Yurii Nikolov: Zelenskyy must find strength to hire professionals instead of loyal PR experts
Investigative journalist Yurii Nikolov explains what stands behind the scandalous Mindich and Halushchenko tapes, the influence of Yermak, and how NABU has, for the first time, reached the top levels of government.
Hello everyone, this is Censor.NET, I’m Maryna Danyliuk-Yarmolayeva. We continue analysing the scandalous Mindich, Chernyshov and other tapes involving the figures who siphoned money from the energy sector through the back office of Andrii Derkach — a traitor officially recognised years ago as a long-standing Russian agent. Today we decided to speak with Yurii Nikolov, an investigative journalist and editor of Nashi Hroshi, a person who has written extensively about corruption and embezzlement in the energy sector — to get a bit of moral satisfaction and delve deeper into the details of this corruption case.
So, Yurii, welcome to our programme.
Hello, Maryna, hello, Censor, glad to be here.
Let me start by asking: as someone who has written a great deal about corruption in the energy sector, how does it feel to watch and listen to all these tapes now? And perhaps you even feel like saying, "I told you so"?
I do, you wouldn’t believe it. I’m really holding myself back from spreading that kind of toxic "I told you so" energy – "I warned you all, I told you this was coming" – so I don’t turn into that granny by the entrance who’s always ranting. But it’s the plain truth. We did warn everyone. Together with the Anti-Corruption Action Center, we spent years investigating these stories. We wrote about Halushchenko being compromised, about Derkach’s office, about Mindich and all the other disgraced top-tier characters in this story, and we backed it all up with facts, not just for a year or two. And the only thing that’s stopping me from fully turning into that grumpy old man going "See? I told you" is one fact: as far as I remember, for the first time since it was created in 2015, NABU has climbed this deep into the underpants of the head of state. And that’s great. This is finally what they were created for – to go after top-level corruption, not some district judges or deputy department heads. The detectives made that move. It cost them nerves – all the crises NABU went through in recent years, the changes in leadership and so on, and SAPO, the specialised anti-corruption prosecutor’s office, too. But as of today I can say: they’re beauties, they’ve done something that has never happened before in Ukraine’s history. They’ve managed to get that far into the president’s entourage. And, without giving away too many spoilers, this is not the end – it won’t stop with Mindich. There are other figures in the President’s Office with a five-letter surname. Everything will come out. So right now we’re getting a huge chance to reboot the country. Thank God the successive Maidans we went through, including this war, will lead to a result that simply makes us better. That’s the positive side of this story.
By the way, about that five-letter surname. Yesterday we did a livestream summarising the NABU tapes published on YouTube. Viewers keep asking why Yermak’s name hasn’t appeared in those recordings yet.
It’s purely procedural. Just the investigators doing the job the way it must be done. Look, it always frustrates me when cases fall apart in court because of procedural errors. Nobody wants some crook to slip away or turn a years-long investigation into a never-ending soap opera. Better to take the time and build an airtight case. And that five-letter surname — he clearly understands what smell is coming his way. He’s already spreading stories that some "namesake" was detained, allegedly like "my brother," who was supposedly taking bribes for appointments in the President’s Office. I saw the photo of that ridiculous "detention." It looked staged: one police officer detains him, someone conveniently takes a dramatic front-angle photo, and meanwhile the guy’s driver is just calmly sitting behind the wheel, not even reacting. It looks like theatre. Beyond PR manipulation, it means something bigger: Yermak understands perfectly well what’s happening. And so do we. Let’s just wait.
Based on the recordings we’ve already heard, the ones the whole internet is turning into memes, do you have an idea who actually organised this entire energy-sector scheme? Because, in my simple understanding, Chernyshov clearly didn’t have the brains to orchestrate something of that scale, and Mindich is questionable too. So were these two running it, or was someone else directing the process?
