Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has returned to the land of Ukrainian flag logos, hat in hand, to ask for more money to fight his war. He’s coming to the right place—the U.S. has given more money to Ukraine than any other nation, in fact, the U.S. has given more to Ukraine that all of the other NATO nations combined. CNN says our official commitment in dollars to Ukraine is $113B, and we have paid out $75B as of September 2023 according to the Council on Foreign Relations who got their data from the Kiel Institute for World Economy. So we don’t even know how much money we’ve given these guys, and it doesn’t matter since we don’t ask for an auditing trail anyway.
Don’t think it’s all military aid. We also pay out humanitarian aid, “financial support” (we pay a lot of entitlements in Ukraine like their social security and disability), as well as weaponry and training. Periodically, Olena Zelenska (Ukraine changes the surnames of wives) is embroiled in a shopping scandal but the mainstream media assures us she’s not spending taxpayer dollars at Cartier’s.
This bottomless hat routine has grown a bit stale for a lot of Americans who cannot understand why we are shoveling out billions to defend Ukraine’s border while our own Southern border is wide open to foreign invasion. We haven’t given much aid to East Palestine, Ohio, or Maui, Hawaii, yet we dole out billions to Ukraine like we had unlimited taxpayer money. In this country, about 300 people die everyday from an overdose of illicit fentanyl. I cannot find reliable statistics on how many die daily in Ukraine, but it is probably not 300 a day—and even if it was, these people are not Americans.
The real crisis is here, not there, Mr. Biden.
Now Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has stated before Congress that if Congress is not willing to keep shoveling money into the gaping maw of Ukraine, it is “very likely” that U.S. troops would have to be deployed to Europe. Boots on the ground and not just any boots, the boots of your children. This is based on Austin’s apocalyptic scenario that if Ukraine falls, there will be a domino effect (gee, that sounds vaguely familiar) that will allow Russia to swallow up many other nations, which will cause a war, and which, in turn, will force the U.S. to send troops to Europe.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson was reportedly skeptical of all this histrionic posturing, but Austin’s words are chilling. Austin said this: pay up or something bad could happen to your kids.
So before we delve further into the deranged psyche of Lloyd Austin, let’s look at the little guy who keeps hitting us up for taxpayer money. (He is five feet five inches tall.) In case you don’t know who he was or where he came from, Zelenskyy was a TV actor who played an honest but beleaguered President of Ukraine in a popular Ukrainian TV show until the point when—quite ironically—he was elected to the actual office in 2019. Zelenskyy like his wife and like Ronald Reagan, comes from a show business background. But he seems to have gotten the hang of politics Ukrainian style early.
Now it would be exceedingly difficult for a team of forensic accountants to trace the spiderwebs of offshore accounting of the Zelenskyy family, so I will have to rely on published accounts by reputable sources, in this case, The Guardian, a newspaper and media outlet based in the United Kingdom.
Zelenskyy comes from the land of oligarchs. Oligarchs are people who accrue massive wealth through government corruption and then hide that wealth like obsessive-compulsive squirrels. Except unlike squirrels, oligarchs tend to go to the sunny Caribbean, bank offshore, and start shell companies. A shell company is a legal business with proper paperwork and a name but no actual business. Shell companies have no products, services, and often no employees. They do however serve a purpose in that you can run large amounts of money through them from time to time. Do that once, and you’re sketchy and likely a crook. Do that 20 times, you’re an oligarch.
Zelenskyy owns shares in multiple offshore corporations. The most visible of these is Film Heritage, where he and the missus hold a large stake. Film Heritage is based in Belize and is not to be confused with the charitable trust based on India also called Film Heritage, dedicated to preserving old cinematic works. The Film Heritage of Zelenskyy fame is a shell company, which, in turn, owns a 25% share in a company called Davegra, based in Cyprus. We’re not done yet. Davegra owns another shell company Maltex Multicapital Corporation, registered in the British Virgin Islands. Davegra owns Maltex outright. Zelenskyy and some others hold a 25% stake in Maltex.
Why so convoluted? A great deal of the world’s ill-gotten gains are held in opaque cascades of shell companies. In fact, the very definition of oligarch assumes money gained by corruption and secreted away in obscure chains of companies. Chances are, when you see networks of shell companies, you’re dealing with money laundering but it can be difficult to prove. And it’s not just money these companies hold. Many of these companies (not just these Zelenskyy-related companies, but companies in any good oligarch system) have vast real estate holdings. That’s because oligarchs know that the money-based economy can crash, but land and property tends to retain its value.
Now according to The Guardian, when Zelenskyy was running for President of Ukraine in 2019, he sold his share of Maltex. It is not clear why he sold it, to whom it was sold, or how much he got, but Zelenskyy walked away from Maltex. In that same year, 2019, Zelenskyy was voted in as President of Ukraine by a wide margin. At this point, Maltex resumes paying Zelenskyy dividends, even though it does not look like he bought back any interest. In fact, it is not clear where Maltex is getting dividends to pay. This is when I wish I had a staff of forensic accountants.
In all fairness, it is not illegal to have offshore investments, even if you are in politics. And it is not illegal to set up a company that has no visible business. And it may not even be entirely illegal if such a company randomly hands big bunches of money to specific people. But it does stink. And if a shell company is paying out a lot of money to one or a small group of individuals for no actual products or services, it really stinks of corruption. So Zelenskyy has the set-up of an oligarch and a nice network of shell companies, but it is not clear if he is using them to hide ill-gotten gains. I am not saying Zelenskyy is corrupt. Let’s just say Zelensky’s financial activities strongly suggest that he is not a poor man.
