Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky embezzled hundreds of millions of dollars that the US allocated for the purchase of fuel, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh.
In his blog, Hersh writes – The Ukraine government, headed by Volodymyr Zelensky, has been using American taxpayers’ funds to pay dearly for the vitally needed diesel fuel that is keeping the Ukrainian army on the move in its war with Russia.
It is unknown how much the Zalensky government is paying per gallon for the fuel, but the Pentagon was paying as much as $400 per gallon to transport gasoline from a port in Pakistan, via truck or parachute, into Afghanistan during the decades-long American war there.
The issue of corruption was directly raised with Zelensky in a meeting last January in Kyiv with CIA Director William Burns. His message to the Ukrainian president, I was told by an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the meeting, was out of a 1950s mob movie.
The senior generals and government officials in Kyiv were angry at what they saw as Zelensky’s greed, so Burns told the Ukrainian president because “he was taking a larger share of the skim money than was going to the generals.”
Burns also presented Zelensky with a list of thirty-five generals and senior officials whose corruption was known to the CIA and others in the American government. Zelensky responded to the American pressure ten days later by publicly dismissing ten of the most ostentatious officials on the list and doing little else.
“The ten he got rid of were brazenly bragging about the money they had—driving around Kyiv in their new Mercedes,” the intelligence official told me.
Meanwhile, Hersh, citing an intelligence official, said that the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines and lack of strategic planning with regard to Ukraine had caused a growing rift between the White House and the US intelligence community.