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Ukraine’s top military commander said Thursday he met with troops deployed on the front lines in a key eastern city besieged by Russian forces, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky grapples with the fallout from a corruption scandal that has engulfed his administration.
After Zelensky’s justice and energy ministers stepped down on Wednesday amid an investigation into alleged energy sector corruption, the government fired the vice president of Energoatom, the state-owned nuclear power company that investigators believed was at the center of the kickback scheme.
Prime Minister Yulia Sviridenko said late Wednesday that the heads of Energoatom’s finance, legal and procurement departments and an adviser to Energoatom’s president had also been dismissed.
A Kyiv The court has begun hearing evidence from anti-corruption watchdog agencies, whose 15-month investigation, including 1,000 hours of wiretaps, has detained five people and implicated seven others in the scheme that allegedly netted nearly $100 million.
Zelensky’s co-owner of the Kvartal 95 media production company, Timur Mindich, is the suspected mastermind of the plot. His whereabouts are unknown.
The investigation has raised questions about what the country’s top officials knew about the plan. It also awakened memories of Zelensky’s effort to undermine Ukraine’s anti-corruption watchdog last summer. He backed down after widespread street protests and pressure in Ukraine European UnionWhich has inspired the country to remove the prevalent corruption.
While Ukrainians expressed anger and disbelief at the unfolding scandal, the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen Said the European Union on Thursday would loan Ukraine 6 billion euros ($7 billion) and promised more money for Kiev.
“We will meet Ukraine’s financial needs for the next two years,” he said in a speech at the European Parliament.
The European Union and other foreign partners have poured money into Ukraine’s energy sector. Russia has continually bombed the power grid, requiring frequent repairs.
The EU is considering how it can bring more money to Ukraine, either by seizing frozen Russian assets, raising money on the capital markets, or by having some of the 27 EU countries raise the money themselves.
Russian President Vladimir Putin Von der Leyen said he “thinks he can outmaneuver us in the fight for Ukraine’s future”, nearly four years after Russia launched an all-out invasion of its neighbor.
“And that’s a clear miscalculation,” she said. “So now is the time, with a new impetus, to buy time and unlock Putin’s cynical effort to get them to the negotiating table.”
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s top military commander, Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, visited units fighting to capture Pokrovsk in the eastern Donetsk region and personally coordinated operations, he said on the messaging app Telegram.
Ukrainian soldiers are engaged in street fighting with Russian forces in the city and are fighting to avoid being surrounded by a larger Russian army as Russia’s war of attrition slowly spreads across the countryside.
Sirski said the main goal was to gain control over some areas of the city, as well as protect logistics routes and create new routes to supply troops and evacuate the wounded.
“There is no question of Russian control over the city of Pokrovsk or operational siege of the Ukraine Defense Forces in the area,” Sirsky said.
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Sam McNeil contributed to this report from Brussels.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine