Volodymyr Zelenskiy has announced the dismissal of all the heads of Ukraine’s regional military recruitment centres in the latest drive to root out corruption after officials were accused of taking bribes from those seeking to avoid the frontlines.
At a time when the country’s army is in need of new recruits, Ukraine’s president described the taking of cash from people who wanted to avoid conscription while others suffered as a form of treachery.
“This system should be run by people who know exactly what war is and why cynicism and bribery during war is treason,” he said in a video statement. “Instead, soldiers who have experienced the front or who cannot be in the trenches because they have lost their health, lost their limbs, but have preserved their dignity and do not have cynicism, are the ones who can be entrusted with this system of recruitment.”
Zelenskiy, who was elected in 2019 on a promise that he would clear up the country’s endemic corruption, has in recent months sought to personally and publicly challenge such practices.
In January, he dismissed a minister, Vasyl Lozynsky, who was accused of embezzlement, and some within his closest circle departed the government.
Last week he also decried the “revolting practices” of some involved in military recruitment after an official in the southern region of Odesa was inexplicably found to have acquired $5m in savings and a property in Spain.
There are 112 criminal proceedings ongoing against officials of military enlistment offices. Zelenskiy said that there was evidence that “some took cash, some took cryptocurrency”.
“The cynicism is the same everywhere,” he said. “Illicit enrichment, legalisation of illegally obtained funds, unlawful benefit, illegal transfer of persons liable for military service across the border.”
Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, Gen Valerii Zaluzhnyi, has been ordered by Zelenskiy to hire new heads of the territorial recruitment centres, with applicants facing checks from the security service.
“Every ‘military commissar’ who is subject to criminal proceedings will be held accountable,” Zelenskiy said. “It is quite fair. Full responsibility. The dismissed ‘military commissars’ and other officials who have shoulder straps and in respect of whom no evidence of crimes or violations has been found, if they want to keep their shoulder straps and prove their worthiness should go to the front.”
Zelenskiy did not mention a further case of alleged corruption reported in the Ukrainian media involving the ministry of defence.
According to documents seen by the investigative news website ZN.ua, the ministry of defence overpaid for summer camouflage kit bought from Turkey as winter coats for the troops.
It was claimed that a total of 4,900 jackets that should have cost $142,000 were bought for $421,000.
The difference between the two prices was said to have remained with the Turkish firm that supplied the goods owned by a Ukrainian from the southern city of Zaporizhzhia.
The ministry of defence has denied overpaying for the clothing.
In June, an investigation had been launched by Ukraine’s security services into Vyacheslav Shapovalov, a former deputy minister of defence, and Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, a former head of the department of state procurement in the defence ministry, into the purchase of low-quality winter clothing from outside the country. It is unclear whether the two cases are connected. Shapovalov and Khmelnytskyi have denied any wrongdoing.
The corruption scandals have emerged as Ukrainian forces are coming under growing pressure from a Russian advance in the east of the Kharkiv region, in the north-east of the country.
The Russian defence ministry claimed on Telegram that 20 Ukrainian soldiers had also been killed in attacks in the Kherson oblast in the south.
An eight-year-old was killed after a Russian missile struck a house in western Ukraine’s Ivano-Frankivsk region, about 60 miles from the Polish border, according to the office of Ukraine’s prosecutor general. Two civilians, a woman and a 44-year-old man, were also said by Ukrainian officials to have been killed in a drone strike in the city of Beryslav in Kherson oblast.
The regional governor, Oleksandr Prokudin, said on Telegram that a 53-year-old man had also been killed in the shelling of a high-rise building in the city of Kherson earlier on Friday.
Kyiv came under attack on Friday with residents being woken up by four enormous explosions that could be heard across the capital as the city’s air defence systems shot down Russian ballistic missiles.
The city’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, posted on Telegram: “In addition to the debris of the rocket that fell on the territory of one of the capital’s children’s hospitals, two more crash sites were found in the Obolon district of Kyiv. The roof of a private house was damaged on Bogatyrska Street. Also in Obolon, a wreck was discovered in an open area in one of the summer cooperatives. There are no casualties.”
An open-source project run jointly by the BBC Russian service and the Mediazona website on Friday confirmed the deaths of more than 30,000 Russian service personnel in the war in Ukraine.
Using publicly available data, including online obituaries, newspaper articles and photographs on tombstones, the Russian journalist collective identifies and lists the deaths by region, military unit and age. “The actual death toll is significantly higher,” Mediazona said on its website.
On Friday night the White House said it was open to training Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16 fighter jets in the US if capacity for such training is reached in Europe.
The White House spokesperson John Kirby, speaking to reporters, said Washington is eager to move forward with the training.
