The Ukraine-Russia-USA Conflict, Part 10: Ihor Kolomoyskiy, the Oligarch Behind Zelenskiy and the Neonazi Batallions
After examing the likely relation between Zelenskiy and the Ukrainian violent far right nationalists, part 10 will investigate how both of these parties were made by the Ukrainian oligarch, former provincial governor and influential background figure Ihor Kolomoyskiy who also parachuted Joe Biden’s son Hunter into the directorate of the Ukrainian gas firm Burisma. I will furthermore look into the appearance of both Zelenskiy and Kolomoisky in the tax evasion related Pandorra Papers.
The core of this article is encapsulated in this single tweet:
For the respective details, keep reading.
12.1 Meet the Ukrainian Oligarchy
Ukraine is as much a ‘democracy’ as the USA is— which is to say that they are both oligarchies:
The famous Gilens & Page 2014 study from Princeton confirms this in somewhat fancier terms:
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
Or as this Tweeter put it:
12.1.1 Oligarch Petro Poroshenko
As far as the Ukrainian oligarchy is concerned and to start with some corruption and pay-to-play-related facts about Petro Poroshenko from the following part of his Wikipedia page going back to the early 2000s:
Poroshenko served as head of the parliamentary budget committee, where he was accused of “misplacing 47 million hryvnias” (US$8.9 million).[45] As a consequence of Poroshenko’s Our Ukraine Bloc membership tax inspectors launched an attack on his business.[26] Despite great difficulties, UkrPromInvest managed to survive until Yushchenko became President of Ukraine in 2005.[26]
Poroshenko was considered a close confidant of Yushchenko, who is the godfather of Poroshenko’s daughters. Poroshenko was likely the wealthiest oligarch[46] among Yushchenko supporters, and was often named as one of the main financial backers of Our Ukraine and the Orange Revolution.[47] After Yushchenko won the presidential elections in 2004, Poroshenko was appointed Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council.[26][28]
In September 2005, highly publicized mutual allegations of corruption erupted between Poroshenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko involving the privatizations of state-owned firms.[48] Poroshenko, for example, was accused of defending the interests of Viktor Pinchuk, who had acquired state firm Nikopol Ferroalloy for $80 million, independently valued at $1 billion.[49]
In response to the allegations, Yushchenko dismissed his entire cabinet of ministers, including Poroshenko and Tymoshenko.[50] State prosecutors dismissed an abuse of power investigation against Poroshenko the following month,[51] immediately after Yushchenko dismissed Sviatoslav Piskun, General Prosecutor of Ukraine. Piskun claimed that he was sacked because he refused to institute criminal proceedings against Tymoshenko and refused to drop proceedings against Poroshenko.[52]
After the 2014 Maidan coup, the oligarch and useful tool for the West/USA Petro Poroshenko was President from 2014 to 2019. On his biography from this article:
Previously, Poroshenko had served as the head of Ukraine’s Central Bank. He played a major role in funding the CIA-backed 2004 Orange Revolution. He later served as the Foreign Minister under President Yanukovich until 2010, when he was fired for pushing for Ukraine to gain NATO membership no later than 2011.
As president, Poroshenko advocated government policies of decentralization to allow foreign corporations easier access to Ukrainian resources. Poroshenko also signed the European Union-Ukraine Association Agreement to begin the process of integrating Ukraine into the European Union.
Poroshenko pushed nationalist policies, including delegitimizing Russian as one Ukraine’s official languages. He helped to split the Orthodox Church into its own Ukrainian faction, separate from the traditional Russian Orthodox Church. And, Poroshenko led Ukraine in its first phase of the war in Donbass.
Poroshenko owns Roshen Confectionary Corporation, which earned him the nickname “Chocolate King”. He also has significant holdings in agriculture, banking, manufacturing and mass media. He is currently ranked #6 on the list of richest Ukrainians with assets of $1.6 billion.
[…]
Petro Poroshenko was, and is, a powerful tool of the Western elite establishment in their efforts to gain control of Ukraine’s banking system, political system and national resources.
Another fun fact from his Wikipedia bio that further cements his strong alliance with US interests:
On 29 May 2015, Poroshenko invited former President of Georgia and his friend Mikheil Saakashvili to help with conducting reforms in Ukraine and granted him Ukrainian citizenship.[204] The very next day after he became a citizen, on 30 May 2015, Saakashvili was appointed by the president as head (governor) of the Odessa Regional State Administration (see Governor of Odessa Oblast).
12.1.2 Oligarch Ihor Kolomoiskiy
Ihor Kolomoiskiy is the Ukrainian oligarch who allegedly stole more than $5 billion via a complex scheme and through his own Privatbank connection to the National Bank of Ukraine. Wikipedia on his Privatbank and his triple(!)-citizenship:
Kolomoyskiy is the co-founder of the PrivatBank and its informal Privat Group, respectively and in 1997 was appointed chairman of its board of directors.[1][13]
PrivatBank was the only Ukrainian lender to receive permission from the National Bank of Ukraine to open an overseas branch, and opened two branches: one branch in Latvia, which was established on 31 July 1992 and was involved in improper actions in 2014, and one branch in Cyprus, which opened in the late 1990s
[…]
Kolomoysky has a triple Ukraine-Israel-Cyprus citizenship, despite the law penalizing dual citizenship in Ukraine.[24] By way of explanation, Kolomoyskyi stated that: “The constitution prohibits double citizenship but triple citizenship is not forbidden.”[25]
The scheme by which Kolomoyskiy apparently stole billions from Ukraine in the 2010s was described in the article “Servant of the Corrupt” by Pedro Gonzalez who quotes from Andrew Cockburns 2021 book “The Spoils of War”:
Washington-Approved Oligarch
In 2014, the IMF approved emergency aid to Ukraine and injected billions into the National Bank of Ukraine — the country’s central bank — to support local commercial banks. Through a globe-spanning scheme involving PrivatBank accounts and PrivatBank Group companies and a corrupt Ukrainian court system, Kolomoisky looted billions in IMF aid. The con, as revealed in a series of court judgments, was outlined as follows by Cockburn:
Forty-two Ukrainian firms owned by fifty-four offshore entities registered in Caribbean, American, and Cypriot jurisdictions and linked to or affiliated with the Privat group of companies, took out loans from PrivatBank in Ukraine to the value of $1.8 billion. The firms then ordered goods from six foreign “supplier” companies, three of which were incorporated in the United Kingdom, two in the British Virgin Islands, one in the Caribbean statelet of St. Kitts & Nevis. Payment for the orders — $1.8 billion — was shortly afterwards prepaid into the vendors’ accounts, which were, coincidentally, in the Cyprus branch of PrivatBank. Once the money was sent, the Ukrainian importing companies arranged with PrivatBank Ukraine that their loans be guaranteed by the goods on order.
