The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) is out for blood. Never before has it claimed so many victims. Encouraged by Zelensky’s pathetic failure to eradicate its independence in July 2025, the NABU and the euro-atlanticist forces it represents are becoming the deciding force in the Ukrainian parliament.

Right before the new year, five MPs from Zelensky’s Servant of the People parliamentary fraction were charged by the NABU, accused of receiving $2,000 to $20,000 USD in return for voting on certain legislation.

Zelensky’s former chief of staff Andriy has still somehow avoided charges since his resignation following the November 28 2025 raid by the NABU on his residence. The NABU visited his house again on December 10, with pro-NABU media claiming that more is to come. On December 11, the NABU visited his driver.

Late evening on January 13, the NABU raided the office of MP Yuliiya Tymoshenko, former prime minister, one of Ukraine’s longest-serving top politicians. A woman imprisoned from 2011 to 2014, feted at the time by the western press as a ‘pro-western political prisoner’. The hero of the pro-western ‘Orange Revolution’ of 2004, glorified into a demigod by her supporters.

She also certainly had no competitors when it came to advertisements and fashion sense.

Now, she is accused of offering bribes to other MPs in exchange for votes. Tape recordings released by the NABU seem to show Tymoshenko exclaiming her desire to ‘destroy the mono-majority’ enjoyed by Zelensky’s parliamentary fraction.

8:00 AM on January 14, the NABU announced its charges against Tymoshenko: offering a bribe.

What exactly is going on? Tymoshenko claims that Zelensky and the NABU are repressing ‘the opposition’. Partisans of the NABU point out that the anti-corruption organ has also charged figures from Zelensky’s party. In fact, there are much more interesting stakes. Geopolitics, the IMF, and Trump’s conflict with euro-atlanticist forces are all in play.

More equal than others

It’s worth pondering the rather odd manner in which the NABU proceeds. Held up by the west and western-funded media and NGOs in Ukraine as the paragon of rule of law, its methods are not exactly immaculate.

First of all, most obviously, the disparity in punishments. Yermak was raided by the NABU in relation to a massive corruption scheme that stole at least $100 million USD from the country’s wartime energy system. That embezzlement may have played a factor in worsening the effects of the ongoing Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure. Yermak’s alias ‘Ali Baba’ was in the tapes regarding this scheme released by the NABU.

Yet Yermak never actually received charges. He is free to do as he wishes. All that happened was that the NABU made a show of raiding his residence after an endless anti-Yermak media campaign by pro-NABU media and political forces (often described as ‘Sorosites’ or ‘liberal nationalists’).

And once Yermak resigned that same day (November 28), nothing more happened. It’s now been almost two months.

Evidently, the NABU had a political aim here — getting rid of Yermak in his position as head of the president’s office. He was despised by Biden’s state department and the Sorosite community because he constantly got rid of their cadres from top official posts. Now that he is gone, liberal-aligned figures distrusted by Yermak like Mikhailo Fedorov are being given top ministerial posts.

Now, compare that to Tymoshenko. The NABU has accused her of bribing other MPs in the parliament to vote against certain bills. The audio released by the NABU shows a voice resembling Tymoshenko’s offering $10,000 for each month of loyal voting.

Certainly, this isn’t particularly palatable. However, it’s nothing compared to Yermak’s crime — overseeing the embezzlement of $100 million from critical wartime infrastructure. The NABU tapes showed that this scheme was profiting from the construction of protective materials for energy objects. Now, with insufficient protections, the energy grid is down and millions are freezing in -20 degree weather.

Yet Yermak received no charges, and is currently incognito. Tymoshenko received charges the day the NABU visited her (the 14th), and has already appeared in court (the 16th). She had to pay a bail of almost $800,000 USD to leave, and is unable to leave the Kyiv oblast.

Furthermore, she was banned from speaking with 66 MPs in parliament. In good bureaucratic traditions, the judge even read out all the names in court. In contrast to these restrictions on Tymoshenko’s political manoeuvring. I might recall that Ukraine’s western-funded media reports that Yermak continues to pay nightly visits to Zelensky.

Clearly, the NABU’s standards aren’t exactly equal. Besides that, there is also another issue. Even the highly pro-NABU journalists at the premiere liberal nationalist publication Ukrainska Pravda have expressed their worries about the NABU’s politicization.

