What part of Ukraine borders the North Atlantic, anyway?

The klepto-nepotistic regime of Volodymyr Zelensky is circling the toilet bowl as yet another corruption scandal soils his good name and tarnishes Ukraine’s reputation for fighting on behalf of all Europeans for democratic values. The aptly named Operation Midas has brought to light an immense extortion racket worth 100 million dollars. Published photos show the golden bathrooms of Zelensky’s associates and duffel bags of greenbacks fresh from the Federal Reserve. After years of de facto carte-blanche spending, Ukraine has merely demonstrated that its sole connection to Atlantic civilization is as a Bermuda Triangle for cargo loads of wealth and weaponry.

In my April piece, I made the case that Ukraine’s chief villains and criminal war profiteers were typically neither Slavic nor Christian. The latest cadre of unsavory actors is a vindicating addendum to that theory. In the latest scandal, long-time Zelensky associate Timur Mindich and his chief financial officer Oleksandr Zuckerman hatched a truly diabolical plan to take advantage of a special wartime law that prevents the enforcement of debts on the state nuclear operator Energoatom. With no legal recourse to sue for unpaid services, contractors were given an ultimatum to pay 10–15% of the contract value to Mindich. Contractors were even threatened with their companies being blocked indefinitely, destroyed, or having staff mobilized to the frontline. Audio recordings reveal Mindich and colleagues jokingly referring to the enterprise as the “shlagbaum“ [boomgate] that lifts once the toll is paid.

According to Ukrainska Pravda, both men are now in Israel, having been tipped off that the anti-corruption agencies were about to swoop. Slipping out undetected during wartime is no small feat; alas the story makes much more sense if we recall that in July Zelensky himself attempted to neuter the independence of the EU-backed anti-corruption bureaus, but backed down due to public outrage.

Mindich and Zelensky go all the way back to their days at Kvartal 95 — the media company that transformed Zelensky from a comedian into a TV star. It was Mindich who introduced him to Ihor Kolomoisky. Mindich then went from Kolomoisky’s fixer to Zelensky’s consigliere until very recently (when anti-corruption bodies started investigating). It’s therefore obvious who gave Mindich and Zuckerman advanced warning and packed the golden parachutes to Israel to go along with their golden bidets. From one gangsta’s paradise to another.

Interestingly, Mindich’s given name Timur is still popular in the East, even though it is in honor of 14th-century Turco-Mongol warlord Tamerlane — who ethnically cleansed the indigenous Indo-Europeans of Central Asia and constructed pyramids of up to 90,000 skulls. Mindich might eventually be able to see the real pyramids of Giza if Trump gets his high-rise approved in Gaza.

Another big fish in hot water is the erstwhile deputy PM, Oleksiy Chernyshov, whose meteoric rise was thanks to Mindich’s recommendation. Besides being involved in the energy embezzlement scheme, Chernyshov is being investigated by the FBI for money laundering. Remarkably, when Chernyshov was publicly flagged for investigation earlier this year, Zelensky felt pressured to demote him from the deputy PM role, but because their wives are the best of friends he plucked a new ministerial portfolio out of thin air: minister of national unity. Ukrainians have a very idiomatic expression for men who look like Chernyshov: “With a nose like that, you can see everything ahead of time.” Alas, he doesn’t seem to have foreseen his current plight, and only his family has fled abroad while he maintains his innocence.

Chernyshov meets European Parliament President Roberta Metsola. Source: Chernyshov via Facebook

Yet another figure defending his reputation from an unenviable position is the Muslim Tatar businessman-turned-politician Rustem Umerov. A big cloud hangs over his possible involvement in the Energoatom affair, but it’s not looking good since Umerov left for Turkey some time ago and is now in Qatar where he looks to be waiting for the dust to settle. Thus, we have the risible scenario in which the secretary of the national security and defense council is defending Ukraine from Doha or perhaps Dubai. It’s a real shit show, but perhaps Umerov has gold plumbing in his bathroom too.

