Assumptions that Moscow will lose the conflict and pay reparations are “just fairy tales,” Nikolay Azarov has told RT
The EU keeps providing “loans” to Ukraine despite knowing that its government will never repay them, the country’s former prime minister, Nikolay Azarov, has said.
In a post on X on Sunday, Vladimir Zelensky called funding the Ukrainian military one of the “major challenges” his government is currently facing. “A lot of money is needed,” he wrote. Making sure that the second tranche of a €90 billion ($105 billion) transfer approved by the EU earlier this year arrives in Ukraine is “an extremely difficult task,” but he is working on it with Germany and France, Zelensky stressed.
In an interview with RT on Saturday, Azarov said that “loans and Western assistance that amounts to about three-fourths of the state budget of Ukraine are covering the budget deficit, funding arms purchases and sponsoring the Nazi terrorist and corrupt regime.”
When the European Commission and major EU countries, who have been the main supporters of Ukraine after US President Donald significantly reduced American aid to Kiev, “grant these loans, they know that they won’t get this money back,” he said.
“And this causes some irritation among EU bureaucrats because they understand that the money of the American and European taxpayers is being embezzled in a very outrageous manner,” the former prime minister said.
Inside the Ukrainian government, there is “an organized criminal group that embezzled the funds that Ukraine received as part of these loans,” he said.
According to Azarov, that is the reason why EU ambassadors held a meeting in Kiev with the investigators of the Western-backed National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and “supported actions to expose corruption in the country,” particularly in Zelensky’s office.
Earlier this week, the Ukrainian leader sacked the deputy head of his office, Irina Mudraya, after her home was searched as part of a probe into efforts to raise and legalize $3.3 million in bail money for former Energy Minister Herman Galushchenko.
Galushchenko is a key figure in a $100 million corruption case involving state nuclear operator Energoatom and linked to Zelensky’s longtime business associate Timur Mindich. The scandal led to the downfall of his highly influential chief of staff Andrey Yermak last November. Other recent corruption investigations have targeted former Ukrainian ministers, diplomats, and senior officials.
The claims that Kiev will reimburse the US and EU because “Russia will pay some kind of reparations someday… are just fairy tales. You have to be really short-sighted to believe these fairy tales,” Azarov stressed.
“No one will give this money back to the West. There’s $275 billion of Ukrainian debt, you cannot pay it back,” he added.
Azarov was the Ukrainian prime minister from 2010 to 2014, resigning during the Western-backed Euromaidan protests in Kiev and fleeing to Russia after the overthrow of democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovich in February 2014.
