The significant fact about Ukraine’s corruption scandal is that it is having one. A scandal, that is, as opposed to just a fact of life.
Last month an investigation led by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, an independent agency, accused allies of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, including two ministers, of graft and fraud to the tune of $100 million. The ministers have resigned, while a former business partner of Zelenskyy appears to have fled the country. The president himself is not accused of wrongdoing but has been politically damaged.
Corruption has always been what’s wrong with Ukraine. The investigation, and the legal and political accountability that have gone with it, is what’s right. A nation that can investigate its leaders even as it fights for its existence is one worth defending.
That should animate anyone not part of the peace-at-any-price wing of the Trump administration, whose leading lights, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, were in Moscow on Tuesday for personal talks with Vladimir Putin. The two real-estate developers were previously the authors, with Putin negotiator Kirill Dmitriev, of a 28-point plan that amounted to a Ukraine surrender document; the thinking behind it, as The Wall Street Journal reported last week, was even scarier.
“For the Kremlin, the … talks were the culmination of a strategy, hatched before Trump’s inauguration, to bypass the traditional U.S. national security apparatus and convince the administration to view Russia not as a military threat but as a land of bountiful opportunity,” the Journal noted. “By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals, Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe — while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.”