The Duran Podcast - Zaporozhye accelerated collapse. Zelensky corruption scandal

Episode Date: November 15, 2025

Zaporozhye accelerated collapse. Zelensky corruption scandal

All right, Alexander, let's talk about what is happening in Ukraine and let's start things off with the military situation. And then maybe we can talk about the corruption scandal, the Energaatom, energy corruption scandal that is dogging the Olensky regime and has implicated his buddy, his buddy from his entertainment days, his business partner and buddy. a man who they referred to as Zelensky's wallet, Mr. Minditch, who has bolted. He is no longer in Ukraine. But anyway, we'll get to that story in the second part of the video. But let's talk about the situation along the entire front line, Alexander, every day it seems like there's a new collapse on the front line in Ukraine. You have Kupyansk in the Harkov region. You have Mirnograd-Pakrosk in the Donetsk region.

You have Zaporoje, which is collapsing. You have Herzl, which not many people are talking about, but that's a situation that is also developing. You have fighting in Sumi in Sevesk, Liman, pick an area, and there seems to be some sort of Ukraine collapse going on. Absolutely. And again, it's extraordinary how. even now, people in the West don't seem to be able to accept this.

I mean, there's been a bizarre article in the economist saying the situation is still under control and Putin has no clear route to victory and the Ukrainians are holding out. Even as you correctly say, the military situation is going rapidly bad. Now, just to say something, the corruption scan. and the military collapse are interconnected with each other. If Ukraine was winning, we would not be having this kind of corruption scandal. The fact that there is a corruption scandal is a product of the fact that everything in Ukraine is starting to go wrong and is starting to go very, wrong, very, very fast.

Let's talk quickly about the military situation. We've already discussed Pachlovsk, we've already discussed Kupyansk in S. several programmes. Now, suffice to say, that the cauldrons in both places are still there, but they have very significantly shrunk in size since we last touched on this. I touched on this, including with Scott have calibrated a short time ago. Both of these cordons have been reduced. I personally believe that Pachosk, the battle there is completely ended. I think Pachosk is fully under Russian control. There are still Ukrainian troops in Mernograd. As we're making this program, there are reports that the Russians are now clearing Mernograd. That story is almost

finished. I think Kupiansk is exactly the same. The Battle of Kupiansk is also mostly finished. There is still a force of Ukrainian troops, apparently. out in the fields, in the wind and the cold and the rain and the mud who are still surrounded, Zelensky won't let them lay down their arms or refuses to authorize them to lay down their arms. They're apparently individual surrenders, but I think that battle is over, going to be over very soon. The big story, and the big story in Ukraine, by the way, now is Zaporosia region, where the military, the defense lines are collapsing. The Russians are advancing at extraordinary speed.

Again, we did a program recently with Scott from Calibrated, and he discussed how the Russians have advanced. I think it was by capture 25 square kilometers a day before we did that program. The momentum of the advance has accelerated, further since then. There are apparently no Ukrainian defences. The Ukrainian military are themselves saying that they are retreating. They always say this retreating to more defendable lines, but there don't seem to be any defendable lines. It looks as if their drone operators

are barely functioning in this area any longer. And it looks as if the Russians are just just outside now the town of Guglopoli, and it could very well be that we will see the Russians either besiege that town or perhaps even storm it very quickly. And you mention Herson. Nobody talks about Herson, but a clear indicator that things are very bad there is that guess who visited Herson, or did he didn't maybe exactly visit Herson because we saw pictures of him outside Herson, you know, the entrance of Herson with a big board saying, you know, here, this is where you enter the city of Herson, all of that. Zelensky himself.

And one of the infallible signs that things are going wrong in a particular area is when Zelensky visits it. And the fact that he has now visited Herson is a sign that I think he's becoming worried about the situation in Herson itself. The reason he's worried about Hassan is not only because, of course, it's recaptured by the Russians, would be a massive prestige blow. But it brings the Russians closer to two places that particularly concern him. Odessa to the west. Hassan is beyond the river, so it brings the Russians closer to Odessa.

And Krivoj Rorg to the north. and of course Krivojrog is Zelensky's hometown. So he's particularly nervous about Herzl. But the fact is he lacks the troops, he lacks the drone operators, he lacks the weapons to hold the Russians back anywhere on the front lines anymore. So an escalating, intensifying collapse right across the front lines, exactly as you said. Will the Russian Ministry of Defense announce soon that they've captured Pakroska, Mirnograd? Do you think they're going to announce that?

