigation or have fled abroad. A shoot-out in a Kyiv street between rival factions of Ukraine’s SBU and HUR domestic and military intelligence services have left many Ukrainians wondering if their country is sliding back to 1990s-style gangsterism. Last week, an investigation by the New York Times found that Ukraine’s military procurement system has suffered from serious fraud, waste and mismanagement during the war. Secret audits show that in 2024 alone, about $1.2 billion (£900 million) was lost through overpayments and corrupt contracts. Unsurprisingly, August polls by SOCIS show that a majority of Ukrainians consider corruption a more serious threat to their state than Russia – and that nearly 57 per cent of Ukrainians blame Zelensky for the prevalence of corruption, nearly double the number in a similar poll from April 2025. The same poll also also projects that three different rivals would beat him in a second-round election, each by a landslide margin of around two-to-one.
do you have reliable evidence of corruption on this level or similar in Russia? yeah let's pull some propaganda piece from PBS from months ago relying on shitty unreliable sources to show that Russian corruption is bad. your point was the corruption is worse than Ukraine. your bullshit PBS article does not support your point.
As for what you say was Russia's off ramp....what would that have been? Ceding territory that Russia has stolen? Becoming a Russian vassal state? You might be a bitch that just rolls over. But most Ukrainians understand the consequences. You obviously do not. I am not hiding. I am not Ukrainian. I don't really have skin in the game, except for the fact that letting bullies win is usually never the end of it. Look at Hitler and what he did. He re-militarized the Rhineland, he annexed Austria, he annexed Czechoslovakia and the western allies did nothing because they thought appeasing Hitler would stop him from being aggressive. But he kept taking until he decided Poland was an easy target. History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Russia stole Crimea from Ukraine, they crushed Georgia from moving closer to Europe. They have fucked up Dagestan. Putin wants to get the old band back together, so maybe he looks to Lithuania or Estonia next.-->you obviously havne't paid attention to attempted diplomacy since the war started and you refuse to listen to, learn or even try to understand the Russian position. You sound like a whiny emo high schooler who views this with a elementary school mind set. LOL, again with the comparisons to Hitler. when will this stupidity end?
Finally, Russian corruption and incompetence is why they haven't been able to crush Ukraine. I mean, they are literally invading a neighbour who is like nearly four time smaller. Yet they can't get their shit together. I stand with Ukraine. It is a brutal war, but they are sort of like the canary in the coal mine-->LOL no it's not. they were literally fighting the 2nd largest army in Europe back stopped by the entire West intelligence and military apparatus without even doing a full mobilization. you've been brainwashed bad dude.
So, you call into question PBS's reporting because they are using an estimate on the casualties? Interesting. So, you obviously take the Russian number at face value...That basically tells me everything we need to know about your views on this. You say me and the rest of those who support Ukraine are brainwashed, yet your evidence appears to be a whole lot vibe and aura. Did you even read the second link I put out? Of was that too inconvenient. Here is a contemporary article about Russian corruption and body armor:
So, please, tell me more about your keen insights.
i don't take russian numbers at face value. i weigh what they claim against the evidence on the ground and the political realities. if Russia had 1.4 million casualties, they likely wouldn't be advancing on the battlefield, they likely would've required a mobilization just to capture the Donbass let alone the other two oblasts, there would be significant political backlash in Moscow with that amount of casualties, and they would have severe manpower shortages just like Ukraine. but that's not the case. Russia also has the overwhelming firepower.
Oh going back to 2022 and using a Forbes article when every single mainstream media outlet was on the Ukraine train and flag waiving like a bunch of idiots. you really grasping for straws. no doubt there was likely substantial corruption in the Russian military shortly after the war started but efforts were made to fix this and root out corruption. this was also Russia's first large scale conventional war since Russia started rebuildling their military in 2008 so a lot of logistical problems were expected. i don't see any evidence in 2024 2025 or 2026 to suggest that Russian corruption is even close to the level of corruption in Ukraine.
and what about that corruption.org website? it doesn't provide us with any meaningful evidence.
so what do you suggest, sitting in your comfortable home 1000s of miles away from the drones and artillery and cheering on this bloody war? The EU talks a big game but they have no concrete plan to help Ukraine. They have no weapons and money and no air defense to give to Ukraine and the political will to help Ukraine is fading. The USA is also stretched thin and have essentially stopped supplying weapons and money to Ukraine, only intelligence. The AFD won big in that German state primarily because of Ukraine war fatigue, sending money to a lost cause, and shooting themselves in the foot for cutting off cheap Russian gas. It wasnt due to influx of migrants. The same is likely going to happen in France with La Pen's party and possibly Italy. Do you have a plan for Ukraine or do you just want to prolong suffering and destruction because you have no idea about Russia's position and only assume that Putin is Hitler?
Is that one reason our leaders have given away $26 billion to UkraineOh, I'm sorry that I didn't pass the muster with a rigorous rebuttal of Russian corruption....But, since you asked:
Russian corruption fuels massive casualties in Ukraine
Estimates show Russian forces have suffered more than one million casualties in the war against Ukraine. At the same time, its territorial gains have been some of the slowest in modern history. Special correspondent Simon Ostrovsky has a rare look at the Kremlin’s war machine and reveals the...
Corruption Risk: Russian Federation vs Ukraine
not Russia? That is a lot of money to pay to punish corrupted Russia.
I think that the total amount given to Ukraine by the west is over 500 billion
and we are not suppose to ask where it went