As for Chernyshov, I’m absolutely convinced this is far beyond his level. He wasn’t even handling those financial flows. What he’s accused of now is petty stuff — sending his driver to collect cash, building himself little houses — nothing of the scale we’re discussing. The organisation of this enormous scheme wasn’t rocket science. It existed long before them. The task was simply to take it over. No need to reinvent the wheel: a 15% kickback "toll gate" on contracts had been invented long ago. All they had to do was use it. And the person who actually controlled this scheme was Halushchenko. He was the one executing it with his own hands — Halushchenko and the lower-level people under him. Halushchenko is extremely experienced; Derkach brought him into Energoatom back in the Yanukovych era. That’s what institutional memory looks like: you hire someone who basically operates a money-printing machine. He knows everything and understands everything — you just say, "Now work for me." And he’ll generate whatever percentage you want. 15%? Sure. 10%? Sure. 20%? Why not. Of course, in some Energoatom tenders we’ve seen much higher kickbacks than 15%, but we should understand that NABU has published only what it can actually prove in court. A lot will inevitably remain beyond the scope of procedural evidence. As for who sits above all this – it’s a clear vertical. I really like the example from The Godfather: the mafia boss meets his consigliere and gives him instructions, and then the consigliere meets with the heads of his gangs. The boss doesn’t personally deal with every foot soldier. So if some low-level thug is caught, he can’t directly testify against the top boss. It’s the same here. On the tapes we hear Mindich talking to his consiglieri – Halushchenko, Tenor, Basov, Roshyk. By law, NABU has no right to investigate the president. Just like the FBI has no right to investigate a sitting president. Diplomatic immunity.
So for now there’s no point obsessing over whether there will be procedural moves against the very top leadership. There simply can’t be. That’s how the system is built, and there’s a certain logic to it. Fine – we’ll wait for the next president. If and when we win the war, or at least reach some kind of truce, there’ll be a sequel. But right now, judging by the commotion already going on on Bankova, the message is clear: Mindich, Yermak – hi there.
By the way, what do you make of Zelenskyy’s address? It came after the recording was read out in court – the one that strongly suggests the president knew full well about this scheme and was talking to its participants. I’ll quote it: there was a line where Mindich advises Halushchenko what to say to the president – "Yes, I’ll do what you need, the way you need it, I’m yours." And after that we saw Zelenskyy’s evening video where he said: "That’s it, I’m imposing sanctions, you can’t steal from the energy sector during wartime." What good are sanctions now if Mindich has already fled?
Sanctions are a worthless tool; they don’t change anything. Zelenskyy’s words, to be honest, now feel like they don’t really matter either, because his political future is already decided. He has no chance of retaining power in elections, if and when they take place. Before this there were still some doubts – maybe he could somehow hold on – but now it’s clear he can’t. The real question now is whether he can keep his legitimacy as Commander-in-Chief in the eyes of the West. That’s what really matters for us. And here I have to say: Zelenskyy has chosen the right direction for his rhetoric. He didn’t go for the stupid denial option – "I don’t know anything, it’s all some scumbags somewhere out there" – and he didn’t claim there were no scumbags at all and order the SBU to arrest everyone in NABU and SAPO. Thank God he didn’t take that route. The first articles in Western media about this – and I really want everyone to understand this – frame it as a story about fighting corruption, not just "corruption in Ukraine". The West has long understood that Ukraine is a deeply corrupt country; we lived under Russia for decades, of course there are plenty of problems. But now we’re finally showing the world a fight against corruption. We’re showing that the patient wants to get off the drip. And that’s exactly how Bloomberg and the Financial Times are writing about it. The first pieces coming out now are, in that sense, positive for us. And Zelenskyy is not getting in the way of this. Yes, of course, he can drag his feet, he can fantasise about his legacy – "me, my greatness, my country" and all that. He can. But does that really matter? For me, that’s a secondary issue. If he is to build any kind of legacy or reputation for himself, it will only be by making the right moves now, in this incredibly difficult situation.
But look: the whole world has now learned that, in the fourth year of full-scale war, that very "two" from the energy sector went to Moscow. As you yourself joked, the "two " sent to Moscow", most likely to fund the needs of today’s senator, state traitor and collaborator Andrii Derkach. Do you have a sense of what consequences this will have for our energy system, for investment in it, and for us getting protection for our energy infrastructure – for nuclear power plants, for example?
Look, in reality people in Europe and America had long suspected all this – about Derkach, about corruption in Ukraine, about Mindich and all the other toxic stories. They saw it in analytical notes, intelligence briefs, diplomatic cables; they had a rough idea of how things worked here.