And when they do, how does Zelensky in the collective West and the media, how do they cover over that? Well, I think the Russian Defense Ministry will, and they will also announce the same about Kupyensk as well when they say it. And they will try to downplay the significance of it. They've been saying repeatedly that Prakosk is this enormously important strategic place, which the Russians have failed to capture. Then what they will say, what they always say is that the Russians captured it after a siege lasting one year or two years, intense fighting, massive Russian losses. By now the strategic significance of this place has diminished.

They'll come up with some narrative to explain. They always do, and that the Ukrainians are moving back to more secure lines or something of that kind. What we're more likely to see, especially out of Prakosk falls, I suspect, is we're going to see another big panic like we saw in the West after the fall of Avdewka. It was the fall of Avdeafka in February 24 that made the West for the first time start to realize that project Ukraine is indeed going to fail. And we had a period, if you remember, when Macron was talking about deploying French troops to Ukraine. And we also had the Biden

administrations and the British government's decision to start long-range missile strikes against Russia. There was a period of several weeks of a pretty big panic. I think we're going to see exactly the same, despite all of this confident rhetoric about everything being under control, we're going to see a similar big panic after the fall of Pakrosk, which to be clear is a much more important place than Avdavka was. Avdaevka was important because it meant that the siege of Donetsk city had ended and because its fall opened the way to Pakrovsk. And, and because it's full, opened the way to Pakrovsk and to the west to Zaporosia and all of those places. The fall of Pakrovsk opens the way to the Nipa, brings about the moment when the whole of Dombas,

the battle, the great struggle for Dombas ends. It would be very difficult for the West to pretend even to itself that this really doesn't matter. Yeah, that's my point. Yeah. You know, Zelensky's been saying for a while now that everything is under control. There are 60 Russian soldiers in Kupyansk that are going to get mopped up, and there's 300 soldiers in Bakrofs that they're going to deal with.

And the narrative from the West and from the media of the West is that this is a stalled war. Russia's not making any progress. Russia has effectively lost. Putin has not accomplished his goals and will never accomplish his goals. And here you have the Russian military capturing Kupyansk, Midnokrad, Pakrovsk, and other areas along the front line. So everything that Olensky has been saying and everything that he's been passing on to Keith Kellogg and to Rubio, who have then been passing it on to Trump. And Trump has been basing his entire policy with regards to Russia and Ukraine on the information that he is getting from from these guys.

is fake, it's false, it's a lie. And the whole world's going to, the whole world sees it. It's going to be impossible not to see this. You can't ignore this. Russia is going to have these regions, right? And then after these regions, it's going to move much quicker. Yes. Right?

Because you're not looking at the fortifications that existed before. You know, you're looking at more open terrain. So does Trump start to walk back his policy with regards to Russia and Ukraine? Does he start to ignore what Kellogg and Rubio have been advising him? I doubt that. But does he do it in light of the facts on the ground, the reality on the ground? Or does he do, as you said, does he pull a Biden and say, you know what? But now I need to send the long-range missiles in the same way that Biden green-lit the

attackos. No. Does Trump then green light? Either the Tomahawks, either the Taurus missiles, whatever, a long-range missile, let's just call it that. In any rational world, he would do the first. He would say, look, I've been given false information by Zelensky, by Rubia, by Kellogg, by Radcliffe, by the Defense Intelligence Agency, by the military.

military in the Pentagon. They told me a whole fairy tale in the summer and the early autumn that the Russians were stalled. The person who told me the truth was Putin. And from this moment on, I should be listening, well, first to Putin, maybe, but also to all those other people within my administration, probably Tulsi Gabbard, we can guess about others, who have probably been telling him, don't listen to what these characters have been doing. telling you. In any rational world, that is what Trump would do. As we've learned, the world is not a rational place. I think what is going to happen is that if there is a collapse, in fact, when the collapse happens, we are going to see a huge panic, a whale coming out of Europe,

a whale coming from the neocons. They're going to be telling Trump, the situation is, Now critical, if we lose Ukraine, the United States will suffer a colossal blow to its prestige. Our entire position in Europe is under threat. Your presidency is going to be discredited. You will be blamed for the defeat. It'll be your fall of Saigon moment. You've got to pull every lever, pull every string to prevent this happening. So you've got to double, treble, quadruple your sanctions against Russia.

You've got to start seizing tankers carrying Russian oil on the high seas. You've got to deploy the tomahawks to Ukraine. You can already see people in the United States, Congress people now coming out and say, we need to send the tomahawks to Ukraine. Don't worry about potential escalation from the Russians. The Lithuanian foreign minister has just said that. You don't need to worry about that. You must, however, prevent this collapse in Ukraine at all costs. And I think that we will see exactly what happened in the spring, in the winter and spring of 2024, a big escalation.

