Where has Ukraine aid gone? ‘Russians simply walked in’

FPI / May 15, 2024

Funds intended to build fortifications for the defense of Ukraine's northern border were diverted to fake companies, according to the Mezha Anti-Corruption Center.

In a report in Pravda, Martyna Bohuslavets, who heads the center, asked: "Where are the fortifications?"

Millions of dollars that were intended for the construction of fortifications in the Kharkiv region were instead "transferred to Kharkiv OVA (Ukrainian Kharkiv Regional Military Administration) to front companies of avatars," Bohuslavets said.

The shocking revelation comes as the BBC reported that a regional Ukrainian commander in Kharkiv has said that the first line of defense was missing in a massive "betrayal" in the northern region of the country.

Denys Yaroslavskyi, a commander in the region in charge of the Ukrainian Special Reconnaissance Unit, told the BBC, “There was no first line of defense. We saw it. The Russians just walked in. They just walked in, without any mined fields."

Yaroslavskyi told the BBC that officials in Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky's regime claimed to have built up the mines as the first line of defense at a huge cost. He told reporters, “Either it was an act of negligence, or corruption. It wasn’t a failure. It was a betrayal." He then added, “When we were fighting back for this territory in 2022, we lost thousands of people. We risked our lives. And now because someone didn’t build fortifications, we’re losing people again."

In March, the nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) said there was a distinct lack of oversight on the funds going to Ukraine. GAO found in its report that the U.S. Department of Defense is lacking in its ability to provide oversight on the resources being sent to Ukraine.

"DOD does not have quality data to track delivery of defense articles to Ukraine. DOD guidance on PDA does not clearly define at what point in the delivery process defense articles should be recorded as delivered or provide clear instructions for how DOD service branches are to confirm delivery," the GAO's report said, adding that full documentation of the funding being sent to the military effort in Ukraine has been lacking.

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