Meanwhile, at the height of Ukraine’s biggest wartime scandal, Zelensky is doing what he does in such moments of crisis: he’s embarked on a multi-stop trip abroad, not for an apology tour but seemingly an amnesia tour. This is the same man who in 2019 campaigned on a platform of anti-corruption. He won’t be visiting Hungary, but Viktor Orban was sure to call out Zelensky’s “wartime mafia network,” while geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar has begun to refer to Ukraine with the Country-404 appellation.

President Donald Trump — quite besieged by his own administration’s existential crisis — has remained silent on the corruption scandal. In my August piece, I argued that MAGA was dying, and it seems that Trump has chosen Israel and the Epstein files to be the hill his presidency dies on. If the brother of Jeffrey Epstein is to be believed, Trump once performed a sexual act on a horse. But as improbable as that seems, it’s less so if remembering that Trump called former lover Stormy Daniels “horseface.” Trump hates Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene with a passion, so it remains to be seen how redacted any released files will be. Trump’s affinity for Israel will perhaps forever remain a mystery given that he is no Christian Zionist, openly questions Jewish dual loyalty, and continues to defend Tucker Carlson amid the Fuentes kerfuffle.

Last week, former head-chopper turned president Abu al-Jolani was welcomed to the White House — as if people still haven’t figured out who was behind ISIL and al-Qaeda in order to achieve regime change in Syria. Out with the Musk — in with the cologne, as some folks joked that Trump only wanted to claim the $10 million bounty that was on al-Jolani’s head less than a year ago. Regime change for Venezuela may be next, or intervention in Nigeria. It’s been a hokey-pokey presidency of bluffs, threats and non-committal bluster that has regrettably landed on the side of mass H-1B visas, bloated budgets and inflation. He’s had one foot in and then one foot out of Ukraine several times, but by now the only syllogism we can be sure of is that Israel is the wife and Ukraine is the mistress.

If there’s a consolation to be had from Trump’s policy on Ukraine it’s that NATO membership has been ruled out. Of course, it wasn’t so long ago that Trump was threatening to withdraw the United States from the alliance in order to get what he wanted. Ukrainian membership was always a farcical notion for diplomatic reasons if not geographic ones. Ukraine is only a north Atlantic country of the third degree, through the Black Sea and Mediterranean basins. As for its sovereignty, the US states of Hawaii, Texas and Vermont have a greater precedent for independence than Ukraine did in 1991.

During the nineties and the early part of Putin’s time in office, there was a very different geopolitical environment, in which mixed signals were being sent about the post-communist security architecture. This is why Putin said in 2005 that he had no problem with Ukraine joining NATO, in an interview still up on the Kremlin website. But back then, even Russia had set up cordial relations with the alliance and anticipated joining. A naive Jeffrey Sachs (who worked as an economic advisor to Gorbachov) refused to believe the warning of a colleague that Russia would never be allowed to join. The long explanation for this would delve into American hegemony and the military-industrial complex. The short explanation was actually provided to us long ago by the first NATO secretary, Baron Ismay, who said that NATO’s purpose was to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

This war will be a humiliating defeat for NATO (and let’s not forget little Switzerland, which spoiled 207 years of neutrality to join the Western alignment against Russia). “Wake me when he takes Poland“ joked one liberal commentator a decade ago, at a time when Ukraine’s conflict was still internal and confined to Donetsk and Luhansk. Heeding such a standard would have actually left everyone better off, if accompanied by some genuine diplomatic efforts of de-escalation.

This is the beginning of the end — Ukraine is ending. Those are not my words but the assessment of journalist of the year in Ukraine, Diana Panchenko. Even Kolomoisky from his prison cell is declaring that Zelensky will soon be gone. But much of the blame for the dire outlook goes back to Zelensky’s inner circle, geometrically speaking, or his inner minyan, ethnically speaking. We often ask ourselves what America would be like if it didn’t have the pernicious alien elite that it has. We could ask the same of the East too.