Posted on 12/04/2025 2:37:06 AM PST by JonPreston
It has been a rough week for everyone in Kiev.
Electricity is available only intermittently. Most nights there is a drone or missile strike. And the weather is gloomy and overcast.
For president Volodymyr Zelensky, it has been particularly unpleasant. In the past seven days he has lost his chief of staff, the Russians claimed to have taken the strategic city of Pokrovsk, and the Americans have stepped up demands that he make humiliating territorial concessions to buy peace.
On Tuesday morning, opposition MPs in Ukraine’s parliament mobbed the speaker’s chair to block Zelensky’s proposed budget and demand the government resign.
The reality is that, in private, plenty of Ukrainians grumble about him.
The most recent available polls, published in October, show that only a quarter believe he should remain in power
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
Ukraine ping
Grumbling about leaders in wartime is normal. The UK skipped elections in WW1 and WW2. The moment the voters got their say, the previous coalition collapsed.
What many Russia sympathizers don’t get, including those in Trump’s cabinet, is that Zelensky is the most dovish of the potential Ukrainian leaders who’s not on Putin’s payroll. The former army chief currently ambassador to Britain is far more hawkish. He wanted a universal draft that all parties to WW2 instituted. Zelensky is the principal stumbling block to it that every other potential leader supports. He fired the army chief, shunted him off to the UK for continuing to harp on the draft.
Grumbling??
EXPOSED: Ukrainian Corruption Black Hole Vanished $108 Billion
The Zelensky regime has been shaken by a series of high profile corruption scandals, but this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Here is the evidence:
🔸Professor Steve Hanke Estimate: $54B - $108B lost from ~$360B total aid since 2022. That's 15-30% lost to graft.
🔸World Bank / EU Indirect Estimate: Pre-war studies estimated Ukraine lost 5-10% of GDP annually to corruption. Applied to current $145B+ in direct budget support (2022-2024), this suggests $7B - $15B+ in baseline systemic leakage of financial aid alone. (Source: World Bank governance indicators, EU anti-corruption reports)
🔸Procurement Loss Benchmark: Ukraine's own State Audit Service identified ~18% of audited procurement spending as violations in 2023. Applied to Ukraine's ~$40B annual procurement budget, this indicates a $7B+ annual corruption risk pool. (Source: State Audit Service of Ukraine 2023 Annual Report)
🔸State Procurement in 2023: $1.7B in "unjustified" expenditures—a formal term for corrupt leakage. (Source: State Audit Service of Ukraine)
🔸Transparency International Data: Ukraine's CPI score of 33/100 (2023) places it in the bottom third globally, correlating historically with public sector leakage rates of 20-40% in high-risk expenditure categories. (Source: Transparency International)
The Zelensky administration has created a perverse ecosystem where:
🔸Consensus Range: Independent macro-models converge on 10-20% as the plausible systemic leakage rate for non-military financial flows.
🔸Financial Aid Impact: Of the $145B+ in direct budget support and humanitarian aid (2022-2024), a conservative 10% leakage equals $14.5B+ lost—not to war, but to graft.
🔸The Military Aid Unknown: No reliable estimate exists for weapons diversion, but the procurement fraud model suggests parallel losses in defense spending are inevitable and substantial.
The proven multi-billion dollar fraud is merely the measurable tip of the iceberg, this numbers where take form Western organizations and agencies, so the corruption cases could be more and even deeper.
It confirms that the Zelensky regime operates as a hybrid entity: a wartime government sustained by Western sentiment, and a criminal enterprise sustained by Western funds.
The country is in ruins, hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions)are dead or maimed, even more are refugees and financing the war has financially exhausted the Ukraine and its backers to the point where there is not much left over for rebuilding the war damage . The Ukrainian economy has been propped up by soon to end foreign welfare payments and it's not clear how the Ukrainian economy perform when the aid money is gone
The peace deal that Boris Johnson , on behalf of Joe Biden, persuaded Zelensky to reject at the last minute consisted of an autonomy agreement for persecuted Russians in the Donbas region in return for Russian military withdrawal from Ukraine
The Ukraine has effectively lost the war after four years of bitter fighting and is facing an even more bitter peace where the terms are far worse for Ukraine than the deal Zelensky walked away from nearly 4 years ago
All this insane death and destruction , and for what- a peace deal much worse than the one offered a few weeks into the conflict
What a tragic end to a senseless , unnecessary and totally insane conflict instigated by Joe Biden and his handlers at home and the EU and NATO abroad
The only winner in this war is China. They don't call Biden “China Joe” for nothing
It appears the Ukrainians have the same corruption as the Somalians in Minneapolis. Is there a virus that spreads this stuff?