But the foreign suppliers invariably reported that they could not fulfill the order after all, thus breaking the contracts, but without any effort to return the money. Finally, the Ukrainian companies filed suit, always in the Dnipropetrovsk Economic Court, demanding that that foreign supplier return the prepayment and also that the guarantee to PrivatBank be cancelled. In forty-two out of forty-two such cases the court issued the identical judgment: the advance payment should be returned to the Ukrainian company, but the loan agreement should remain in force.
[…]
With D.C.’s help, in exchange for him backing down, Poroshenko successfully removed Kolomisky from the visa ban list, among other things. Importantly, Pyatt and Nuland looked the other way on Kolom[o]isky’s IMF scheme, even as Washington persecuted other oligarchs.
Meanwhile, at the same time that it ignored Kolomoisky’s corruption, the State Department attempted to extradite Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash for a bribery incident that allegedly took place in India. However, his real crime was holding ties to the government Nuland had a role in toppling as well as his association with deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. When Firtash appealed against his extradition, a European judge agreed and concluded that “America obviously saw Firtash as somebody who was threatening their economic interests.” Nevertheless, Washington has a long memory, and Firtash may end up standing trial in the U.S after all.
Even as he was removed from the U.S. banned list, Kolomoisky allegedly continued to embezzle and defraud PrivatBank of huge sums. Some of his schemes spilled over onto American soil.
According to the Justice Department, from approximately 2008 through 2016, Kolomoisky obtained fraudulent loans and lines of credit as part of a massive scheme totaling at least $5.5 billion, i.e. roughly equal to five percent of Ukraine’s gross domestic product at the time. In the U.S., millions of those dollars were allegedly laundered through commercial real estate purchases from Ohio to Kentucky and Texas. Furthermore, Zelensky’s benefactor allegedly purchased a dozen steel mills in small towns across America, leaving in his wake bankrupt factories, unpaid taxes, rotting buildings, and hundreds of steelworkers out of jobs.
By nationalizing PrivatBank in 2016, Ukraine effectively put the burden of a multi-billion dollar bailout on the shoulders of taxpayers.
As explained in this April 2019 Politico article, the oligarch Kolomoyskiy apparently enjoyed a brief time of popularity after “spending more than $10 million to create the “Dnipro battalion”” and after having been “[a]ppointed governor of his home state of Dnipropetrovsk in east Ukraine in March 2014”:
Ukrainians lauded Kolomoisky for standing his ground at a time when the country’s army was in tatters and its central government was weak, and for securing Ukraine’s eastern regions from further destabilization.
He scored further popularity points by entering into a public spat with Russian President Vladimir Putin, dismissing him a “schizophrenic dwarf.” Putin shot back, calling him a “unique crook” that had supposedly scammed Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich for billions of dollars.
But that popularity quickly went downhill again due to oligarchs doing what oligarchs usually do:
However, just as his position in post-revolutionary Ukraine seemed unassailable, Kolomoisky seemed to revert back to the ways of his corporate raider past in the chaotic, violent 1990s. The tycoon — who kept a live, five-meter-long shark in his office that he reportedly fed during meetings to unnerve his guests — has faced allegations of contract killings, intimidation and bribery linked to his business deals, claims he has repeatedly denied.
When Kolomoisky’s ally and chairman of Ukraine’s state-owned oil transport company, UkrTransNafta, was dismissed by Poroshenko in early 2015, the oligarch sent armed men in face masks to storm the firm’s headquarters at night.
He clashed angrily with journalists and parliamentarians that rushed to the scene, screaming that he “came to free the building from Russian saboteurs” in a rant that went viral on YouTube. After Special Forces rebuffed his violent and illegal raid, Kolomoisky was a marked man.
He was seen as directly challenging the authority of the state, and evoked fears of a weak Ukraine under Russian aggression breaking apart into fiefdoms controlled by rival oligarchs. […]
The oligarch was fired from his gubernatorial post in March 2015, and his holding in Privatbank was forcibly nationalized over a year later. The government also succeeded in getting a court in London to freeze more than $2.5 billion of his overseas assets. Fearing for his safety after his right-hand man Hennadiy Korban was arrested on charges of murder and kidnapping, the oligarch fled for Switzerland then Israel in 2016.
Kolomoisky has been abroad ever since, waging war against his arch-nemesis, President Poroshenko. Playing the righteous Trotsky to Poroshenko’s evil Stalin, he has accused the president of being “totally immoral” and a “slave to absolute power.”
His television channel even broadcast allegations that the president had killed his own brother, who died in a car accident in Moldova in 1997. Poroshenko denies the allegation. Kolomoisky also set up his own nationalist political party UKROP — its name based on a derogatory Russian name for Ukrainians — which won two seats in parliament in 2016, but went nowhere after that.
The aforementioned date of April 2019 is an interesting date since that is when the US investigations into Kolomoyskiy began and when media loyal to the US empire began reporting about Kolomoyskiy. From this April 2019 Daily Beast article (my thanks to Lowkey for that link):
Jonathan Brunson, who worked at the U.S. embassy in Kiev and was senior analyst on Ukraine for the Crisis Group, took a different view.
“I think Kolomoisky is super-dangerous,” he said. “He is probably one of the most dangerous oligarchs because he’s one of the ones who’s willing to get his hands dirty.”
