'Fair Mobilization' and Corruption

Commentary on analysis by Ukrainian journalists Kurtev and Butusov. Corruption creating problems protecting the power grid.

Yesterday, Yury Romanenko released a discussion with Viktor Kurtev on his youtube channel. I’ve discussed Romanenko on here before. Essentially, he is a Russian-speaker with various kooky schemes about how Ukraine needs to become a new pole of attraction for the ‘Russian world’, thereby replacing evil Moscow. He often invites (or at least used to) Arestovich on his show, and advocates a ‘wise nationalism’ instead of the ‘stupid cultural nationalism’ of the usual Ukrainian patriot crowd.

Anyway, his interview with Kurtev was all about energy. It’s a classic topic in Ukraine, one recently brought into focus by Russian attacks that destroyed 80% of Ukraine’s energy capacity according to prime minister Shmyhal.

I won’t get into Kurtev’s various predictions about Ukraine’s energy future. The numbers make the head spin and since everyone seems to have a different prediction, it comes off as overly speculative. What matters is that the country has grim prospects on that front.

What’s more interesting is Kurtev’s explanation of how this situation came into being. Kurtev published an article in late 2023 called ‘Concrete on Blood’. Aside from the content of the article, it is funny to note that it is a reference to the very popular Russian TV show ‘Word of a Boy - Blood on the Pavement’, which, to the chagrin of Ukrainian patriots, was also the most watched TV show in Ukraine last year.

According to Kurtev in his interview and article, the Ukrainian government has been engaging in some very self-destructive corruption when it comes to protecting its electro-energetic system. He even says that he sometimes suspects that “0.2% of those involved in this are Russian agents”.

His main problem is that Ukraine’s government has relied on huge contracts to private constructors to put up a bunch of concrete over electric power plants. These grandiose plans have been called ‘turtles’. However, they cost a huge amount of money and are unable to protect the plants from Russian missile attacks.

Interestingly, one of the key figures in this soon-to-unfold corruption scandal is Mustafa Naiem, the guy who started maidan with a fateful facebook post back in 2013. He has cycled through a wide variety of profitable government posts since 2014, all with dubious links to his original journalistic profession. For the past couple years he has occupied crucial posts in the ministry of infrastructure, and has been at the forefront of the concrete campaign.

Naiem receiving another award, doubtless for his sterling work in the struggle against corruption, about which he never shut up

Kurtev bemoans how hundreds of millions of US dollars are being wasted on useless concrete constructions, and argues that there is continuity between these endeavours and Zelensky’s ‘big build’ campaign of the pre-2022 years, which was often called ‘the big steal’, because of the huge corruption rent that government-sheltered contractors earned.

Kurtev was particularly indignant that this waste of resources takes away concrete from a more important front - the literal frontline, where Ukraine is in desperate need of concrete bunkers and trench fortifications.

This leads smoothly onto our second expert, Yuri Butusov, who never shuts up about the frontline’s concrete deficits. Butusov comes from a different camp to Romanenko and Kurtev. Butusov is the premiere Poroshenkite war journalist, and manager of the fittingly named InfoNapalm. He spends much of his time at the front with soldiers, sometimes filming himself with weapons in hand. He even uploaded a video of him personally shelling the enemy with artillery in 2021 (on ‘Holodomor day’), while the Minsk agreements were still in play as well, which even led to a criminal investigation by the Ukrainian government into the incident.