Letter From the Editors

It was lights out this week for some top Ukrainian energy officials and close associates of President Zelensky after the country’s two anticorruption agencies announced the results of an operation – aptly titled Midas – to investigate a corruption scheme involving kickbacks from contractors at state power behemoths like Energoatom. President Zelensky did not comment on the specific figures in the probe, which Vedomosti says “involved 15 months of work, 1,000 hours of audio recordings and over 70 searches,” although he did say: “There must be a clear procedural response. There must be sentences.”

But does any judgement await Zelensky? Could the plug also be pulled on presidency because of the scandal? In an article for RG, Pavel Dulman writes that the “thousands of hours of wiretaps in NABU’s hands are like a ticking time bomb under Zelensky’s throne.” But expert Vladimir Zharikhin, who believes the investigation is an attempt “to appease Ukrainian society in the face of the continuing energy crisis,” says the investigation will not have a “major impact” on Zelensky’s political survival because an election is unlikely to be held while hostilities with Russia are still raging.

Zharikhin’s comment does raise the question of how Ukrainian society is faring amid this energy crisis. As NGE’s Olga Musafirova reports from Kyiv, winter has not yet arrived in the capital and the situation is not yet critical. But Russian airstrikes are continuing to damage energy infrastructure throughout the country, leading to extended outages and their accompanying indignities. For her, though, “it is especially abhorrent that these facilities have been subjected to equally devastating attacks from Ukrainian state officials.” But at least, she quips, court sessions in the corruption case are being broadcast on live TV and “anyone who has power can watch.”

In another NGE article, Denis Morokhin interviews Zhanna Nemtsova about the toll of the war and sanctions on ordinary Russians. As she explains, the largest share of Russian assets blocked in Europe are “private assets frozen due to sanctions on Russian financial bodies.” The majority of these assets are owned by individuals who are not subject to sanctions. These people aren’t corrupt officials or oligarchs, “but members of the country’s once-burgeoning middle class, many of whom oppose the war and despise Putin.” Thus, Nemtsova says, these particular sanctions adversely affect the most progressive section of Russian society and do nothing to help Ukraine or undermine the Putin regime.

Meanwhile, back in Russia, a recent ARCSPO poll indicates that civic awareness is growing as Russian citizens are beginning to reject the “Soviet” mentality, in particular, the notion of the need for a “strong hand” to lead them. According to NG, though, Russia’s political system is in a suspended state where this “hand” still exists and continues to “guide the actions” of Russians. This creates situations where, after dissenters are silenced (something Altai Republic head Andrei Turchak is trying to accomplish on his turf), the system turns in on itself and, as Ilya Shepelin comments in Meduza, starts to devour its own.

But to return to Ukraine for a moment. As Oleg Karpovich writes in Izvestia, the US withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty and the INF Treaty during Trump’s first term presaged “the Ukraine crisis.” Now, as the fate of two other key nuclear documents – the CTBT and the NPT – is up in the air, Karpovich warns that “The American establishment must understand that Russia will not allow a strategic imbalance and will respond appropriately to any attempts to change the status quo.” Thus, Roman Romanov says in Vedomosti, “it’s not just about sanctions or the continued fighting in Ukraine, but the fact that bilateral relations have practically lost their long-standing ‘central narrative’ around which they could be built – agreements on strategic stability.”

So when can we expect the US and Russia to reach a strategic balance given the current state of affairs? I think we all know the answer to that.