They point to the way that the NABU dramatically published photographs and videos of Tymoshenko with a barely blurred face, but her instantly recognizable braids. The NABU shared a photo of her with $40,000 USD found in her office. But what exactly does that prove? Nothing. It is merely a cheap act fitting of the yellow press.

This is not how a law enforcement body should act. Ignoring any presumption of innocence, Tymoshenko has been tarred as an irremediably corrupt politician, but without anything having been proven in a court of law. The NABU has put a great deal of effort into creating a slick video about Tymoshenko’s corruption, released before she had even made her first appearance in court.

The NABU’s nature

The NABU has never gone after an MP as high profile as Tymoshenko. In many respects, Tymoshenko is the most experienced politician in the Rada, having been an extremely active politician since the late 90s. She was prime minister in the late 2000s, and was poised to win the 2019 elections until Zelensky appeared out of nowhere.

Before going deeper into the reasons why the NABU has gone after Tymoshenko, let’s delve further into the institution.

The question of who exactly the NABU is working for isn’t a choice between seeing it as Zelensky’s tool for repression of the opposition, or as a perfectly neutral law enforcement agency.

The NABU was set up in 2015 at the prodding of the US state department, the EU, and organizations like the Open Society Foundation. Ever since, it has been held up as the greatest achievement of the 2014 ‘revolution of dignity’, quite important given that it has achieved very little else appreciable. Continued IMF funding always depends on ‘maintaining the independence of the NABU’ (ie, choosing western-approved figures to run it).

What’s important to understand about the NABU is that it operates as a separate legal system. Having concluded that the Ukrainian legal system is irreparably corrupt, it was necessary to create a parallel legal system staffed by ‘new faces’. These new faces, the leaders of the NABU, are vetted by the likes of the IMF and the US embassy, and the past decade has been full of constant pressure on the Ukrainian parliament and president not to prevent the ‘correct’ figures from leading the NABU.

Naturally, many top political forces and legal authorities in Ukraine have called this arrangement a violation of the constitution. There is only one legal system there, not two. Tymoshenko, as we will see, was among the loudest critics of the NABU and its subordination of Ukraine to ‘colonial external control by the west’. The NABU and its partisans claim that these are merely the desperate whelps of retrograde corrupt politicians.

In July 2025, Zelensky’s security services arrested a number of top NABU detectives and tried to pass a law that would remove the independence of the NABU, placing it under the supervision of Zelensky’s General Prosecutor. The EU was outraged, young urban liberals protested, and Zelensky ignominiously backed down and reversed the bill, right after his entire parliamentary fraction had voted for it. At the time, some wondered if the west planned to replace Zelensky with a figure that was more respectful towards the NABU, ie, towards what I might call euro-atlantic interests.

But when the NABU released explosive tapes of the massive wartime corruption reigning among Zelensky top associates in November, a new geopolitical interpretation appeared. Soon after the November 10 tape release, Trump began pushing hard on Zelensky to accept a peace deal the Ukrainian president had hitherto resisted.

Many began speculating that the NABU was acting on Trump’s orders. By creating the largest domestic scandal Zelensky had ever faced, Zelensky seemed weakened enough to accept Trump’s demands. After all, the NABU was originally set up by the Americans, so why shouldn’t they use it as a foreign policy tool? Zelensky’s party, naturally, constantly ranted that anyone who accused them of corruption was helping Trump-Putin push Ukraine to ‘capitulation’.

I was never convinced. To begin with, the NABU wasn’t created by Trump, but by the Democratic Party, USAID, the Open Society Foundation. The NABU played a major role in the 2016 Russiagate affair against Trump. The NABU and affiliated structures are filled with fanatically atlanticist liberals who despise Trump.

More importantly, it isn’t actually true that the US sponsored the NABU. The NABU is sponsored by the Ukrainian budget. Today, the Ukrainian budget is funded by the EU — Washington is no longer sending over funds.

 

And the EU, of course, is certainly not interested in ending the war in Ukraine through a compromise deal with Russia. Quite the opposite. That is why I have always felt that if the NABU has a geopolitical bent, it is to pressure Zelensky into continuing the war, not to end it.

Yes, a NABU raid forced Zelensky to sack his chief of staff Andriy Yermak in November 28. Yes, Yermak was highly militarist, hated by Washington, and constantly pushed back against Trump’s peace plan, declaring right before his resignation that Ukraine would never abandon the territories it had lost to Russia (which is what Trump’s plan presupposes).

