By Uriel Araujo

Taking all that into consideration, it is not far-fetched at all to describe the current aid Washington sends to Kyiv as being in part a major corruption scam that has a lot to do with leaders across the Atlantic trying to protect themselves and to secure their own private interests. This is not to deny of course the role American geopolitical interests (pertaining to NATO expansion) also played in the greater scheme of things. The point is that personal and electoral factors too should all be considered by analysts and journalists when trying to make sense of unwinnable conflicts being fuelled.

With regards to the ongoing Israeli military campaign in Gaza, the point of Benjamin Netanyahu’s supposed personal and political interests in the perpetuation of the military occupation has been raised by several analysts and journalists. Marc Champion, for example, writing for Bloomberg, highlighted the fact that the Israeli Prime Minister is currently “fighting corruption charges in court” (it being implicit that it is of course usually harder to investigate and to condemn incumbent national leaders). Netanyahu, in addition, will “face a political reckoning over Oct. 7’s security failures as soon as the war in Gaza ends.”

Thus, writes Champion, “under cover of the country’s blinding rage and deep yearning for long-term security, Netanyahu is fighting to secure his own political survival.” Champion and other analysts may or may not be spot on, with regards to Netanyahu’s motivations and calculations. The point is that personal, private and business interests (sometimes even involving shady deals) may indeed shape, to some degree, foreign policy decisions. And the issue is more outstanding in Ukraine than perhaps anywhere else.

By October 2023, the European Union (EU) and the United States had made over $160 billion (and counting) in commitments to Ukraine (including tens of billions in arms – many of which ended up in black markets, by the way). One may recall that already in 2021 Amos Hochstein was especially appointed by US President Joe Biden as the US Senior Advisor for Energy Security, with a focus, back then, on reducing the “risks” Nord Stream 2 posed, from an American perspective. Today, the Russian-German Nord Stream 2 pipeline is gone (have been criminally exploded as it was), and Hochstein, when not busy threatening Lebanon with war, (“learn from Gaza”) is currently preoccupied with the seemingly lost cause of Saudi-Israel normalization. Volumes could be written on those issues, but let us focus here on Eastern Europe.

Back in 2021, I commented on how American geopolitical and geo-economic interests, pertaining to selling its own (more expensive) liquefied natural gas to Europe, were inextricably linked with private interests, which included corruption scandals involving Biden’s own family and his aforementioned  protégé Hochstein – who is a former member of Naftogaz’ supervisory board, this being the largest national oil and gas company in Ukraine, also involved in a number of scandals.

I’ve also written on the shady deals involving Ukrainian investment company Dragon Capital and the American multinational investment company BlackRock, as well as the evidence implicating the Democrat Party and the Bidens.  In many of these episodes, Hunter Biden, the incumbent president’s son plays a role: his sexual scandals, the once ridiculed biolabs allegations, and many other accusations once deemed as mere “conspiracy theories” gained traction within the US media, were weaponized by the Republicans, and keep haunting the current American presidency to this day.

As I wrote before, in August 2021, a Ukrainian Parliament’ member denounced a corruption ring within the aforementioned Naftogaz: interestingly, his testimony included alleged leaked audio records of then US Vice President Biden offering the then Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko a billion dollars as part of a secret deal to dismiss the former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was investigating the business activities of Biden’s son in the country.

Considering all that, it would not be too far-fetched at all to apply to the Biden’s administration, the same reasoning Marc Champion applied (with or without merit in this case) to Netanyahu’s one: the Bidens certainly seem to have lots of business and personal reasons to desire the perpetuation of a conflict in Ukraine, from which American arms’s manufacturers also profit.

Taking this reasoning further, this “personal” angle becomes even more evident when it comes to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. We know that already in June 2022, Ukrainian Army Brigadier General Volodymyr Karpenko admitted his nation had lost almost 50% of all weapons and equipment it received, and we know much of it has been smuggled to criminal and terrorist groups, Ukraine being “a longtime hub of arms trafficking”, as  John Hudson, writing for the Washington Post, once described it.

Ukraine is also an import transit destination for drugs such as heroin. It has the third highest criminality score of 33 countries in Europe. In today’s world, illicit trade plays of course a major role in the financing of terrorist and extremist networks globally, and far-right extremism is yet another huge problem that has been haunting the country since at least 2014. Such forces have certainly been a force to be reckoned with: on May 27, 2019, former neo-Fascist Dmytro Yarosh, then adviser to Valerii Zaluzhny, former Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, said that President Zelensky could “lose his life” and end up “hanging on a tree on Khreshchatyk” if he ever “betrayed” Ukrainian ultra-nationalists by negotiating an end to the civil war in Donbass.

Zelensky does have his personal motivations, including concerns about his own physical safety, for keeping the conflict with Russia going indefinitely. According to Seymour Hersh (Pulitzer winner winner) CIA sources, European leaders last year (from Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and the Czech Republic) were pressuring the Ukrainian leader “to find a way to end the war”, and they had “made it clear that ‘Zelensky can keep what he’s got – a villa in Italy and interests in offshore bank accounts – ‘if he works up a peace deal even if he’s got to be paid off, if it’s the only way to get a deal’.”

Taking all that into consideration, it is not far-fetched at all to describe the current aid Washington sends to Kyiv as being in part a major corruption scam that has a lot to do with leaders across the Atlantic trying to protect themselves and to secure their own private interests. This is not to deny of course the role American geopolitical interests (pertaining to NATO expansion) also played in the greater scheme of things. The point is that personal and electoral factors too should all be considered by analysts and journalists when trying to make sense of unwinnable conflicts being fuelled.

Uriel Araujo is a Ph.D. scholar and a researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Voice of East.

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