Brunson pointed to Kolomoisky’s role in funding the ultra-far-right Azov battalion, a group of Ukrainian fighters alleged to have ties to American white supremacists, per RFE/RL; the State Department has called its political wing a “nationalist hate group,” and human rights workers say it may be a haven for neo-Nazis.
“He was one of the first oligarchs who began to act like a warlord,” Brunson said.
From this part of Kolomoyskiy’s wikipedia entry:
In April 2019 it was reported the FBI was investigating Kolomoisky over financial crimes involving Bogolyubov, the Krivyi Rih businessman Vadim Shulman and Mordechai “Motti” Korf of Florida along with Kolomoyski’s steel holdings in West Virginia and northern Ohio in the United States and his mining interests in Ghana and Australia.[71][72][73] Legal filings from American prosecutors in 2019 detailed how Kolomoisky used his control of Ukraine’s largest retail bank, PrivatBank, to loot staggering sums from Ukrainian depositors, and via a series of shell companies and offshore accounts whisked the money out of the country and into the U.S.[69][74]
In November 2019, the New York Times reported that Kolomoisky was behind plans to build a controversial ski resort in Svydovets, Ukraine. In the article, a professor at a local university was quoted describing Kolomoisky as “a leech who sucks our blood here and puts it in Switzerland.”[75]
On August 6, 2020, the United States Department of Justice in the Southern District of Florida (Miami) alleged that Ihor Kolomoisky, Gennadiy Boholiubov, Mordechai Korf, and Uriel Lader collectively obtained numerous properties as part of a $5.5 billion Ponzi scheme as “an international conspiracy to launder money embezzled and fraudulently obtained from PrivatBank,” which was nationalized in 2016 to prevent a collapse of Ukraine’s equivalent to the United States’ FDIC, and using PrivatBank’s “Cyprus branch… as a washing machine for the stolen loan funds.”
And from this part of his Wikipedia entry:
In 2021 the US banned him and his family from entering the country due to “significant corruption”, with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken claiming that he was “involved in corrupt acts that undermined rule of law and the Ukrainian public’s faith in their government’s democratic institutions and public processes, including using his political influence and official power for his personal benefit” and that he “poses a serious threat to the future of Ukraine.”[15]
One possible reason for why the USA finally began to look into and act against Kolomoyskiy is that they already had arrangements with then president Poroshenko and that Kolomoyskiy disrupted that with his oligarchic turf war against Poroshenko.
But there is something else that happened in April 2019 and more specifically on the 22nd: Zelenskiy won the final round of Ukrainian presidential elections against Poroshenko after also clearly leading the first round on March 31, 2019.
And it is in that year that Kolomoyskiy began to say some noteworthy things that Washington must surely have been displeased with. From the Gonzalez article:
In 2019, just after Zelensky won his election, Kolomoisky signaled that he was prepared to pour oil over troubled waters and make peace with Russia. The civil war in eastern Ukraine has so far claimed more than 14,000 lives. The oligarch said it was enough: “They’re stronger anyway. We have to improve our relations,” he said about Russia and Ukraine according to the New York Times. But he also saw an obstacle: “People want peace, a good life, they don’t want to be at war. And you [Washington] are forcing us to be at war, and not even giving us the money for it.”
Did the U.S. sanction Zelensky’s patron, the way it did Firtash, to nudge him in the right direction?
In the latter case, the U.S. threatened to arrest Firtash for bribery to pressure Yanukovych into signing a trade deal with the EU. But the deal was, in reality, a ploy to destabilize Russia’s economy.
Despite being characterized as merely “pro-Russian,” Yanukovych, as The Economist explained, preferred “to preserve the status quo and refrain from joining either camp while continuing to milk [the EU and Russia].” And so the United States squeezed his friend to encourage Yanukovych to tilt in the desired direction. “If Yanukovych were to be persuaded to change his mind, threatening to put his sponsor Dmitry Firtash behind bars was a potent lever to apply,” wrote Cockburn. “Four days later, Yanukovych signaled he was ready to sign, whereupon Washington lifted the request to shackle his billionaire ally.”
But Yanukovych changed course and accepted a counteroffer from Moscow, a moment that became the flashpoint for a color revolution. Still Cockburn: “Street protests in Kiev followed, eagerly endorsed by Nuland, who subsequently distributed cookies in gratitude to the demonstrators.”
Yanukovych fled Kiev on February 22. Four days later, Washington renewed its efforts to arrest Firtash. “They duly did. Briefly imprisoned, Firtash posted the equivalent of $174 million bail and waited for a court to rule on his appeal against extradition.”
Whether something similar happened with Zelensky’s oligarch is another good question; likely one that won’t be answered anytime soon.
But the NYT article with Kolomoyskiy’s surprising peace with Russia statements was published in November 2019, whereas the Daily Beast article about US investigations into Kolomoyskiy was published on April 8, 2019, or between the first and the second round of Ukrainian presidential elections during which Zelenskiy ran on a peace with Russia platform.
It would consequently appear that the war-happy US empire, which must have recognized Kolomoyskiy as the oligarch behind Zelenskiy, gave both of them a warning shot to drop all that “peace with Russia” nonsense by officially beginning to investigate Kolomoyskiy — investigations that could perhaps be dropped if Zelenskiy and Kolomoyskiy could be swayed in the ‘right’ pro-war direction and especially after the Ukrainains voters had naively gobbled up their pro-peace talking points.
It furthermore needs to be considered that Kolomoyskiy doing a 180° turn on his earlier hawkish position against Russia could easily have been a message to the US empire along the lines of “If you investigate me, I will block the war that you want to have.” Then maybe some compromise was reached: There would be no serious investigation or consequences, but Kolomoyskiy was banned from entering the USA so that the USA could save face and ostentatiously show to the world that it was doing something against an Ukrainian oligarch whose financial criminal enterprise may very well have branched out into the USA. So much for some respective speculation.
12.2 Kolomoyskiy Produces President Zelenskiy
During Poroshenko’s presidency, the ascendence of Kolomoyskiy/Zelenskiy began:
Poroshenko grew increasingly unpopular when the 1+1 television station owned by rival oligarch Igor Kolomoisky ran hit pieces exposing Porshenko’s offshore accounts that hid much of his wealth obtained from corrupt activities. Kolomoisky owned the television show Servant of the People, starring Volodymyr Zelensky, and he financed Zelensky’s successful presidential bid against Poroshenko in 2019.
Notably, 1+1 did not air stories about the hidden offshore accounts of Zelensky which were brimming with tens of millions of dollars in illegal loans from Kolomoisky himself. Kolomoisky is ranked as the #4 richest man in Ukraine, with known assets of $1.8 billion.
From “Servant of the Corrupt” by Pedro Gonzalez on that production:
The show literally created Zelensky’s presidential persona, effectively allowing him to build an unofficial campaign against the incumbent administration until March 2018, when a political party named after the television series was registered with the Ministry of Justice. In December 2018, Zelensky officially announced his presidential candidacy on 1+1.
Zelensky, the creation of an oligarch, campaigned for president as the character he played in a comedy series with a party named after the show to victory in 2019. During the race, Volodymyr Ariev, a political ally of incumbent President Poroshenko, posted a chart on Facebook claiming it showed how Zelensky and his television production partners were beneficiaries of a constellation of offshore firms which allegedly received millions from Kolomoisky’s PrivatBank.
The allegations were dismissed as baseless at the time, but the Pandora Papers revealed that information on several companies in the network corresponded with Ariev’s chart, the OCCRP noted.
From this April 2019 Politico article with more details:
Kolomoisky’s media outlet also provides security and logistical backup for the comedian’s campaign, and it has recently emerged that Zelenskiy’s legal counsel, Andrii Bohdan, was the oligarch’s personal lawyer. Investigative journalists have also reported that Zelenskiy traveled 14 times in the past two years to Geneva and Tel Aviv, where Kolomoisky is based in exile. Neither man could be reached for comment.
[…]
With Zelenskiy’s meteoric rise, however, Kolomoisky has the upper hand again.
This in turn explains why, instead of running for president himself like the rival oligarch Poroshenko, Kolomoyskiy was instead forced to use his seemingly progressive puppet Zelenskiy. Instead of an oligarch himself, it is now an oligarch’s puppet who played and keeps playing president while one or more Ukrainian oligarchs keep pulling the strings as usual.
On the ensuing Kolomoyskiy-Zelenskiy corruption-fest from the Gonzalez article:
Shortly after taking the reins, Zelensky and his Servant of the People party began firing, supposedly for inefficiency, Ukrainian ministers with reputations as anti-corruption reformers. Daria Kaleniuk, head of Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Center, told the Washington Post in March 2020 that the affair sent the message that Zelensky “can fire a person who takes a risk, for doing the right things, and blame this person for inefficiency.” Kiev-based reform reporter Oleg Sukhov echoed the sentiment last year, writing that “Zelensky has consistently protected corrupt officials from prosecution and killed anti-corruption reforms.” On the other hand, when faced with a petition calling for his dismissal, Zelensky refused to fire Oleh Tatarov, his deputy chief of staff, who had been charged with bribery.
The people put on the chopping block were also the ones most likely to threaten the power of oligarchs like Kolomoisky, from whom Zelensky may have learned a thing or two.
In a 2020 press conference, he remarked that he wanted to be “remembered as the president who built good roads in Ukraine.” One of the handful of construction companies that have received a significant share of state funds for building public roads during his tenure is PBS LLC, which is linked to Skorzonera LLC, a company co-owned by Kolomoisky, according to corporate records.
PBS has been accused by Ukrainian investigators of misappropriating millions in state funds for road work. A ruling by a court in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast noted that together with the Kolomoisky-controlled Skorzonera it is connected as part of a web of related business entities with overlapping addresses and personnel. PBS and Skorzonera had even sent their tax declarations from the same IP address.
Notably, former Customs Minister Maxim Nefyodov was one of the reformers fired by Zelensky. Nefyodov is most well-known for having created ProZorro, a system designed to tackle corruption in Ukraine’s public procurement sector.
After dismissing Nefyodov, Zelensky’s party used its majority to pass legislation that would allow the most expensive road construction project in modern Ukrainian history to be built with zero oversight, ProZorro exempt. Last June, the Kyiv Post reported how Zelensky “has doubled spending on road repairs, reaching into the pocket of the COVID relief fund and spending money Ukraine has won in international courts.” An interesting source of cash, considering that the IMF approved a multi-billion dollar aid package in 2020 “to help Ukraine to cope with COVID-19 pandemic challenges by providing balance of payments and budget support.” Is it possible that Zelensky has taken a page out of Kolomoisky’s book by taking liberties with international aid? It’s hard to say for certain.
One reason why Kolomoyskiy selected Zelenskiy to play president is that both are Jewish. Note Kolomoyskiy’s heavy hand-writing also in this context:
Kolomoyski is a prominent supporter of Ukraine’s Jewish community[42] and the president of the United Jewish Community of Ukraine.[43] In 2010, he was appointed as the president of the European Council of Jewish Communities (ECJC)[44] after promising the outgoing president he would donate $14 million,[45] with his appointment being described as a “putsch”[43][44] and a “Soviet-style takeover”[46] by other ECJC board members. After several ECJC board members resigned in protest, Kolomyski quit the ECJC and, together with fellow Ukrainian oligarch Vadim Rabinovich, founded the European Jewish Union.[45]
12.3 More on the Presidential Actor Zelenskiy
The following short video documentary from WION brings to light some interesting facts about Zelenksy, such as his totally broken campaign promises: Aside from aggravating the war in Donbass (because of likely threats to his life by far right extremists which were/are funded by these two oligarchs), president Zelenskiy — the literal product of the oligarch Kolomoisky, similar to the former president Yushchenko being a product of the oligarch Poroshenko — obviously also did not “confront oligarchs.”
He instead was and is the tool of the oligarch Kolomoyskiy which was used against the oligarch Poroshenko in their personal feud and battle for oligarchic supremacy. This was then sold to an easily fooled public as a battle against corrupt oligarchs in general — a view that is as idiotic as thinking that one crime/drug lord fighting another crime/drug lord is engaged in a battle against crime/drugs:
Some basics on his background: Zelensky comes from a well-to-do middle class family and started his career in television entertainment and comedy. One critic described his style as “puerile, vulgar and working class”:
Zelensky also privately performed as a ‘court jester’ for oligarchs and political elites such as Viktor Yanukovich who was ousted in the 2014 maidan coup. This contributed to his estimated net worth of $15 million in 2012 and is perhaps also how he came into contact with oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskiy:
The most important role of Zelenskiy was that of the history teacher Vasily Petrovych Goloborodko in the Servant of the People television series:
In the series, Goloborodko becomes president after a rant against corruption — and that is also what happened in real life with the actor Zelenksiy:
The series was produced by Kvartal 95, which was founded by Zelenskyy.[5] […]; on 31 March 2018, a political party named after the television series was registered with the Ministry of Justice,[6] and Zelenskyy was actually elected President of Ukraine on 21 April 2019, with over 70 percent of the second-round vote.[7]
The psychological technique that was used to achieve this is called “priming,” something which can be used as a type of psychological or social “conditioning” or manipulation:
Priming can have a significant effect on our behavior. In some cases, it can even lead us to do things that we wouldn’t normally do. For example, one study found that priming participants with images of elderly people made them more likely to help someone who was in need. Another study found that priming participants with words related to compassion made them more likely to donate money to charity.
On the other hand, there are also studies that have shown the negative effects of priming. For example, one study found that priming participants with images of violence made them more aggressive and violent. Another study found that priming participants with words related to cheating made them more likely to cheat in a game.
So in other words: The Ukrainian public was “primed” with footage of a Ukrainian anti-corruption, anti-oligarch, ordinary people president Goloborodko that was played by Zelenskiy before they ‘spontaneously’ and ‘of their own accord’ arrived at the transparently ridiculous conclusion that the Kolmoyskiy puppet Zelenskiy would be such a president.
Another technique that was used against the 99% to make them believe that Zelenskiy would be their guy is “diversitywashing” which basically consists of dressing up imperialism, oligarchy or the 1% and their agenda in aspects of intersectionality (non-maleness, non-whiteness or non-heterosexuality) while essentially changing nothing about that agenda. The hope of the manipulators here is that people will not see through the superificial veneer of alleged progressivism and intersectionality and that they will buy into the same old pro-1% and anti-99% agendas after such a rebranding or repacking. The professional actor Zelenskiy and those behind him also accomplished that with this video (Zelsenkiy is 2nd to left):
“Oh, he is so progressive, so not-Putin, so not-oligarch; he must surely be on our side” — this is what diversitywashers want you to believe.
But the following ‘funny’ political Servant of the People spot in which a machine pistol-wielding Goloborodko/Zelenskiy kills pro-Russian parliamentarians in the Ukrainian parliament is probably closer to the truth, because this is not only imagery of the war that was to come — among other causes due to Ukraine’s failure to stay militarily neutral — but furthermore imagery that both his oligarch producer Kolomoyskiy and Ukrainian neonazis would find appealing. The accompanying music is the US rock and roll song “Let’s Have A Party” which is also highly fitting in light of how the US keeps using Ukraine in its proxy war against Russia:
Especially if you believe that there is often “truth in jest,” other noteworthy footage is the following from October 11, 2014:
Some in hindsight perhaps not so ‘amusing’ because all too truthful takeaways:
“be[ing] in the ranks of the Banderites […] is the only way to make a career in Ukraine” [true because Zelenskiy made it to president as the puppet of Banderite Kolomoyskiy]
“My salary is small, but it’s not a problem since we are allowed to take money and property from the Russians.” *applause* “And earlier, the same applied to the Jews. But then the main Bandera’s man Kolomoyskiy prohibited it.” *bigger applause* [true because Kolomoyskiy funded Azov and Aidar despite being Jewish]
“Today, our president — the most important one, Barack Obama — has promised that we will join NATO soon, as an American henchman, of course.” [true because Ukraine is being (ab)used as the sacrificial pawn in the US proxy war against Russia]
Particularly interesting, since it is another truthful reference to Ukrainian neonazi militants: “If you can, please send me Hitler’s book ‘Mein Kampf’ — they are sold out here!”
“Sometimes I do morning exercises on the balcony. I do it like this, from the heart to the sun.” This is a more specific reference to the Azov neonazis since the Azov battallion has a yellow “sun” in its symbol:
For evidence of how President Zelenskiy fell under the sway of the Ukrainian neonazis from Azov and elsewhere, see part 9.
12.4 Kolomoyskiy Funds Neonazi Battallions/Private Armies Azov, Aidar and Dnipro
The principal funder of the neonazi Azov battalion is none other than the Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskiy, with Poroshenko also chipping in:
12.4.1 The Azov Battalion
From the Azov Battalion Wikipedia page as of April 14, 2022:
one of the main financiers of Azov was Jewish-Ukrainian billionaire and oligarch Igor Kolomoyskyi.[38][28]
Wikipedia likewise leaves no doubt that Azov actually is a “neo-Nazi” battalion that was “formally incorporated” into the Ukrainian army:
The Azov Special Operations Detachment (Ukrainian: Окремий загін спеціального призначення «Азов», romanized: Okremyi zahin spetsialnoho pryznachennia “Azov”), also known as the Azov Regiment (Ukrainian: Полк Азов, romanized: Polk Azov) or Azov Battalion until September 2014, is a neo-Nazi[2][3] unit of the National Guard of Ukraine based in Mariupol in the coastal region of the Sea of Azov.[4] Azov formed as a volunteer paramilitary militia in May 2014,[5] and has since been fighting Russian forces in the Donbas War. It first saw combat recapturing Mariupol from Russian forces and pro-Russian separatists in June 2014.[6] It initially operated as a volunteer police company, until it was formally incorporated into the National Guard on 11 November 2014.[7][8][9]
[…]
In March 2015, Andriy Diachenko, a spokesman for the Azov Brigade, told USA Today that 10% to 20% of the group’s members are Nazis.[22][23] A provision in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2018, passed by the United States Congress, blocked military aid to Azov due to its white supremacist ideology; in 2015, a similar ban had been overturned by Congress.[20][24] Members of the battalion came from 22 countries and are of various backgrounds.[25][26] In 2017, the size of the regiment was estimated at more than 2,500 members,[27] but was estimated to be 900 members in 2022.[28]
[…]
Neo-Nazism
The Azov Battalion has been described as a far-right militia,[45][13] with connections to neo-Nazism[98] and members wearing neo-Nazi and SS symbols and regalia, and expressing neo-Nazi views.[3][18]
[…]
In 2015, Marcin Ogdowski, a Polish war correspondent, gained access to one of Azov’s bases located in the former holiday resort Majak; Azov fighters showed him Nazi tattoos as well as Nazi emblems on their uniforms.[106][13]
[…]
Azov’s founding member Andriy Biletsky, leader of the far right Social-National Assembly (SNA), had stated in 2010 that “the historic mission of our nation” was to lead the “white races of the world in a final crusade for their survival […] a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen”, an ideology that political scientist Richard Sakwa traces to the National Integralism of 1920s and 1930s.[110]
Zelenskiy talked around that issue as follows and did not even try to come up with excuses:
But that of course does not prevent lying Western mainstream media from pretending that they are not neonazis. On April 14, 2022, and during the midday news, the Austrian radio station Ö1 (from “Österreich/Austria”) which is supposed to be quality radio, described Azov as no more than a battalion of “well-trained volunteers” with not even a mention of them being ultranationalist or far right. This is how history gets rewritten in true Orwellian fashion in the West.
12.4.2 The Aidar Battalion
I will be brief with the other two battalions since it is pretty much the same thing. The first commander of the Aidar Battalion, which was “named after the Aidar River in the Luhansk region where it was initially deployed,” was one Serhiy Melnichuk who “became a member of the Verkhovna Rada representing the Radical Party of Oleh Lyashko.”
(The party won 22 seats at the 2014 Ukrainian parliamentary election.[13][14] In the 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary election it lost all those seats. […] The party also advocates an end to the War in Donbas by the use of force.[5])
The motto of the Aidar Battalion was the ancient and arch-propagandistic one of “God with us” — meaning that they can do no wrong when they kill or terrorize other people. Aidar was also not set up as a defensive but as an “assault” battalion, a function in which they committed war crimes just like other such battalions:
24th Separate Assault Battalion “Aidar”, also known as the Aidar Battalion, was an assault battalion of the Ukrainian Ground Forces. The unit took part in the war in Eastern Ukraine and had roughly 300–400 members in 2014. It was named after the Aidar River in the Luhansk region where it was initially deployed.[4][5] In 2014, Amnesty International reported that the Aidar Battalion had committed war crimes during the War in Donbas.[6] It was disbanded in 2015 and reconstituted as the 24th Separate Assault Battalion of the Ukrainian Army, before being absorbed into the 10th Mountain Assault Brigade in 2016.
In 2014, Newsweek reported funding by Kolomoyskiy:
There are over 30 pro-nationalist, volunteer battalions similar to Aidar, such as Ukraina, DND Metinvest and Kiev 1, all funded by private investors.
The Aidar battalion is publicly backed by Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who also allegedly funds the Azov, Donbas, Dnepr 1, Dnepr 2 volunteer battalions, operating under orders from Kiev. Last spring Kolomoyskyi offered a bounty of $10,000 of his own money for each captured Russian “saboteur”.
A warrant for Kolomoyskyi’s arrest was issued in Russia in July for “organising the killing of civilians,” through his sponsorship of volunteer militants.
One has to wonder: Could a $10.000 incentive have been one of the reasons for human rights abuses of private army ultranationalist nutcases against alleged Russian ‘saboteurs’ who just might have been ethnically Russian civilians? Hmmm.
12.4.3 The Dnipro-1 Battalion
Kolomoyskiy hails from Dnipro in the province or Oblast Dnipropetrovsk where he was made governor before being fired by Poroshenko, and it was especially there where he raised a veritable private army in the form of the Dnipro-1 Battalion that dwarfed both Azov and Aidar and that, together with his insane behavior, got him the designation of “warlord.”
From this 2015 Business Insider article:
The recruits came from Ukraine and Europe. There are even a couple of Americans. Estimates suggest Kolomoisky could call on over 20,000 troops and reserves. His Dnipro Battalion, also known as Dnipro-1, includes around 2,000 heavily armed fighters. The unit is reported to have cost the banking billionaire $10 million to set up. […]
there are doubts about where the troops’ ultimate loyalties lie — to the government in Ukraine or to their regional paymaster. Last week, armed men in masks stormed the headquarters of state-owned oil company UkrTransNafta in the Ukrainian capital Kiev, following the sacking of its director Oleksander Lazorko, a key ally of Kolomoisky.
Human rights violations and war crimes were also the norm with that private army:
“OHCHR also continued to document human rights violations committed by members of Ukrainian voluntary battalions in 2014, as well as continuing cases in early 2016. On 20 January, a group of ‘Dnipro-1’ battalion members raided a house in Avdiivka, severely beating a man, subjecting him to asphyxiation with a plastic bag and mock execution.”[15]
From the reports (2016) by Global Rights Compliance LLP: “For example, <UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine> has documented specific allegations of enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention and ill-treatment by the members of volunteer battalions such as “Aydar”, “Dnipro-1”, “Kyiv-1” and “Kyiv-2”
12.4.4 Why All These Private Mercenary Battalions and Militias?
In case you are wondering why Ukraine has so many private mercenary battalions or militias, this Scheerpost article by NATO expert Jacques Baud has some answers:
[T]he [Ukrainian] army is undermined by the corruption of its cadres and no longer enjoys the support of the population. According to a UK Home Office report , when reservists were called up in March-April 2014, 70% did not show up for the first session, 80% for the second, 90% for the third and 95% for the fourth. In October/November 2017, 70% of callers did not show up during the “Autumn 2017” callback campaign. This does not include suicides and desertions (often for the benefit of the autonomists) which reach up to 30% of the workforce in the ATO zone. Young Ukrainians refuse to go and fight in the Donbass and prefer emigration, which also explains, at least partially, the country’s demographic deficit.
[…]
[T]o compensate for the lack of soldiers, the Ukrainian government resorted to paramilitary militias. They are essentially made up of foreign mercenaries, often far-right activists. As of 2020, they constitute around 40% of Ukraine’s forces and number around 102,000 men according to Reuters . They are armed, financed and trained by the United States, Great Britain, Canada and France. There are more than 19 nationalities — including Swiss.
Western countries have therefore clearly created and supported Ukrainian far-right militias . In October 2021, the Jerusalem Post sounded the alarm by denouncing the Centuria project. These militias have been operating in the Donbass since 2014, with Western support.
12.4.5 Nazi Pills for Nazi Soldiers?
As a more speculative aside, history might also be repeating itself in Ukraine in the form of nazi fighting pills being given to nazi soldiers:
To be fair though, it is or would be something that other countries or armies (e.g. the USA, what a coincidence) are doing too to various extents and with similar consequences:
12.5 Kolomoyskiy, Hunter Biden and Burisma
Hunter Biden is the (formerly) drug addict son of president Joe Biden:
The following Hunter Biden laptop story is interesting in and of itself a) not only since it it real — now confirmed by the NYT, WaPo, NBC or CNN — but also b) since it (has) had the potential to explode the Biden presidency (evidence of corruption) and c) since it had been censored by the very same ‘liberal’ (i.e. deeply authoritarian) mainstream media via the McCarthyite excuse of “Russian disinformation”:
The respective whistleblower is one Joe Maxey who has good reason to fear for his life:
Hunter abandoned his laptop at a Delaware computer store in 2019. The owner, John Mac Isaac, gave a copy to Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who passed it on to Maxey.
‘I came here so that we could do a forensic examination of Hunter’s laptop safely in a country that still respects human liberty and the ideals of liberal democratic principles,’ he told DailyMail.com.
‘I do not believe this would have been possible inside the United States. We had numerous attempts on us from trying to do things like this there.’
Maxey said that after contacting DailyMail.com about the laptop last year, black suburban SUVs appeared outside his house, and former US intelligence officer friends he shared copies with told him they received strange calls.
‘I showed this to a friend of mine in desperation in February [2021] because nobody would listen to me. No news organizations would take it. In fact, the very first major news organization to take it was the Daily Mail,’ he said.
‘Very dear friends of mine, the sharp tip of the spear, were making welfare calls to me every day, basically to see if I was still alive.’
Maxey claimed one former intelligence agency senior staffer told him soon after he received the hard drive in 2020: ‘If you don’t release enough of this, so that they know you can release all of it, I’m telling you brother, you’re a dead man.’
Maxey took their advice in October 2020 and posted batches of emails and other files from the laptop on file sharing sites.
But after about an hour, the links were taken down.
Maxey said he believes the US government was hunting down files from the laptop posted online and flagged them to the companies.
‘There were five drop boxes: two in the United States, one in New Zealand, two in the UK. All the same drop boxes in which they tell us child pornography is shared around the globe without any consequence because they can’t look at it.
‘These are all Five Eyes countries, English speaking countries in an intelligence sharing agreement. And they were all ripped down.
‘So this means that our intelligence services, who still have not even acknowledged that they have Hunter Biden’s laptop, were obviously diligently doing cache searches across the internet to find out if any of this stuff was being released.
To return to the main thread: It is relatively widely known that Hunter Biden was elevated to “the board of Burisma Holdings, one of the largest private natural gas producers in Ukraine, from 2014 until his term expired in April 2019.”
What is largely unknown is that it was apparently Ihor Kolomoisky who helped him into this cushy and well-paying corporate seat. From the Kanekoa Substack article “How One Ukrainian Billionaire Funded Hunter Biden, President Volodymyr Zelensky, And The Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion”:
The real person who was the benefactor to, and the boss of, Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, at the Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings, was not the CEO of Burisma Holdings, Mykola Zlochevsky, but it was instead Ihor Kolomoysky, who was part of the newly installed Ukrainian Government, which the Obama Administration itself had actually just installed in Ukraine, in what the head of the “private CIA” firm Stratfor correctly called “the most blatant coup in history.”
Shortly after the Obama Administration’s Ukrainian coup, on March 2, 2014, Kolomoysky, who supported Yanukovych’s overthrow, was appointed the governor of Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. Hunter Biden, with no experience in the industry or region, would join Kolomoysky’s Burisma Holdings two months later on May 12, 2014.
A 2012 study of Burisma Holdings done in Ukraine by the AntiCorruption Action Centre (ANTAC), an investigative nonprofit co-funded by American billionaire George Soros and the U.S. State Department, found that the true owner of Burisma Holdings was none other than Ukrainian billionaire-oligarch Ihor Kolomoysky.
The study, which was funded to dig up corruption on the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, instead found that Ihor Kolomoysky “managed to seize the largest reserves of natural gas in Ukraine”.
Burisma Holdings changed owners in 2011 when it was taken over by an off-shore Cyprus enterprise called Brociti Investments Ltd, and subsequently, moved addresses under the same roof as Ukrnaftoburinnya and Esko-Pivnich, two Ukrainian gas companies which happened to be also owned by Kolomoysky through off-shore entities in the British Virgin Islands.
From Pedro Gonzalez’ article “Servant of the Corrupt”:
Twenty fourteen was also the year when then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, reportedly joined the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company to which Kolomoisky has been connected with a controlling interest, according to the New York Post. Emails obtained by the Post revealed that Vadym Pozharskyi, a Kolomoisky protégé, communicated with Hunter in 2015 about a meeting between Pozharskyi and then-Vice President Biden. Further, bank records of Hunter (lawfully obtained according to D&A Investigations) show payments made to him by PrivatBank.