So for them the real news is what is happening now. And what is happening now is that these schemes are being exposed and investigated, with arrests, suspicions, tapes. Now politicians in Germany, France, and, say, Denmark or Norway can tell their voters: "Yes, money was being stolen in Ukraine – our money. But look, we are helping to investigate it, to lock up these turncoats and stop them stealing our money." That’s the positive part of this story.
By the way, can you decode what exactly this "two" that sent to Moscow" is? Our viewers were also asking what that might mean.
No, honestly, I have to admit I’m not an insider in this story – I’m not part of any of these fun little circles. I, like you, am learning about all this after the fact. I really don’t want anyone now starting to accuse NABU of leaking something, hiding something, or spinning conspiracy theories. Because if we go by the slang I know from these lovely people, "two" here means two million dollars. Did it go to Moscow? Yes, to Moscow. Is that depressing? Well, yeah. But I’ve made a decision for myself in this story – and I urge everyone else to do the same: be patient. First, NABU hasn’t even published all the tapes yet. They’ll be releasing them in batches; we’ll see more seasons of this series. And in the very first episode NABU said that, apart from the energy sector, there were also embezzlement schemes in defence procurement. Umerov, hi there!
Right, what do you mean "hi there"? Umerov isn’t showing any signs of life. By the way, I even tried calling him…
Well, that’s fine. Apart from Umerov himself, who has now gone off somewhere, he had a whole bunch of people he planted in the Defence Procurement Agency, in the State Operator For Non-Lethal Acquisition and so on. So there are plenty of people to ask questions to. Even if he personally tries, as you put it, to lie low so that Budanov can later "bring him back", like he once did with Chernyshov, he’ll just keep quiet about it. But let’s see.The situation is so full of nuances, and so much depends on how each of the key players reacts in the moment. Who can guarantee, for example, that Umerov himself won’t decide to tell a story or two? The main thing is that NABU, for the first time in its history, has chased a case all the way up to people at this level – on such a scale and with such strong evidence.
What do you make of Umerov’s excuse that he supposedly wasn’t even acquainted with Mindich? A lot of people are now using that same line.
What does that even mean – "wasn’t really acquainted"?
What, they only spent the night together, for example.
Well, I don’t think that’s the case with Mindich. The real question is: what actions did you take, and what instructions did you give to whom?
How deep is the infiltration into the system of state power of people linked to this friend of the president, who co-owns the Kvartal 95 studio?
The influence was significant. The war itself played an important role here. It turned out that Mindich managed to convince Volodymyr Zelenskyy that no one but him could handle managing the financial flows in the energy sector and in defence procurement.
These two sectors were precisely the ones that, with the start of the war, were taken out of the open Prozorro state procurement system and moved into separate closed circuits – energy and defence procurement. And now we understand: the same kind of stories we saw with civil-defence construction, when money earmarked for protective structures under the building codes ended up in villas in Koncha-Zaspa and Kozyn, could be happening here too. The cost estimates are hidden. I just see that there is a tender for three billion hryvnias. What’s inside it? I have no idea, because it’s classified. We can only "trust" the people appointed by the president – Umerov, Zhumadilov and others he put there. So anything is possible. It’s obvious that, using his access to Zelenskyy’s ear, Mindich could at the very least have obtained a kind of indulgence – a licence, if you like – to do whatever he thought necessary. As in any situation where someone is told: "Do as you see fit." That’s exactly what Mindich had with these classified arrangements. Is that good? Well, we can all see the result. We look at how our drone strikes are going, our missiles, all of it, and with the very limited resources of our state budget we’re getting a volume of missiles, drones and everything else that is clearly smaller than what we could have had under honest competition – and instead we’re getting what Mindich was willing to order, with some kind of wildly inflated price tag, excuse me. So where are our missiles?
They’re flying somewhere. Which brings us to another question: how do we now build a new system? While we’re still unpacking the Mindich and Chernyshov tapes, I saw the news that they’re now trying to appoint as head of the gas transmission system operator a person from the same energy market, tied into all these stories with Halushchenko and Mindich. This wonderful lady’s name is Oksana Kryvenko.
Yes, she already got herself tainted in the energy sector back under Poroshenko – selling regulatory services to oligarchs, setting the "right" tariffs, offering them her services. Look, there’s no such thing as "Mindich’s people" separately. And how do Yermak’s people differ from them? How, exactly? Only in that nobody has grabbed Yermak by the ass yet?