Zelenskyy also has ties to a billionaire TV producer in Ukraine with the delightfully sinister name of Igor Kolomoisky. That sounds like the name of a villain from The Man from Uncle. Kolomoisky made numerous seven-figure payments to Film Heritage, although it is not clear why. There are rumors—and that’s all I could find—that Zelenskyy and Kolomoisky are in cahoots but it is not clear what the cahoots is all about. There is not any obvious above-board business activity between them.
Zelensky’s wife hasn’t helped matters. Olena Zelenska got embroiled in a shopping scandal, when it was reported she spent over $40,000 on a one-hour shopping spree in Paris. Newsweek ran interference and indeed, there is not much of a smoking gun, but there are numerous reports from a variety of outlets that state she spent a great deal of money on luxury items while in spending some time in Europe. This would not be illegal. She is free to spend her money as she wants and, as long as we do not demand any financial reports from here, she is apparently also free to spend our money as she wants. Of course, this could all be just a rumor, but she is a snappy dresser.
Then in October 2023, a report in Newsweek said Olena Zelenska spent $1.1 million at Cartier’s in New York and was so irritated when an employee there offered an opinion while showing jewelry that he was fired on the spot—but Newsweek claims the story is not credible. The person who claimed to be fired said she spent over $1 million on baubles. Newsweek said this was fake news.
None of that matters much to me because whether or not the Zelensky family is spending money like drunken sailors, they could be. The money we send to Ukraine is not checked or audited. The United States has officials who periodically rumble that we have serial numbers of certain pieces of military hardware and equipment, but there is no serious effort to watch where the money goes. In fact, over $29B that went to Ukraine so far was not spent on anything military—it went to financial support of the country and humanitarian aid. Zelenskyy is starting to be like a drug addict, demanding more and more money and we taxpayers are starting to be like Ukraine War enablers.
Here’s what we do know about the Zelensky family; they are involved in offshore companies that look suspicious. Occasional rumors come up about spending sprees. Olena Zelenska may be the most honest person who ever lived—or she may be an oligarch milking the United States for her jewelry box. The point is—we have no safeguards to prevent her from doing the latter. So even if the Zelensky family are the most honest people who ever lived, we have no guard rails with the money we are sending them. By the way, here is how you write $113B in digits: $113,000,000,000. If you take the population of the United States as of December 12, 2023 (340,811,184) that comes out to over $350 for every man, woman, and child in the country.
That’s a lot. If you’re a family of two parents and four kids, that’s $2,100 out of your household budget. So far. For a war in a place you’ve probably never been, defending people you’ve never met and likely will never meet, all in support of a short angry man with offshore accounts and a well-dressed wife.
We don’t have money to house homeless veterans, deal with opioid addiction, help the people of East Palestine or Maui, or close our border, but we have Ukraine money? As they say in New Jersey, what are we, nuts? Not adjusted for inflation, we spent $300B on World War II. We’ve almost reached the halfway point of that amount now just for Ukraine.
So why are we in Ukraine to begin with? We started sending our money there to fight a proxy war with Russia, or at least that is the story. We send Ukraine money so they can defend their national sovereignty, although we don’t much worry about our own. We are also hoping this war will protect Ukraine and deplete Putin’s resources. But maybe we’re sending all that unaudited money over there for some other reasons.
Victoria Nuland, Undersecretary of State, admitted in a Congressional hearing that the U.S. runs biolabs in Ukraine. Although many sources say we don’t do this, Nuland herself said, “Yes, the Biden administration does fund a series of biolabs in Ukraine.” That is verbatim from the transcript. What had previously been called Russian disinformation was confirmed before Congress. You can see why Putin might be a little irritated with bioweapons labs on his border—imagine if Mexico had biolabs on the Southern Border. You think that might irritate us a little?
Another reason the war in Ukraine happened was the fact that Putin determined that 2022 was a good time to grab Ukraine. We all know he’s been looking at it. Ukraine and Russia have a deeply intertwined history and a frenemy-relationship that spans many centuries. Ukraine was part of the old Soviet Union. It went independent and poses a bit of a problem to Russia since Putin regarded it as a buffer state between Russia and the rest of NATO-allied Europe. Ukraine has been leaning increasingly pro-West and even hinted it wanted to join NATO (which NATO previously promised Putin would never be permitted). If Ukraine joined NATO, Putin would have a NATO nation at his front door. This is like Canada forming a military alliance with China (oops, that may have already happened…) Plus we know Russia made a land grab for Crimea under Obama and Obama did exactly zero to defend Crimea. So it made military sense for Putin to make a play for Ukraine.
Add to that the fact the guy in the White House is mumbling about building a railroad from the Pacific over the Indian Ocean and Putin likely considered he’d never get a better chance to take back Ukraine.
Borders in Europe are very fluid. Using Melania Trump as an example, the former First Lady says she is from Slovenia. That’s if you look at a map today. When she was growing up, she lived in the same place but it was called Yugoslavia. And go back to when her parents and grandparents were dealing with war in Europe and the land was called the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The name sounds almost quaint. The point is that Europe has always been a land of adjustable boundaries. This does not mean that invasion is acceptable, but it also does not mandate that the US empty its treasury every time it happens.
The alarming thing about Lloyd Austin’s remarks is that he wants the war to continue. He is sounding desperate, like he needs the war to continue. Maybe it’s a military imperative, maybe it’s the nefarious underbelly of the military-industrial complex, maybe it’s a guy who has been charged with protecting the oligarchy. Make no mistake: Austin is making a veiled threat without much of a veil. Your money or your life… or rather, your money or the life of your children.
Extortion. The more I learn about government, the more I know about organized crime.