OPINION:
Billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars and war gear have flowed into Ukraine’s operations budget and Defense Ministry over the past three years amid warnings that the government is riven with corruption.
Alleged wrongdoing reached the high echelons of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s inner sanctum when officials confirmed on Feb. 10 that Defense Minister Rustem Umerov was under investigation. The suspicion is that he unlawfully dismissed his ministry’s defense procurement agency director.
In November, The Kyiv Independent reported that two military logistics commanding officers were accused of stealing $662,000 by inflating the costs of aircraft parts. In another case, the military’s top psychiatrist was accused of “illegal enrichment.”
The U.S. has stationed criminal investigators in Europe to probe allegations that American defense items are being swiped along the pipeline to Ukraine.
U.S. investigators tell me they have not discovered any Ukrainian official outright stealing some of the $30 billion dedicated to Ukraine’s operating budget, part of more than $200 billion in money and Pentagon stockpiles since 2022. However, Republicans have complained that the Biden administration never agreed to an audit to track exactly where all the money has gone.
This month, the inspectors general for the Defense Department, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development released a joint report warning that “Ukraine continued to struggle with official corruption at multiple levels.”
In January, the Congressional Research Service issued a report suggesting that Ukraine is so flush with cash that “Given past reports of corruption in Ukraine, Congress also may consider whether U.S. assistance could contribute, directly or indirectly, to incidents of waste, fraud, or abuse.”
The Ukrainian parliament approved a $53 billion operating budget for this year earmarked almost totally for national defense to contain Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion. Reuters reported that international aid would fill a projected budget deficit, meaning American money funds day-to-day government chores.
The three U.S. inspectors general have agents in Kyiv and have met face-to-face with Ukraine anti-corruption teams to impress upon them the importance of safeguarding U.S. dollars.
I asked the Pentagon inspector general’s office whether it had detected any theft of U.S. funds.
Spokesman Jeffrey Castro said, “Special IG oversight has not yet substantiated diversion of U.S. assistance as a result of official corruption in Ukraine.”
On the weapons front, the three-team inspectors general report accuses Pentagon agencies of failing to keep track of defense supplies. Inventories leaving Europe do not always match the shipments that arrive in Ukraine.
“The DoD OIG found that the [Defense Security Cooperation Agency] and the Military Services did not effectively account for the [U.S. military] items they delivered to Ukrainian control,” the inspectors general said.
The report added, “The Special IG agencies have positioned criminal investigators in Germany, Poland, and Ukraine to investigate allegations of fraud, corruption and potential diversion of weapons or technology.”
I asked Mr. Castro to explain what had been explicitly alleged. He responded, “Consistent with long-standing policy, the DoD OIG does not release details regarding or confirm the existence of particular investigations.”
American inspectors generally work with the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine.
The bureau has publicized some arrests of public officials whose cases suggest that a rich flow of U.S. and European aid creates opportunities to steal.
The anti-corruption bureau announced in January it had extradited from Bulgaria a member of an “organized group” that embezzled millions from the state-financed Ukraine Railways from 2022 to 2024, the beginning of U.S. war aid.
Ten people, including a former adviser to Mr. Zelenskyy, have been arrested. In April, the former aide was accused of stealing $2.1 million.
More troubling, the bureau announced in December that a former acting deputy head of criminal investigations in the National Police was suspected of abetting a member of parliament “in receiving an undue benefit of a particularly large amount.” The former official is accused of facilitating kickbacks from contractors. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine charged the member of parliament in July with requesting $80,000 in kickbacks.
The bureau charged the chief psychiatrist of the armed forces of “illegal enrichment” by amassing more than $1 million in personal assets since the war began. The psychiatrist sits on a commission that decides whether a person is fit for military service. The doctor has bought multiple homes, land and four BMWs.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has invited Elon Musk and his DOGE whiz kids to invade the Pentagon and trace money. The Musk team may find inappropriate spending on Ukraine.
Sen. Josh Hawley, Missouri Republican, said the days of an open checkbook are over.
“Unlimited guarantees that the last administration was making. ‘We’ll just spend hundreds of billions of dollars on this forever.’ That was absurd,” Mr. Hawley told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham. “And I’m glad President Trump’s putting a stop to it.
“We need an accounting of every single tax dollar that’s been spent over there,” he added. “Because remember, right now we have zero because Congress never would vote for an audit of the money, and the Biden White House never would do one. We need to know exactly how this money has been spent all these years. If you think USAID is a corrupt thing, just wait until we see how our money has been spent.”
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist for The Washington Times.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.