They just haven’t put out the Yermak tapes yet, have they?
Exactly, and that’s it. That’s the only difference. Once those come out, we’ll be talking about "Yermak’s people" in exactly the same way. And then it will turn out that it’s not just Mindich’s people who need to be fired and voted out, but Yermak’s people too. And in the end, if you put it all together, it will become obvious that we’re really talking about Zelenskyy’s people. And that raises the question: what do we do with all of them? To me, this is a very existential story. There has never been anything like this in Ukraine’s history. Ukraine, on the verge of military defeat, on the verge of the occupation of Kyiv and everything we see around us, is confronted with an existential challenge: to replace the country’s top management made up of ordinary crooks with genuine professionals. We’ve never faced that before. I sincerely hope – with no irony or sarcasm here – I sincerely hope that Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself will make that choice. De jure, during wartime we can’t do anything about his position. It is very important that the current, legitimately elected Commander-in-Chief, while continuing to hold this office and lead the country, find within himself the strength to change the country’s whole modus vivendi. If he can do that, our task will genuinely become easier. Hiring professionals instead of loyal PR-asses – and I do spell that with a hyphen – hiring professionals would help all of us a great deal. And by professionals I mean people who are politically independent, whose decisions don’t depend on whether they get an envelope, or a pat on the head from the president, or something like that. So yes, I truly hope for that ideal scenario; you can call me an idealist five or six times over, but that would make life much easier for all of us. But is it realistic? Honestly, I have no way of predicting what’s going on in Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s head.
Well yes, it really is idealistic, because literally a couple of days before the first batch of these tapes appeared, we saw Zelenskyy go public, giving interviews to foreign outlets and, in English, saying that Kudrytskyi was the biggest corrupt figure in the energy sector. We all heard that. And then it turned out that he was not, in fact, the biggest, given what the president’s friends were doing right under his nose. It looked pretty ugly. They smeared the man, and now I’m sure Mr Kudrytskyi is feeling a strong urge for payback.
We’ll see how it plays out, because unfortunately that story has already moved into the legal realm; they’ve already slapped Kudrytskyi with formal charges. Now we’ll have to watch how law enforcement crawls back out of that stupidity they’ve drawn up. But I still want to remain an idealist, because if you don’t hope for something better, what are you even aiming for? Where are we steering this story? Look, Maryna, you’re very cool and popular. What will you tell the people who love listening to you? Where are we supposed to go from here?
I always tell people that we have to fight, we have to fight these clowns. Because we’ve seen that Mindich can just run off to Israel with "Shugarman" without any problem. But we can’t run away to Israel, because this is our land, our homeland.
Exactly. And here we are, you and I, fighting. And look at the changes we’ve already got. If we had kept quiet all this time, would the current situation even be possible?
Absolutely not.
Right. That’s why we fight, and that’s why we have results. Right. That’s why we fight, and that’s why we’re getting results. And with my idealist’s eye on the future, I’m just throwing in one more wish here – I want that as well.I understand it may be unrealistic. But I think the ideal scenario here and now would be for Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself to pull himself together, rewire the matrix in his own head and start doing things differently. I fully understand all the arguments why this might not happen. But ideally, that’s what I’d like to see.
I actually liked the reaction from the Kvartal 95 studio after it became known, following the release of these tapes, that the person who handled Energoatom’s finances was brought in by another co-owner of Kvartal 95, Serhii Shefir – let me remind you, the president’s former aide. Even Kvartal 95 is now saying they have nothing to do with this. Is that the first sign that Zelenskyy’s ship is starting to sink?
It’s not the first sign. Among all the whores and prostitutes clustered around Zelenskyy, they’re hardly the first. Milovanov beat them to it by a day – he was Yermak’s adviser, and before that he worked on Poroshenko’s team when he was president and sat on Energoatom’s supervisory board. People kept asking him: what exactly are you overseeing there? And as soon as things started to smell burnt, Milovanov wrote his resignation. My friends and I have been saying since the summer that Zelenskyy’s team is done. The polling started to show his ratings sliding, and it’s obvious he’s losing control of parliament. Whenever the next elections are held – the main thing is that they do happen – any political force running under Zelenskyy’s name will never again get the level of power it has now. Which means it won’t control the government. And then very different people will be in charge – and mostly, of course, people with a military background. So I think the more clear-sighted members of Zelenskyy’s team should already back in the summer have been preparing for a future that is no longer going to be languid, predictable or guaranteed. It’s just that the biggest prostitutes are only now announcing this publicly. And Kvartal is one of them.
