A $100 million corruption scandal in Ukraine isn’t some isolated administrative glitch. It’s a five-alarm fire aimed straight at Europe—especially Central Europe—which has been footing an ever-growing bill for Western political wishful thinking for over a decade.

Operation Midas, exposed by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) (source: OSW Centre for Eastern Studies), shatters the state-modernization story. And it reveals something else: Central Europe has been sold the job of bankrolling a system whose structural rot remains untouched.

For the region that has taken the hardest hit from the war—demographic, economic, energy, and political—this isn’t abstract debate. It’s about real security and the risks our countries bear most directly.

Corruption Under Fire

Operation Midas uncovered a 15-month kickback machine inside state-owned Energoatom, the company that produces nearly half of Ukraine’s electricity. Investigators say a tight-knit group of officials demanded 10–15% cuts from contractors, siphoning off at least $100 million (source: Al Jazeera)

In a stable country, that alone would trigger resignations and full audits.

In Ukraine, the stakes are existential. A war that keeps hammering energy infrastructure is already pushing the system to breaking point. The fact that public money is being looted on this scale at the same time is staggering. Every dollar lost—whether to bombs or to bribes in critical state companies—makes Ukraine more dependent on foreign cash. In our region, people are starting to ask: are some Ukrainian elites treating the war as a license to keep the old opaque money flows running?

The West has poured hundreds of billions into Ukraine. The EU has delivered €187.3 billion in aid (source: EU assistance to Ukraine – European Commission), including €100.6 billion for economic and social resilience, €66 billion in military aid, €17 billion for refugee costs, and €3.7 billion from frozen Russian assets. The U.S. has provided $66.9 billion in military aid since February 2022 (source: U.S. Security Cooperation with Ukraine – U.S. Department of State), with NATO allies pushing total military and logistics support past $130 billion.

Against that backdrop, a $100 million leak isn’t an outlier—it’s proof that the grand project of building efficient institutions, transparent administration, and a functioning state in wartime is hitting structural walls.

Corruption in Ukraine is chronic. In 2014 the country ranked 142nd out of 175 on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (source: Transparency International CPI 2014).

After recent arrests of officials over multimillion-dollar drone and electronic-warfare procurement scams, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declared “zero........

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