Önder Özar Diplomasi Sevgisi: The Washington Post Today's Worldview - Ukrainian journalsts are uncovering Ukrainian corruption and more.....

By Adam Taylor
with Sammy Westfall

Ukrainian journalists are uncovering Ukrainian corruption

Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, answers questions from journalists near the scene of a helicopter crash in Brovary, near Kyiv, on Jan. 18. (Sergey Dolzhenko/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

For a top Ukrainian official, the downfall came from a fatal weakness: A conspicuous interest in luxury cars.

In October, Ukrainian news outlet Bihus.info shared photos of Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office, driving a new Chevrolet Tahoe SUV that had been donated for humanitarian aid. Two months later, the news website Ukrainska Pravda reported that Tymoshenko had been filmed multiple times driving a 2021 Porsche Taycan, worth around $100,000, through Kyiv earlier in the year.

Tymoshenko dismissed the insinuations, suggesting the Chevrolet was used for official business and that he had only been borrowing the Porsche. But with so much of the country suffering economic devastation, the ostentatious modes of transport chosen by a senior Zelensky adviser made waves.

“Can the representatives of power in this country, a quarter territory lies already in ruins, live luxuriously?” wrote Mykhailo Tkach, the Ukrainska Pravda journalist who broke the story on the Porsche.

This week, Kyiv saw a series of resignations or dismissals, many of which appeared to be related to allegations of graft. Tymoshenko was among the most prominent to leave office, but there was also Deputy Defense Minister Vyacheslav Shapovalov and Deputy Prosecutor General Oleksiy Symonenko, as well as five governors of front-line provinces.

The headlines are deeply uncomfortable for the Ukrainian government. Since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022, Zelensky has become an international icon, praised for his resilience and steady hand. But reports of corruption are likely to alarm many in Western capitals, which have sent huge sums of money to Ukraine to balance the economic catastrophe of the war.

But it’s important to remember who uncovered the allegations of Ukrainian corruption: Ukrainian journalists and anti-corruption campaigners.

That Ukraine has a corruption problem is hardly news. It’s been dubbed the most corrupt country in Europe. In the most recent Corruption Perceptions Index by Transparency International, the country was ranked 122 worst out of 180 countries.

But while this reputation for graft is known around the world — former president Donald Trump called Ukraine the “third-most corrupt country” — perhaps less acknowledged is how many in Ukraine push back against corruption. Indeed, for investigative journalists willing to probe into corruption, Ukraine has provided rich material.

Bihus.info was founded by Denis Bigus, an investigative journalist who hosted the television show “Our Money.” Bigus first became known internationally for helping to set up YanukovychLeaks, a website that helped uncover the finances of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych — the pro-Moscow leader ousted in 2014 who left behind a mansion with a private zoo and luxury car collection.

Bihus has also worked at Ukrainska Pravda, an online news organization first founded in 2000 that garnered widespread attention for its investigative work. This outlet also led the reporting that led to Symonenko’s resignation this week, with Tkach reporting earlier this month that Ukraine’s Deputy Prosecutor General had traveled to Marbella, Spain, over the New Year and was seen driving in a controversial businessman’s Mercedes.

Yuriy Nikolov, another well-known Ukrainian journalist with the publication Mirror of the Week, provided the revelations that forced Shapovalov from office this week, reporting that a recent $350 million procurement contract had included basic food items at heavily inflated prices.

This is just scratching the surface. Ukrainian journalists working for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s investigative unit, “Skhemy,” or “schemes” in English, have also uncovered numerous allegations of official corruption in Ukraine, last year forcing the resignation of a judge in Ukraine’s Supreme Court for holding a Russian passport.

And it isn’t just journalists uncovering corruption. Ukrainian nonprofit groups, such as the well-known Anti-Corruption Action Center, have led their own investigations and calls for reform. Meanwhile, after the 2014 overthrow of Yanukovych and the subsequent discovery of large-scale corruption, Kyiv set up the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine.

This body has the mandate of investigating and preparing cases against people suspected of graft — as shown this weekend when it oversaw a sting operation that saw Deputy Infrastructure Minister Vasily Lozinskiy arrested for allegedly taking a bribe of $400,000 on an equipment purchase.

Fighting corruption is a risky business. One of the founding editors of Ukrainska Pravda, Georgiy Gongadze, was murdered after investigating government corruption. Just 31 years old, his body was found in a forest, decapitated and covered in acid.

“Gongadze tried to be like a normal reporter, he didn’t try to be a hero,” Serhiy Leshchenko, a Ukrainian journalist who later edited Ukrainska Pravda, told the BBC in 2004. “But in Ukraine it’s a brave activity being a journalist.