By his own account, Joe Biden got the Ukrainian Attorney General (AG) who looked into this fired by threatening Poroshenko and Yatsenjuk to withhold $1 billion:
And there is yet another very noteworthy Hunter Biden laptop-Kolomoyskiy connection that relates to Kolomoyskiy’s and other private armies’ indiscriminate shelling and killing of children in the separatist regions. From the above Kanekoa Substack article:
Children’s schools in Donetsk have been hit so many times by indiscriminate shelling that basements are set up as make-shift bomb shelters and windows are piled high with sandbags. Donbas has also become one of the most landmine contaminated places on earth putting more than 220,000 children at risk.
“The shelling doesn’t leave a child’s psyche unscathed. Children are traumatized. They are terrified. There are children who become very emotional. They pour their feelings out,” said Iryna Morhun, the Principal of Krasnohorivka School, which was hit by a direct strike.
“On the other side, there are children who keep this pain inside. It’s very sad to see children who should be having a happy childhood suffer because of this war.”
Hunter Biden’s Laptop Talks About “Children Burned Alive” In Donetsk
The nonprofit research group, Marco Polo, which is doing a comprehensive report on Hunter Biden’s Laptop, made the connection between Hunter Biden’s text messages and Kolomoysky’s massacres in eastern Ukraine.
Text messages found on Hunter Biden’s laptop, show Hunter Biden asking Hallie Biden, his brother’s widow and his mistress, if she believed that he had “children burned alive in DONETSK” or “children killed in donetsk, Ukraine”.
Most likely, in reference to Kolomoysky, his reported Burisma Holdings boss, who was also funding the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion that was accused of war crimes and the shelling of civilians in eastern Ukraine.
12.6 Kolomoyskiy’s and Zelenskiy’s Appearance in the Pandorra Papers
To end on the Zelenskiy-Kolomoyskiy connection with which this article started: Both the billionaire Kolomoyskiy and his millionaire political puppet Zelenskiy have a noteworthy appearance in the tax evasion related 2021 Pandorra Papers:
The Pandora Papers are 11.9 million leaked documents with 2.9 terabytes of data that the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published beginning on 3 October 2021.[1][2][3] The leak exposed the secret offshore accounts of 35 world leaders, including current and former presidents, prime ministers, and heads of state as well as more than 100 billionaires, celebrities, and business leaders. The news organizations of the ICIJ described the document leak as their most expansive exposé of financial secrecy yet, containing documents, images, emails and spreadsheets from 14 financial service companies, in nations including Panama, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates,[4][5] surpassing their previous release of the Panama Papers in 2016, which had 11.5 million confidential documents (2.6 terabytes).[6][7][8][9][10]
The extremely tight net between Zelenskiy and Kolomoyskiy thus receives further confirmation. From the aforementioned Kanekoa Substack article:
In 2019, Kolmoysky’s media channels gave a big boost to Zelensky’s presidential campaign, while Kolmoysky even provided security, lawyers, and vehicles for Zelensky during his campaign. Kolmoysky’s bodyguard and lawyer accompanied Zelensky on the campaign trail as Zelensky was chauffeured around in a Range Rover owned by one of Kolmoysky’s companies.
The Pandora Papers showed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his TV production partners were beneficiaries of a web of offshore firms created in 2012, the same year Zelensky’s production company entered into a deal with Kolomoysky’s media group, which allegedly received $41 million in funds from Kolomoysky’s Privatbank.
From the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting (OCCRP) article “Pandora Papers Reveal Offshore Holdings of Ukrainian President and his Inner Circle”:
The documents show that Zelensky and his partners in a television production company, Kvartal 95, set up a network of offshore firms dating back to at least 2012, the year the company began making regular content for TV stations owned by Ihor Kolomoisky, an oligarch dogged by allegations of multi-billion-dollar fraud. The offshores were also used by Zelensky associates to purchase and own three prime properties in the center of London.
The documents also show that just before he was elected, he gifted his stake in a key offshore company, the British Virgin Islands-registered Maltex Multicapital Corp., to his business partner — soon to be his top presidential aide. And in spite of giving up his shares, the documents show that an arrangement was soon made that would allow the offshore to keep paying dividends to a company that now belongs to his wife.
[…]
Zelensky capitalized on widespread public anger at corruption, but his 2019 campaign was dogged by doubts over his anti-graft bona fides, given that his campaign was boosted by media belonging to Kolomoisky — who is accused of stealing US$5.5 billion from his own bank and funneling it offshore in concert with his partner, Hennadiy Boholiubov.
[…]
Two of Zelensky’s associates in the offshore network, who were also part of his TV production company, now hold powerful positions. Serhiy Shefir is Zelensky’s top presidential aide, while Ivan Bakanov heads the Security Service of Ukraine.
So in case you thought the tax-evading millionaire and Kolomoyskiy puppet Zelenskiy is a servant of the people who is doing something about corruption, you might want to reconsider that in light of this evidence.
Conclusions
The by all appearances criminal and dangerous Ukrainian oligarch Kolomoyskiy is not only one of the primary funders of war crimes and human rights abuses committing Ukrainian private mercenary armies, battalions or militias such as Azov, Aidar and Dnipro. He is also, in more than one way, the producer of President Zelenskiy who in turn appears to be little but a puppet for not just a) the USA and b) the far right or neonazi militants (see part 9) but, most fundamentally, a puppet for c) the oligarch and “warlord” Kolomoyskiy who, like Zelenskiy, also makes an appearance in the tax-evasion related 2021 Pandorra Papers.
Lastly, a possible scenario where someone close to or in the employ of Kolomoyskiy ‘protects’ Zelenskiy or his family so that Zelenskiy stays in line with those who pull his strings also need to be considered. Then again, the personal enrichment of a professional comedian and actor who (again) plays the part of a democratic president while the anti-democratic USA, anti-democratic oligarchs and anti-democratic Banderites do their thing in the background would already provide a sufficient explanation for why Zelenskiy does what he does.
[continue to part 11]