But Yermak was hated by everyone. As Politico put it in June 2025, the man was so unlikable that he managed to unite both Republicans and Democrats in despising him. Yermak certainly did bet on continuing the war forever, but that is not because of some sort of ideological affinity with the NABU and its ‘Sorosite’ community, but rather because endless war provides excellent conditions for spectacular corruption schemes.

But as I said, Yermak has not actually faced any real consequences. He’s had so much time unmolested that I’m sure he has destroyed all possible evidence linking him to the corruption, found some excellent legal representatives, and worked on a fantastic defence plan. He himself is a very experienced lawyer, after all.

It’s hard to shake the feeling that Yermak was made into a massive scapegoat, focusing all societal anger at wartime corruption on him. Sure, he was responsible, but so was Zelensky. Anyway, Yermak didn’t face any consequences, and continues to pay Zelensky nightly visits at his home residence. Yermakites continue rising up to top positions of power. It’s all a bit of a farce, in other words.

I’ve even listened to pro-NABU journalists at the western-funded Ukrainska Pravda say, with approval, that the purpose of the NABU is precisely to let off public steam over corruption. The existence of the NABU and its flashy raids, even if it doesn’t succeed in ending corruption, reassures Ukrainians enough to reduce the risks of a large scale uprising against elite corruption, like in 2004 or 2014.

I wouldn’t be so sure of that, but the logic is clear. Now that Ukraine has been programmed into the nationalist, neoliberal paradise that the 2014 ‘revolution’ fought for, they don’t want any more revolutions.

The final reason why I don’t think the NABU was acting on Trump’s orders to put pressure on Zelensky in signing a peace deal is chronological. First the NABU caused the corruption scandal, then Trump pushed with his peace deal. Then the NABU quite abruptly stopped publicizing compromising information on Zelensky’s inner circle. The November 28 raid on Yermak was the last real event related to the affair.

That’s probably because the NABU and the euro-atlanticist ecosystem is represents does not want an end to the war. It was hence quite worried that it had actually weakened Zelensky too much, thereby helping their enemy Trump in pushing through the peace deal they hate so much.

Trump vs inertia

I think that what really makes the NABU question interesting is what it says about US global power. It doesn’t matter how radically different a new president is, how much he wants to transform US power abroad. I’m not a partisan of Trump’s, but I do think it is fair to say that he has quite different ideas of the US role in the world to the Democrats. And that he wanted the US to play a different role in eastern Europe.

But simply occupying the cockpit doesn’t make one the pilot. Ever since the ‘Vietnamization’ of the 70s, the US has increasingly subcontracted its foreign policy to others. Allies, proxies, puppets, there are many names for them. ‘Puppets’, I would say, is not exactly an accurate term. If they were really puppets, the new puppetmaster could force them to contort however he wanted them to.

The NABU and the dense network of NGOs and paramilitary groups that dominate Ukrainian politics aren’t puppets. They wouldn’t exist without the past few decades of western funding and media indoctrination, but they still aren’t puppets. That is, if we see the puppetmaster as Washington, no matter who is in power.

The state department, so to speak, created them with a particular aim — to reject all forms of Russian influence in Ukraine, to push Ukraine into NATO, to conduct all forms of covert and overt operations against Russia. After years, decades of living this role, these proxy forces can’t simply switch sides. Sure, some of them probably will in the future, given the opportunity.

But largely, Ukraine’s western-cultivated nationalist forces are under pressure not to accept peace deal with Russia. A post-peace Ukraine would see much less use for fanatical nationalists. Liberal nationalists often worry that a post-peace Ukraine would see ‘pro-Russian’ forces win elections.

What this means is that that the majority of Ukrainians want to see an end to a war that kills ordinary people in industrial capacities, plunging the rest into poverty. This would require some kind of detente with Russia. People who have spent the past decades urging just such a suicidal war would find themselves sidelined, or perhaps one day even persecuted.

Anyway, all that is to say that I don’t believe in the NABU-Trump alliance. The forces represented by the NABU would never take part in any peace conspiracy.

Gas princess

Now, onto Tymoshenko’s case in more detail. The complex geopolitical and political interests animating the NABU are also on full display here.