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Zelensky Called Him a Criminal. Now Ukraine Calls Him for Guns and Ammo.
In its hunt for weapons, Ukraine has rolled back anticorruption rules and turned to people once seen as relics of an anything-goes era.
Published Aug. 12, 2023Updated Aug. 15, 2023
In the early weeks of the war in Ukraine, with the invading Russian Army bearing down on Kyiv, the Ukrainian government needed weapons, and quickly. So its Ministry of Defense made a desperate and unlikely phone call.
On the other end of the line was Serhiy Pashinsky, a chain-smoking former lawmaker who had overseen military spending for years. He had spent much of that under investigation on suspicion of corruption or denying accusations of self-dealing. Now, he was living in virtual political exile at his country estate, sidelined by President Volodymyr Zelensky and his promise to root out corruption.
“Go out on the streets and ask whether Pashinsky is a criminal,” Mr. Zelensky said on national television in 2019. “I guarantee you that out of 100 people, 100 will say that he is a criminal.”
But Mr. Pashinsky had ties to the arms business and, perhaps as important, he knew how to operate in a scrum, undaunted by red tape. In government, that had made him the source of scandal. During wartime, it made him invaluable.
He answered the call.
Eighteen months later, a New York Times investigation found, a company tied to Mr. Pashinsky has become the biggest private arms supplier in Ukraine. It buys and sells grenades, artillery shells and rockets through a trans-European network of middlemen. The company, Ukrainian Armored Technology, reported its best year ever last year, with sales totaling more than $350 million, up from $2.8 million the year before the war.
And Mr. Pashinsky is once again under investigation, with the Ukrainian authorities scrutinizing Ukrainian Armored Technology’s pricing and his financial relationships with procurement officials and companies abroad, said two officials familiar with the matter.
This month, investigators with the intelligence service searched the offices of a state-owned company, looking for evidence against Ukrainian Armored Technology, according to government officials with knowledge of the search. Most of those who spoke about the investigation did so on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing inquiry.
Mr. Pashinsky and the arms network he built highlight a little-discussed aspect of Ukraine’s war strategy. In the name of rushing weapons to the front line, leaders have resurrected figures from Ukraine’s rough-and-tumble past and undone, at least temporarily, years of anticorruption policies. Government officials stopped blacklisting suppliers who had ripped off the military, and they abandoned many public-disclosure rules intended to reveal self-dealing.
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Mr. Zelensky’s administration did all of this while promising to continue fighting corruption. That has led to awkward contradictions — like the administration turning for help to someone it had labeled a criminal, gratefully buying weapons and simultaneously investigating him.
In the immediate term, the gamble is paying off. Ukraine held off Russian troops long enough for international aid to arrive. And Ukrainian Armored Technology has tens of millions of dollars in ongoing contracts to support the war effort. The long-term risk is that these temporary changes become entrenched, and that Mr. Pashinsky and others who had been sidelined will emerge from the war with more money and influence than ever.
Ukrainian leaders understand this risk. “We are not very idealistic in this regard,” the deputy defense minister, Volodymyr Havrylov, said in an interview. When the war broke out, he said, “we wanted huge amounts, immediately.”
A Times investigation across Europe shows how that happened, and how Ukraine’s policies, born out of desperation, drove up prices and added layer upon layer of profit-making.
Mr. Pashinsky’s network, for example, buys weapons and then sells them, then buys them again and sells them once more, according to classified contracts and government documents obtained by The Times, along with interviews of more than two dozen current and former government officials and arms-industry figures.