Leshchenko now works in Zelensky’s office, but the dangers he described still persist. Last year, Ukrainska Pravda’s Tkach described harassment linked to their reporting, while the editors of Bihus.info reported that unknown people were impersonating their reporters. Journalists have complained that under Ukraine’s wartime media, it has become even harder to report on corruption.

1,000 Words

Democratic Youth Front of India activists hold a public screening of “India: The Modi Question” outside a bus terminal in Kochi, India, on Jan. 24. (Sunoj Ninan Mathew/AP)

The Indian government has embarked on an extraordinary campaign to prevent its citizens from viewing a new BBC documentary that explores Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s alleged role in a deadly 2002 riot that saw more than 1,000 people — mostly Muslims — killed.

Talking Points

• Berlin said it would send 14 German-made Leopard 2 battle tanks to Ukraine, and allow other countries to send theirs, after weeks of international pressure. The Biden administration also announced it would provide Ukraine 31 M1 Abrams tanks.

• The Post’s Miriam Berger reports on the small circle of Iranian judges, connected to the country’s clerical leaders and security services, that is meting out long prison terms and death sentences to protest supporters. In recent weeks, seven judges in Iran appear to have issued between them at least 17 death sentences, some of which Iran’s high court has overturned.

• Five men who fled Russia to avoid wartime conscription have been living in South Korea’s Incheon International Airport for months. They had requested asylum, but South Korea, which has a low rate of accepting refugees, deemed them unqualified to even apply. The men appealed, and some will find out the decision this week.

• Pope Francis condemned “unjust” legislation criminalizing same-sex relationships around the world, saying “being homosexual is not a crime.” He said the church must work to end such laws, while Catholic bishops who support them “have to have a process of conversion.” The clergy should offer “tenderness, please, as God has for each one of us,” the pontiff told the Associated Press.

Viewpoints

A stranger planned to bomb my mosque. He became a member instead.

By Bibi Bahrami | The Washington Post ● Read more »

Rereading Russian classics in the shadow of the Ukraine war

By Elif Batuman | The New Yorker ● Read more »

Britain’s cautionary tale of self-destruction

By David Wallace-Wells | The New York Times ● Read more »

Revisiting nuclear

Willie Torres. (Martin San Diego for The Washington Post)

Carlo Arcilla, head of the Philippine Nuclear Research Institute. (Martin San Diego for The Washington Post)

BATAAN, Philippines — They’d grown old together, the nuclear plant and its caretaker.

Willie Torres had been there at the start in the 1970s, when the plant was still being built, a $2.3 billion project set to become Asia’s first venture into nuclear energy. He stayed on as a technician when the plant became dogged by scandal. And he remained as one of a handful of staff when, in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, the government ordered it mothballed.

In the face of skyrocketing energy prices and the global push to slow climate change by moving away from fossil fuels, interest in nuclear power has surged anew in the Philippines and abroad. President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. announced weeks after taking office last year that “it is time” to revisit nuclear energy and mused openly about reviving the decades-old Bataan nuclear plant.

The plant begun in the mid-1970s by the president’s father, dictator Ferdinand Marcos, was beset by construction delays, cost overruns and charges that the Marcos family had taken bribes from contractors. When an independent commission concluded that the plant had “inadequate safeguards and could be a potential hazard,” opposition to the project grew. It was shelved in 1986 and its reactor was never turned on.

“It was a lost opportunity,” said Torres, 61. “Not just for me, but for the entire country.”

The plant, nestled in forested hills three hours outside Manila, became a monument to the excesses of the Marcos era. Swallows moved into its cavernous chambers and their gurgles echoed against the concrete walls. For decades, Torres held out hope that the plant would one day be reopened, and now, under Marcos, it might. Activists who once marched against the plant because of its alleged safety lapses are mobilizing their communities to fight again.

But the battlefield has changed.

The Bataan Nuclear Power Plant. (Martin San Diego for The Washington Post)

The Philippines is one of the countries most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Its coal-heavy energy sector accounts for half its greenhouse gas emissions. In the country’s legislature and on the global stage, nuclear power has found influential champions who argue it is the only energy source that will allow the Philippines to green its grid without having to slow growth.

Some energy experts aren’t sure that nuclear power makes sense for the Philippines, but their voices are increasingly being drowned out. On social media, the contentious history of the Bataan nuclear plant is being rewritten, said Veronica Cabe, an organizer at the Nuclear/Coal-Free Bataan Movement.

“Every day we see it,” Cabe said. “They’re turning the narrative.” – Rebecca Tan and Jhesset O. Enano