Before the Russian invasion, CIA reports linked him to an oligarch so dirty and so mired in “significant corruption” that the State Department banned him from entering the U.S. But now CIA propaganda portrays Zelensky as nobler than Winston Churchill and saintlier than Mother Theresa. Will the Real Volodymyr Zelensky Please Stand Up
In 2019, the CIA-run Radio Free Europe reported on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s connection to Ihor Kholomoisky, a Ukrainian oligarch whom the State Department banned from entering the U.S. in March 2021 due to his “significant corruption.”
This report is ironic given that, since Ukraine’s war with Russia began over four months ago, Radio Free Europe along with the rest of the Western media has depicted Zelensky as something equivalent to a reincarnation of Winston Churchill and Mother Teresa, driving a campaign for his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize and inspiring a flamboyant musical tribute during the 2022 Grammy awards.
Steering One of the Biggest Ponzi Schemes in World History
Meanwhile in January 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a civil forfeiture complaint—the fourth against him—which alleges that Kholomoisky and Gennadiy Bogolyubov, who owned PrivatBank, one of the largest banks in Ukraine, embezzled and defrauded the bank of $5.5 billion which went missing.
The two allegedly obtained fraudulent loans and lines of credit from 2008 through 2016 and laundered portions of their criminal proceeds using an array of shell companies’ bank accounts, primarily at PrivatBank’s Cyprus branch, before they transferred the funds to the U.S. where they continued to launder them illegally through an associate operating out of offices in Miami.
According to a profile in The American Spectator, Kholomoisky laundered millions in Cleveland, Ohio, and across the Midwest where, as “one of the [region’s] biggest real-estate landlords,” he “steered one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in world history.”
Making Even Other Oligarchs, No Strangers to Violent Crime, Blanch
Born in Soviet Ukraine in 1963, Kholomoisky was among those to benefit after the Soviet collapse in the early 1990s from the sale of formerly state-owned enterprises like steel plants and gas wells at fire-sale prices.
A writer for Forbes magazine reported that, in one instance, he saw “hundreds of hired rowdies armed with baseball bats, iron bars, gas and rubber-bullet pistols and chainsaws forcibly [take] over” a steel plant that Kholomoisky eyed.
For the full Bond-villain effect, Kholomoisky put a shark tank in his office. Allegedly, he was not averse to shoving the head of a visitor in it as a reminder never to cross him.
As Governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast from 2014 until 2016, Kholomoisky bankrolled anti-Russian units operating with the Ukrainian army in Donetsk and Luhansk—which voted to secede after the post-Maidan government tried to impose the Ukrainian language on them.
These units included the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion which terrorized the people of eastern Ukraine, along with the Dnipro and Aidar battalions, which were sometimes deployed as personal thug squads to protect Kholomoisky’s financial interests.
Burisma and the CIA
The New York Post reported that Kholomoisky had a “controlling interest” in Burisma Holdings—the Ukrainian energy company which employed Hunter Biden as a board member for $50,000 per month. Russian media, quoted in State Department emails, referred to Burisma as “part of Kholomoisky’s financial empire.”
Six months after Hunter Biden departed, Burisma appointed Cofer Black to its board—a position that he maintains. Black was a career CIA officer who served as director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center following the September 11 attacks.
This appointment raises questions as to whether Burisma served as a CIA-front operation that was designed to help finance the anti-Russia militias in eastern Ukraine.
Ihor and Volodymyr Sitting in a Tree…
Kholomoisky’s relationship with Zelensky goes back to around 2012, when Zelensky and his partners in a television production company, Kvartal 95, began making regular content for TV stations owned by Kholomoisky.
A comedian and actor who had been famous since the 2000s, Zelensky began his political rise a few years after taking on a starring role in the political satire “Servant of the People,” which began airing on Kholomoisky’s network in 2015.
The show starred Zelensky as a humble history teacher whose anti-corruption rant in class is filmed by a student, goes viral online, and wins him national office.
In a case of life imitating art, Zelensky ended up winning the real-world Ukrainian presidency just three-and-a-half years after the show’s launch, with more than 73% of the vote.
Zelensky capitalized on widespread public anger at corruption, but his 2019 campaign was dogged by doubts over his anti-graft bona fides given his connection to Kholomoisky.
Ariev did not provide smoking-gun evidence, though the Pandora Papers—11.9 million leaked documents published by a consortium of investigative journalists in October 2021—show that at least some of the details in this alleged scheme correspond to reality.
Besides providing financial support during Ukraine’s 2019 election, Kholomoisky supplied Zelensky with a car and lent his personal lawyer to him to be campaign adviser and promoted his candidacy on various media outlets that he owned.
Zelensky claimed that his relationship with Kholomoisky was not political; rather he had gone to visit him because of TV work.
However, Zelensky made sure to reward him when he became president. He removed Kholomoisky’s opponents, the Prosecutor General, the Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine, and his own prime minister, who tried to regulate Kholomoisky’s control of a state-owned electricity company.
Zelensky’s long-standing ties to Kholomoisky belie the pristine public image of a man hailed by U.S. politicians as a “lion of a leader” (August Pfluger R-TX) and person of “incredible bravery” (Adam Schiff, D-CA).
Since the fighting began, Zelensky has eschewed negotiations and instead begged the West for more and more weapons while inviting foreign mercenaries into Ukraine.
This assessment is at odds with the current media hagiography of Zelensky, which also obscures his ties to Kholomoisky that the CIA itself has acknowledged.
Ukraine Army Largely Destroyed, Battlefield Losses, Mobilised with Mental Illness, Cancer, Forever War Crippling West, The $61bn Farce, Novorossiya Peace Basis
Ukraine has suffered troop losses of between 400 and 500,000 and Russian troops are advancing with increasing rapidity on all fronts. Arkhangelskoye and Kotlyarivka have been taken by Russian troops and the critical strategic town of Chasov Yar is about to fall. Even where Ukrainian troops had some success in breaking through at Rabotino in the Zaporizhzhia region they are now in retreat.