In an article on Ukraine, titled “Trading with the Enemy,” posted on his website today, award-winning journalist Seymour Hersh asks (doubting): “Does the Biden administration have an endgame to the conflict?” He reports that Ukrainian President “Zelenskyy has been buying fuel from Russia, the country with which it, and Washington, are at war, and the Ukrainian president and many in his entourage have been skimming untold millions from the American dollars earmarked for diesel fuel payments. One estimate by analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency put the embezzled funds at $400 million last year, at least; another expert compared the level of corruption in Kiev as approaching that of the Afghan war, ‘although there will be no professional audit reports emerging from the Ukraine.’”
Hersh adds: “Many government ministries in Kiev have been literally ‘competing,’ I was told, to set up front companies for export contracts for weapons and ammunition with private arms dealers around the world, all of which provide kickbacks. Many of those companies are in Poland and Czechia, but others are thought to exist in the Persian Gulf and Israel. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are others in places like the Cayman Islands and Panama, and there are lots of Americans involved,’ an American expert on international trade told me.”
Hersh also had an intelligence report on CIA Chief William Burns’ meeting with Zelenskyy in January: “His message to the Ukrainian president, I was told by an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the meeting, was out of a 1950s mob movie. The senior generals and government officials in Kiev were angry at what they saw as Zelenskyy’s greed, Burns told the Ukrainian president, because ‘he was taking a larger share of the skim money than was going to the generals.’ Burns also presented Zelenskyy with a list of 35 generals and senior officials whose corruption was known to the CIA and others in the American government. Zelenskyy responded to the American pressure ten days later by publicly dismissing ten of the most ostentatious officials on the list and doing little else. ‘The ten he got rid of were brazenly bragging about the money they had—driving around Kiev in their new Mercedes, the intelligence official told me.” (https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/trading-with-the-enemy)
