UA 
Corruption in Ukraine's energy sector was an open secret long before the high-profile arrests. Anyone with even a passing connection to the industry knew about it – many had written about it – yet the government said nothing.
Then came Mindichgate – the corruption scandal named after Timur Mindich, a businessman close to the president – and the promised clean-up turned out to be little more than "a fresh coat of whitewash".
Meanwhile, the war in Iran risks strengthening Russia through higher oil revenues, and the peace talks grind on, their effectiveness now doubted even by Trump himself. Lana Zerkal, the member of the Ukraine Facility Platform's Coordination Council, discussed all of this in an interview with Svoboda Live on Radio Svoboda.
Mindichgate – a symptom of a systemic problem
The corruption scandal in the energy sector was only the visible tip of a far deeper problem. Opaque tenders, funds siphoned out of Energoatom, murky governance at state-owned enterprises – all of it had been going on for years, and all of it had been reported. "Nobody in the government paid the slightest attention. For all the expert criticism, for all the reporting – not a single response," Zerkal says.
When the scandal finally broke, the government announced a complete overhaul of corporate governance at state-owned enterprises. In practice, it came down to a partial reshuffle of Energoatom's supervisory board, with the same management left in place. The energy regulator NEURC – which had ignored violations for years – was left essentially untouched.
Why energy-sector reform never happened
The energy sector has always been where the big money moves, so every attempt to reform it has quickly run into resistance.
"In my time I've watched several energy ministers arrive with serious reform agendas. Within months the ambition quietly drained away, and they slipped back into the same old channels."
The pattern never varied: new faces, old schemes. State-owned enterprises remained a way to control the money, not companies anyone intended to run well. Reforms were announced, then quietly shelved the moment they threatened someone's interests.
Corruption scandals and Ukraine's reputation
For Ukraine's international partners, these stories are awkward. Supporting Ukraine is essential – but it is getting harder and harder to explain to voters at home why they are bankrolling a country dogged by major corruption scandals.
"They have to turn a blind eye to what's going on inside the country," Zerkal says.
That these cases become public at all shows Ukraine's anti-corruption institutions are working, and its partners know it. But the point, Zerkal stresses, is not just arrests but convictions – and Ukraine still has strikingly few of those.
The war in the Middle East: why it makes things worse for Ukraine
For Ukraine, the new conflict is more bad news than good – on several fronts at once.
The first is competition for weapons. Interceptor missiles for Patriot systems are made in limited numbers, and supply is inevitably being redirected towards the Middle East.
The second is Russia's oil revenue. If the conflict drags on and prices rise, Moscow will have more money for the war. Iran, Zerkal points out, pioneered the "shadow fleet" – using unmarked tankers to move oil in defiance of sanctions – and Russia has borrowed the same playbook. "Russia will simply sell more, earn more and pour more into the war."
Should the operation succeed and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) be weakened, Russia's and China's access to cheap sanctioned oil would shrink. China has been the chief beneficiary of this shadow trade: cheap Iranian and Russian crude, shipped around sanctions, has flowed mainly to Beijing. But as long as the IRGC survives as an institution, neither Iran's internal repression nor its support for terrorist groups will end.
The one thing Ukraine can genuinely offer partners in the region is four years of hard-won experience in countering drones.
Negotiations: does Trump even want a deal?
Trump, in Zerkal's view, is not convinced a deal is achievable at all. His State of the Union address said as much: barely a mention of Ukraine, and no clear position. "He deliberately keeps it out of the spotlight, because he knows there may be nothing to show for it."
Russia, for its part, is working the information space brilliantly: projecting "flexibility", pinning the blame on Ukraine and leaning on Trump. "The ball is in Ukraine's court. We've agreed to everything – all that's left is the small matter of pulling Ukrainian troops out."
The appointment of Vladimir Medinsky – who led Moscow's 2022 talks – to head the delegation is telling: nothing fundamental has changed. The process is closed to outsiders, so conclusions drawn from press leaks are worthless. "People who draw conclusions without being in the room are grifters and clout-chasers," Zerkal says. Even so, she insists the situation is still in flux – and to write it off as a "dead end" is simply to stop analysing it.
