Zelensky Faces a $100 Million Corruption Scandal and a Gold Toilet Crony That Could Drag Him Into Trump's Suicidal Peace Deal
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky is fighting not on one front but three. To the East, Vladimir Putin's military might grinds away at his forces. To the West, Donald Trump – having already turned off the tap of military and financial aid – is pushing him to accept a humiliating, almost suicidal peace deal. And on the home front, he is mired in an escalating corruption scandal involving some of his closest cronies. As a result, it's increasingly looking as if we are approaching the end game in a war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and reduced numerous towns and cities to ashes.
In This Article:
- Home Front Crisis: Corruption Scandal Takes Down Ministers and Forces a Friend into Exile
- Kvartal 95 and a President’s Downfall: Mindich, Servant of the People, and a $100 Million Web
- The Trail of the Conspirators: Undercover Recordings, Aliases, and the Real Cost of Corruption
- Intimidation and Legislation: Subverting an Inquiry and the Kyiv Protests
- Public Outcry and Backdown: Protests, Reactions, and the 12414 Law
- Power, Money, and a Flight: Mindich’s Gold Toilet and the Citizenship Revoke
- The Wider Crisis: Democratic Legitimacy, War Stagnation, and a Delicate Peace
Home Front Crisis: Corruption Scandal Takes Down Ministers and Forces a Friend into Exile
If so, it will be due in no small way to a massive corruption case that has already claimed the scalps of two of Zelensky's most senior ministers and forced one of his oldest friends to flee into exile abroad. Until recently, the Western media has been unwilling to undermine the Ukrainian cause by highlighting allegations of backhanders for government and military contracts. But the latest scandal, which revolves around kickbacks totalling $100 million, is of such a scale it cannot be ignored. And Zelensky is perceived to be heavily involved as Timur Mindich, his former business partner in a TV production company called Kvartal 95, is at the heart of the scandal.
Kvartal 95 and a President’s Downfall: Mindich, Servant of the People, and a $100 Million Web
It's hard to exaggerate the closeness of the bond between the two men, as it was Kvartal 95 that made Servant Of The People, the TV comedy series that propelled Zelensky into the public consciousness. In it, he played a high school history teacher in his 30s, who is unexpectedly elected president of Ukraine after a student films him delivering a rant against – ironically – government corruption and uploaded it to the internet. Now his relationship with Mindich has come back to bite him. A president who commanded an approval rating of 84 per cent in the months following the Russian invasion in 2022 has seen it plunge to just 20 per cent, according to an opposition parliamentarian.
The Trail of the Conspirators: Undercover Recordings, Aliases, and the Real Cost of Corruption
Pictured: A photo of a golden toilet said to be from the bathroom in Zelenskyy's former business partner Timur Mindich's apartment. Pictured: U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office at the White House on February 28, 2025. A heroically thorough investigation launched by Ukraine's National Anti-Corruption Bureau (Nabu) after it suspected multimillion kickbacks were being paid on contracts by executives of Energoatom, the country's nuclear power company, led detectives to secretly record conversations between the alleged conspirators in apartments and offices around Kyiv. Transcripts of the exchanges read like something out of a thriller, with the suspects referring to each other using aliases such as 'Che Guevara' and 'Professor'. They were sufficiently cocky to make jokes about lugging around bags of cash that were so heavy they gave them back pain.
Intimidation and Legislation: Subverting an Inquiry and the Kyiv Protests
But other conversations revealed the very real costs of their corruption. One of the suspects said it would be a 'waste of money' to install concrete defences around electrical substations near nuclear power plants. These same substations were subsequently targeted by Russian drones and missiles. As the anti-corruption police closed in over the summer, their targets got wind of the fact they were under investigation and mounted a campaign of intimidation against their tormentors. The plotters put tails on Nabu detectives, obtained their home addresses and even tracked them using classified government CCTV networks. More evidence of official collusion with the conspirators came on July 21 when several detectives involved in the probe were detained by the security services, which are under Zelensky's control. The very next day Zelensky's ruling party pushed a bill through Parliament that stripped the anti-corruption agencies of their operational independence – a piece of legislation signed into law by the president himself.
Public Outcry and Backdown: Protests, Reactions, and the 12414 Law
The idea Zelensky was trying to close down an investigation into his friends immediately provoked a furious backlash. Despite the threat of Russian attacks, thousands of protesters gathered outside the president's office in Kyiv. Many of the mostly young protesters waved placards with slogans such as '12414 [the number of the new law] sounds like 1984', and 'Parliament is full of parasites'. Within 48 hours, Zelensky backed down. Nabu duly found that Energoatom was paying kickbacks valued at 10 to 15 per cent of contracts, with some of the cash spent on lavish villas near Kyiv allegedly intended for use by Oleksiy Chernyshov, a former deputy prime minister, and other officials.
Power, Money, and a Flight: Mindich’s Gold Toilet and the Citizenship Revoke
The final and most damaging aspect of the corruption case came when it emerged that the co-organiser of the $100 million scheme was the president's pal Timur Mindich. Mindich, who was found to have a gold toilet in the bathroom of his apartment and thick wads of US dollar bills, fled the country a matter of hours before detectives arrived at his home – presumably after being tipped off. Zelensky has since revoked his old friend's Ukrainian citizenship, ostensibly as a punishment. But this move had the effect of putting Mindich, who is believed to be sheltering in Israel, beyond the reach of Ukrainian law.
The Wider Crisis: Democratic Legitimacy, War Stagnation, and a Delicate Peace
Zelensky's political problems are amplified by the fact that last year's presidential election was cancelled due to the war. And so a man who was elected to a five-year term has now been in power for six and a half years – and refuses to step down while the war is ongoing. Some argue that this means neither he nor the Parliament has a clear democratic mandate. Indeed, some of his critics – especially on the Maga Right in Washington – describe him hyperbolically as a 'dictator'. But Britain didn't hold any elections during World War II and so you could say that he is no more of a dictator than Winston Churchill. Corruption probes are not Zelensky's only problem, of course, The war is not going well either. The Russian Army is making slow but inexorable progress in advancing its frontline, with the strategically important city of Pokrovsk, its streets littered with corpses from both sides, likely to fall to Moscow in the days or weeks to come. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Army is beset by a recruitment crisis, with desertions running at four times they rate they were a year ago, and around 300,000 soldiers estimated to have gone AWOL since the war began. National finances are in a dire state. As things stand, Kyiv doesn't have nearly enough money to fill its $60 billion budget black hole and is going to run out of money by February unless the EU agrees to donate the £300 billion of Russian central bank reserves and other state assets frozen in Western bank accounts. In this context, the latest Ukraine 'peace deal' cooked up by Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff and Russia's special envoy Kirill Dmitriev may not be as unacceptable as it looks at first sight. Yes, the 28-point plan calls for Kyiv to give up areas of the Donbas it still controls, to slash its troop numbers by 60 per cent and to accept a ban on several classes of weapons, including missiles that could hit Moscow. Foreign peacekeepers would also be banned and Ukraine would be required to designate Russian as a second state language, But Zelensky has never been more under siege and, with Trump growing more impatient by the day, he may decide he has no alternative but to sign on the dotted line. Whether his people will support such a decision remains to be seen.