Now, moving from prostitutes to currency, because a lot of people are wondering where those wrapped dollar bundles marked "Atlanta" and "Kansas" came from.
It’s actually a simple story. I consulted specialists on this. It just means these dollars were taken from a Ukrainian bank, most likely one of those that is an official importer of physical dollar cash. A number of banks have the right to import cash from there, and to be honest I don’t particularly care which specific bank turns out to have been the importer. What matters is that the state now controls more than 50% of the banking sector. That’s the key point here.
Mindich himself has been linked to Sense Bank. So when people close to power control half of the banking system – in fact about 60% – they can do practically anything. That’s why, in my view, the specific bank is not the main issue. The key fact is that the suspects in this corruption case had dollar bundles seized from them still in the original wrapping, before they were even repackaged by Ukrainian banks. In other words, they had direct access to the very bank that imports cash into the country.
But does that amount to evidence of state treason? My sources say there is no such information at this stage. The conspiracy theory that someone literally stole money "straight from America" in order to launder it is a bit overblown. New details may still emerge, and then we’ll discuss them. In reality, cash imports work the same way in every country: there are authorised banks that import dollars into their jurisdiction – to Bulgaria, Moldova, Poland. They sign contracts with the Federal Reserve. So this may be an entirely legal case. What it does tell us, though, is that the bundles were seized before they were repackaged, straight from the bank. Which means we’re dealing with some real top dogs.
You wrote that this should have been picked up by the financial monitoring service. But we basically understand that our financial monitoring is now filled with "someone’s people" as well. Can you explain whose people have captured a structure like the financial monitoring service?
Look, Ukraine has an institution called the State Financial Monitoring Service. It’s a state committee, an independent body on paper, where the leadership is de jure appointed by the government, but in practice appointed by the President’s Office. For the past year it has been headed by one Mr Filip Pronin. Pronin is a former classmate of the minister for regional development, Oleksii Kuleba. Kuleba, until very recently, was Yermak’s deputy. It was precisely the Poltava Regional State Administration he headed that, according to MP Yaroslav Zhelezniak, got mired in a major corruption scandal involving the embezzlement of hundreds of millions of hryvnias in fortification construction. And with that background, Pronin is now heading the State Financial Monitoring Service. And, as NABU sources say, this service then refuses to give detectives information about money transfers made by Firepoint, a company suspected of being linked to Mindich. In other words, birds of a feather flock together.
They’ve hermetically sealed the system, and a Ukrainian institution that’s supposed to look after the public interest is in fact looking after the private interests of a particular company. What do you even call that? Under-arrested? Someone they simply didn’t manage to lock up in time? So my sincere advice – which I’m always ready to repeat publicly to Pronin and his colleagues – is this: just do your job. If you don’t know what to do, follow the law. Don’t twist, don’t wriggle, don’t overcomplicate things for yourself.
Our colleagues have done an investigation looking at who exactly Mr Pronin has hired there. For example, one "specialist in international assets" is a person who previously worked as a cashier at McDonald’s. What exactly is he supposed to be investigating?
No, no, no. Look, the people they appoint to leadership positions are usually just those who need to be paid a good salary – my team, the ones who will, if needed, backstop things with their signature. The actual specialists down below usually stay in place, unless there’s a total purge of the agency. So there is only one thing we need from Pronin: unblock what’s been blocked. "Sign here, sign there" – and the fortifications case will move forward. Otherwise he’ll end up looking just as pale as Mindich does now, and others will follow. Why does he need that? He should start cooperating. That’s what we need right now.
Let me ask you this. You and I are not glamorous people; judging by our interiors, we live in simple flats. Why did Mindich, Chernyshov and two other unnamed individuals need four very expensive houses in Kozyn, whose construction they were paying for with kickbacks from these energy-sector schemes? And what’s crucial here – as you yourself said, these schemes have always existed – is that now they are happening while we’re under missile attacks on our energy system, with the Russian Federation deliberately taking out exactly the substations that feed our nuclear power plants, which were supposed to be protected by the very people featured on these tapes. Why did they need four houses? Who was supposed to live there?
