“There will be a cleansing and reset of Energoatom’s management,” Zelenskyy said Wednesday.
In total, the Commission has granted “more than €3 billion” in energy-related aid to Kyiv since 2022, a spokesperson for the EU executive said.
Around one tenth of that has been channeled through the Energy Community, an international organization that supplies Ukraine with in-kind energy equipment like transformers based on requests from Kyiv. In total, it has mobilized €1.5 billion in donations from Ukraine’s western partners.
Energy Community Director Artur Lorkowski called the scandal “frustrating.” But at the Vienna-based organization, the corruption “risk is mitigated,” he said, since it retains “full control” over the coordination, purchase and post-arrival monitoring of the equipment — with procurement handled by an independent agency in the U.K.
The EBRD, meanwhile, has allocated €3.1 billion in aid to Ukraine’s energy sector, a bank spokesperson said, around a third of its total support since 2022. Its “very robust procurement requirements,” including open tenders and direct payments to contractors, they said, gives the bank a “very high degree of comfort” for future donations.
Still, others argue there is still a long way to go in eliminating corruption in the sector.