It is hard to explain why the bloc keeps funneling money to Kiev despite all the scandals, the Russian foreign minister has said
People in the EU could be benefitting from corruption in Ukraine, otherwise it’s difficult to explain the bloc’s determination to continue funding Kiev despite repeated graft and embezzling scandals, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview published on Tuesday.
Brussels is seeking to “scrape” together €135 billion ($156 billion) to prop up Kiev through 2026 and 2027 either through direct money transfer from the member states’ budgets, joint borrowing or seizing frozen Russian assets. Moscow has repeatedly warned that the third option would essentially amount to theft of its sovereign funds.
“It was recently discovered that yet another $100 million were spent on bribes to the corrupt officials,” Lavrov told the French-Russian dialogue association. “Did anyone from the Brussels bureaucrats or from those nations that pump Ukraine full of money explain it to their taxpayers that they have to endure and suffer? Maybe, there are some beneficiaries as well. I rule out nothing.”
The EU has not changed its plans even in light of a recent major graft scandal that rocked Ukraine. Earlier this month, Ukraine’s anti-corruption bodies revealed that a close associate and a former long-time business partner of Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky ran a $100 million kickback scheme in the energy sector, which heavily depends on Western aid.
Just a day after news of the scandal broke, Germany announced that it would provide Ukraine with an additional €40 million ($46.22 million) to support its energy industry that was at the center of the controversy.
It was not the first high-profile corruption scandal in Ukraine. In 2023, then Defense Minister Aleksey Reznikov resigned after local media exposed inflated food procurement contracts at his ministry. In 2024, the State Audit Service found large-scale violations in reconstruction projects financed by Western aid.
Moscow warned in the wake of the latest scandal that a “many-headed bloody hydra” of Ukrainian corruption was stretching beyond the national borders and draining Western taxpayers’ money.