Ukraine’s last national elections were in 2019.
Martial law was imposed in February 2022. This stopped all elections (presidential, parliamentary, and local) under Article 19 of the “On the Legal Regime of Martial Law.”
This was reaffirmed by the Verkhovna Rada in a February 26, 2025, resolution, pledging elections only after war ends.
Uk guvment claims 81% of Ukrainians oppose wartime voting.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Servant of the People) won with 73.22% in the runoff vs. Petro Poroshenko with 62% voter turnout.
It all corrupt as Chicago....these numbers are ballot box stuffed and voting machine dialed in.....nobody is that popular....
WarScam Inc is becoming clearer and clearer to most people.
Green Reconstruction was the main topic for the moneymen starting in the Spring of 2022
Zelenskyy is between a rock and a hard place.
If he signs a Peace deal, his NAZI solders will Mussolini him.
If he doesn’t sign a Peace deal, he will lose more Territory.
Every time I see an article like this it is reminding of how corrupt our leaders are, especially Turkey Neck Gobbler McConnell and his politician followers running the kickback scheme and the bill simply added on to the $39,000,000,000,000 debt.
In the bigger picture this conflict is reminding of just a huge civil war and we had no reason to ever give either side a dime. Understandably President Trump wants to end this battle but the world trusting either side for more than a few months is a fool’s errand as the corruption is insurmountable in our lifetime.
A lot could be pointed out re: Ukraine's (i.e. NATO's) imminent failure, but suffice to say if the BRITISH PRESS are writing pieces like this, just stick a fork in ol' Zel. He's cooked.
I gotta say, you've been one of the more decent Zeepists, well written and not too shrill, but like all, lacking of wisdom, or perhaps mildly retarded. Like this:
What many Russia sympathizers don’t get, including those in Trump’s cabinet, is that Zelensky is the most dovish of the potential Ukrainian leaders who’s not on Putin’s payroll. The former army chief currently ambassador to Britain is far more hawkish.
Do you actually think it matters who's in charge - or thinks they are - in Ukraine, or how much of a dove or hawk they are?
This, from start to finish, has been NATO's war to win or lose. Which means it was America's, which means Biden's, now Trump's, and he's O-U-T out. Whomever the chief grifter heading Ukraine happens to be is completely irrelevant, and always has been.
It's wakey-wakey time for NATO and the entire west. Nappy time is over.
100%. Everyone has their hands in the till, with the loudest, pro-war voices stealing the most.
Larry Fink/Blackrock - Trump's new buddy is already on it. Meet the new boss:
💯 he was in on it from the start
Hmmmmmm? Spain Villa or ‘nyc’ $27 million apartment once owned by bill cosby. Decisions......
The country is in ruins, hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions)are dead or maimed, even more are refugees......
Zelinsky is a patriot and a hero. Putain is a pig and a vicious war criminal. A murderer, torturer and rapist. He is no hero. He is a KGB thug who wants all of Ukeaine, and eastern Europe and wants to resurrect the Soviet Empire and threaten the world.
I don’t understand conservatives who love Putain and hate Israel.
“Larry Fink/Blackrock”
Fink will hit it off well with the Z-man. They’re peas from the same pod.
“The country is in ruins”
The majority of the destruction is in the areas controlled by the Russians.
Most of the power plants in areas held by Ukraine have been hard hit. I suspect Ukraine will be able to salvage about half their power generation components.
“The destruction they have experienced is on par with Germany in WW2”
It’s more like that of Great Britain. Coventry, Exeter, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Dover, The City and the London docklands were hard hit.
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