A Wartime Corruption Scandal Has Zelenskyy on the Ropes

Hello, everyone. Today at WPR, we’re covering the frontier AI company Anthropic’s recent disclosure that Chinese hackers had coopted its model to conduct a massive cyberattack, and Latin America’s political shift to the right.

But first, here’s our take on today’s top story:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy famously rose to fame as the lead actor in a TV series that skewered the rampant corruption of the country’s political elites. In “Servant of the People,” Zelenskyy played a high school history teacher named Vasyl Holoborodko, who unexpectedly wins a presidential election after his anti-corruption rant goes viral on social media.

It is somehow fitting, then, that the most serious graft scandal to hit Zelenskyy’s inner circle since Russia’s invasion in 2022 has been unfolding in a series of slickly produced online videos that Ukrainians have likened to a Netflix series.

The country’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau says Timur Mindich, Zelenskyy’s friend and business partner who co-founded the president’s production studio, led a high-level “criminal organization” that collected $100 million in kickbacks and bribes from contractors of the state-owned nuclear energy company, Energoatom.

But instead of publicizing their findings the traditional way, in court filings and press conferences, investigators have been dramatizing it in a series of viral online videos. The clips feature cliffhangers, explosions and audio evidence gathered from wiretaps. Targets of the investigation, dubbed Operation Midas, were revealed to have used code names with each other, like “Rocket,” “Che Guevara” and “Sugarman.”