Here I can only repeat the hypotheses that have already been voiced, until NABU officially publishes what it has. These are just hypotheses. One is that the houses were for Chernyshov, Mindich, Yermak and Zelenskyy. It makes sense: these are the surnames that have monopolised the flows in this country. Maybe it’s a case of childhood deprivation and a man wanting to compensate once he’s finally made it to the trough.
But these are different people. A more plausible version seems to be about the "dynasty of Kvartal" – a demonstration that "we’re a crew". We’re the lads. Yes, we’re the lads, we live together, hang out together, party together and so on. It’s a way of showing the world that we’re such cool guys, rather than just compensating for some poor childhood.
Is there any fundamental difference between this and Yanukovych’s Mezhyhirya, which blew up as a scandal in 2014 after he fled?
You know, there is. When I was talking about compensating for a poor childhood, Mezhyhirya is exactly what I had in mind – that was my view of Yanukovych. The man grew up in Soviet times, did a stint in prison, so when he finally got his hands on serious money, he could indulge in that gaudy, ostentatious luxury.
What’s more, these houses, which are still under construction, are smaller than Mezhyhirya. Sure, they’ve got pools and all that, but Mezhyhirya is, if I’m not mistaken, 30 hectares built up from top to bottom. Here we’re talking about four houses. Yes, huge ones – each of them is about twenty times the size of my flat on the outskirts of Kyiv – but still, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not Mezhyhirya.
Here I rather see signs that the boys wanted to show: "We’re a gang."
Will Mindichgate now be used to push Ukraine towards capitulation?
I don’t know. Trump has taught us that there is no point trying to predict what’s going on in his head. He mouths off one thing, does another, and promises a third. So I honestly don’t know what the Americans will decide to leverage now. The United States is an absolutely unpredictable actor at the moment. The only thing you can be sure of – and all my forecasts about the war are based on this – is that America will not go to war with Russia or with China.
In other words, America is fully aware of its own vulnerability right now. It will do everything to avoid an escalation big enough for American citizens to get hurt. That’s the basic story. And from that you can derive all the other scenarios. What they’ll do in Zelenskyy’s case, honestly, I don’t know.
You can imagine a scenario where they pressure Volodymyr Zelenskyy into capitulation. You can imagine another where Trump just doesn’t give a damn about the whole topic and says: "You deal with it yourselves." Because, fundamentally, why should he care? Right now he owes us nothing at all. The only thing he is doing is selling weapons to the Europeans for them to pass on to us. He’s not giving us money, he’s not helping us directly; he’s just selling some aid for Ukraine to Europe. Trump can "love" anything and anyone if it suits him.
And given his long-standing reputation, he’s a wheeler-dealer who has faced dozens of corruption-related court cases. And what did that "corruption" look like? He would take loan money from banks, use it to grow his businesses, and then dump the banks and never pay the money back. A classic con artist.
Friends, I have no idea what Trump will do, but one thing is certain: he will definitely not be punching Putin.
And finally, let’s sum up what lessons Ukrainian society should take from all this. Because I’ve already drawn one lesson for myself: supporting NABU and SAPO in the summer, with all their flaws and imperfections, was worth it.
Yes, that’s true. Ukrainians made a strategically correct choice then. But there’s a broader lesson in this whole story. For me, the best sanctions are the ones you impose with your own hands. Do your part to fight off the enemy. NABU is doing its part now: they are taking out the enemy on the corruption front. Good for them. Unfortunately, that enemy is exactly the one who screwed up the whole story with those Mindich schemes. It turned out we let him handle missile procurement, and then things got "lost" somewhere, or "didn’t work out", or "couldn’t be done", and so on. So we shouldn’t pin our hopes on some external narratives or angles – we have to defend our own lives ourselves. That’s the main lesson.
This was me, Maryna Danyliuk-Yarmolaieva, and Yurii Nikolov. We’ve tried to get to the bottom of these Mindich tapes, but I don’t think this will be our last conversation. For now we’ll leave it with an ellipsis, listen to the new tapes when they come out, see which new names appear there, and be sure to meet again in a new programme, in a new interview.
Thank you, Yurii. Take care, all our viewers.
