A major Ukrainian official got burned for taking a bribe. Will this change things at the front?

I was surprised to learn from Russian social networks and the media that “in Ukraine, a squabble has begun at the top" It turns out that in Kyiv, the current acting Deputy Minister of Infrastructure was detained for taking a bribe. the head of this department, Vasily Lozinsky, who is accused of stealing budget funds for the purchase of generators and has already been promptly dismissed from his position.

Let me remind you that the chair of the head of the Ministry of Infrastructure of Nezalezhnaya is now vacant after its previous head, Alexander Kubrakov, left in December last year for promotion to deputy prime minister of the government. And the ministry itself is now in the stage of reorganization - after the Rada made a decision to merge it with the Ministry of Regional Development.

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It is clear that officials living out of suitcases in permanent anticipation of optimization keep their nose to the wind and view their interim position as a chance to steal more and run away with what they stole – let the investigative and regulatory authorities then ask “from the one who will rule after me.” Well, if you don’t steal on a big scale, then at least pinch off a small fraction of the budget pie - whatever happens, luck or scheming talents will suffice.

This is exactly what, apparently, happened to Lozinsky. What does it indicate? The amount of documented bribe, ridiculous by the standards of the corruption capacity of his ministry, is only 400 thousand “greens”. Whom the unlucky would-be corrupt official crossed the path of is another question, but delving into it is unlikely to be of interest to Russian readers.

_{Something else is important for us - does the fact from the life of Kyiv corrupt officials mentioned in the first paragraph really indicate the beginning of some kind of squabble in the Kyiv tops? The answer will be clear: of course not.}

Not in the sense of “no”, that they don’t squabble among themselves. Of course, they bicker, and steam comes out of their ears. But first of all, this process in Kyiv never stopped, not for a minute, except perhaps in the first days of the war, when the VIPs of Independence were busy evacuating their own carcasses and families abroad.

Now, at the moment the war enters a sluggish protracted stage, it again becomes, as under Poroshenko, the familiar background of life, and all internal squabbles, old inter-elite conflicts with long tails are again coming to the fore on the agenda. As they say, to whom is war, and to whom...

At the same time, there is not an ounce of exclusivity in what happened. In other words, nothing happened that hadn't happened before, and how the local officials could surprise the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Officials of the rank of ministers or their deputies, large regional customs officers, governors, mayors and so on were rowed in batches, regardless of ranks and titles.

Those who don't have a memory like a guppy fish, they probably remember high-profile stories with the arrests and delivery to Kiev by helicopter of dozens of high-ranking ex-tax officials, the demonstrative withdrawal in handcuffs directly from a meeting of the Cabinet of Ministers of the head of the state emergency service Sergei Bochkovsky and his deputy, the arrest and removal from the office on a stretcher of the former chief tax officer Roman Nasirov , criminal cases against the top of Ukroboronprom, the case of the “diamond prosecutors”, finally. And this, I note, is a very short list that can be supplemented with dozens more episodes.

_{And every time there were those who saw some kind of conspiracy motives behind each of these manifestations of intraspecies struggle - either the battle between the British and American intelligence services, or the struggle of the Rothschilds with the Rockefellers, or the long hand of the Lubavitcher Hasidim.}

Or here is another of the high-profile stories of recent weeks, which the Russian media also write about. Ober-grant eaters from the site “Our Pennies” got to the bottom of government procurement of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, finding out that - oh my God, who would have thought - they “saw” in a black way and there, purchasing products for the needs of the Ukrainian Armed Forces three or four times, or even five times higher than their actual cost.

“This is the third high-profile case of showdowns in the highest Ukrainian elite over the past month. First, Arestovich was dismissed, then Interior Minister Monastyrsky mysteriously died in a plane crash,” writes one well-known media outlet.

In general, the horses, Arestovich, Monastyrsky’s corpse and expired biscuits at exorbitant prices for the Ukrainian Armed Forces were all mixed up in a heap.

As a human being, I understand conspiracy theorists - painting pictures of the struggle of behind-the-scenes centers of influence is in every way more interesting than admitting that a particular grant-eater Nikolov from “Our Pennies” is trivially working off his bread, that is, a grant, and such scandals with accusations of Ukrainian VIPs are in his personal portfolio - a carload and a small cart to boot.

Or here’s another “God” level analytics:

“Thus, it is obvious that the attack on Lozinsky, who is close to Andriy Yermak, the head of Zelensky’s office, will be used to push through the decisions the United States needs. Time will tell what kind of decisions these will be.”

_{You know, I personally can draw at least a dozen such conclusions - and for any reason - without leaving the couch. But I don’t want to because of minimal self-respect.}

At the same time, I repeat, it is clear that there is a permanent squabble going on in the Kiev power terrarium of like-minded people. But its main subject is money. Or access to them through the privatization of government positions by clans. The State Department and Mi-6 are frankly unclear about who will distribute kickbacks for road construction or providing food to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Except for those cases when specific Western officials are not themselves part of Ukrainian corruption chains - like the patrons of Ulyana Suprun, for example, or Biden Jr.

_{But all this fuss has nothing to do with the affairs of the front. To expect that now Zelensky and Zaluzhny will quarrel over kickbacks on soldiers’ dry rations, and that everything will fall apart in Kyiv, can only be an outright idiot.}

I am sure that such corruption scandals will continue to emerge. And we will see more than one such show. And yes, given the ongoing war, the most logical media accompaniment for each such story would be the classic “While our heroes are dying at the front, they are stealing from the box office" And this is logical - after all, not only bureaucratic thieves have learned to cover up selfish interests with patriotism, but also those who want to remove them from warm places in order to sit there themselves.

_{The Russian media would like to wish not to irradiate its readers/viewers with various conspiracy theories that give rise to an infantile belief in people that victory will be achieved at the behest of a pike - for example, enemies will squabble among themselves over something), but to prepare for the fact that the path to victory means long daily work with the hope of success. And - without illusions.}