It will happen all over again and only on a much bigger scale this time. That, I think, is far in a way the most likely outcome of the fall of Pakrovsk and the collapse of all of these places. The big thing, the key event is if Trump goes along with the pressure, which there will definitely be to declare some kind of no-fly zone in Western Ukraine or to support deployment of European troops there. I hope that that is a red line he won't cross because if he does do that, then the disaster we are in is going to deepen much further. And we are going to be in an incredibly dangerous situation altogether. But I'm afraid escalation seems to me far more likely as a response from Trump and the administration to what we're seeing now.

Yeah, they're going to tell him this is your war now, and you're going to be blamed for it. And it is his war. It is, yeah. And it is his war, absolutely. That's not a lie. But, yeah, the Nial Khan is going to blame him for everything that's happening. And they're going to say you didn't escalate enough. Yes.

That's going to be what they say. Listening to Lithuania, the president to the United States taken foreign policy advice from Lithuania. But there you have it. So the corruption scandal in Ukraine. Energe Atom and at 100 million dollar kickback graft corruption scandal in order to secure contracts. Energe Atom was giving kickbacks. One of the main leaders of this group, there are seven people, I believe in total, that Nabu,

which is the agency that the United States put together, right? So this is a collective West agency that they put together to fight corruption in Ukraine back in like 2014 or 2015. And after the Maidan coup from the United States, they put together Nabu to fight corruption. And they have seven people that they've identified. I believe they have like four or five people already in custody. The ringleader is Zeletsky's business partner, entertainment, cohort buddy. I don't know. They had production companies together.

They had a whole bunch of entertainment business going on, right? And this guy also had a scouting, entertainment scouting agency, which ended up becoming a drone manufacturer, which the New York Times actually talked about in an article a couple of weeks ago called Firepoint, which did secure a billion dollar contract to manufacture drones and to also put together the Flamingo missile or take a part in the production of the Flamingo. Lomingo missile. Anyway, this guy, Mindich, he has fled. The latest reports claim that he is in Israel. That is what I read from Politico. He is actually the guy, Alexander. Get this. In that article from Politico, they claim that it is Mindich who introduced Zelensky to Kolomoisky. That's interesting. Servant of the people and everything there. So the Ukraine media, They're talking about this nonstop. We've had resignations in the Zelensky government.

And this is a big scandal. Even though the amount of money in the grand scheme of things, 100 million, is peanuts. When you take a step back and think about all the hundreds of billions that have poured into Ukraine, unaudited, unaccounted, hundreds and hundreds of billions. Nabu and this scandal is focused on this hundred million in this energy company. Your thoughts? Right. Well, the first thing to say is, you know, corruption in Ukraine, people taking kickbacks. Who would have thought of it? I mean, you know, this is a country which we all assume there's this perfect law-abiding, extraordinary place. I mean, you know, we hear all the day, every day

about, you know, how it's champions, democracy and human rights and the rule of law and all of these things. The example, Ursula and Kayakhalis said this is the example of human rights and democracy. Exactly. They're fighting for our democracy's Alexander. Well, indeed, absolutely. So as I said, this is really astonishing that all of this has happened. But putting all that aside, I mean, you're absolutely correct.

This isn't, these aren't just small sums of money compared to me, you know, the money flows into Ukraine. These are insignificant sums of money. I mean, to you and to me, a hundred million dollars is an awful lot. Relative to what has been flowing into Ukraine, it is, it is pitiful. I mean, it's a rounding up, rounding up error. I mean, it's not even that, actually. It's minimal. And that basically tells you instantly and at once that this is a political scandal. There is a political dimension to the scandal. If anybody really wanted to get to grips with the realities of what has been happening,

the corruption in Ukraine, I mean, we wouldn't be talking about sums on this scale. We would be talking about billions, not hundreds of millions. So, and it wouldn't just be golden toilets, which is quite an astonishing thing in itself, by the way. I mean, I cannot understand why anybody would want the golden toilet. But anyway, let's not get into that. We wouldn't be talking about that. We would be talking about far bigger, darker, much more terrible things on a far bigger scale than anything that we are seeing. So this tells you that this is a political scandal.

in Kiev, any scandal of this kind is by definition a political scandal. Now, the one thing about this scandal, which I'm not absolutely clear about, is what its ultimate objectives are. To me, it looks like somebody is attempting to pin all allegations. of corruption on a small group of people close to Zelensky. They're talking about relatively small sums of money. They're trying to keep us looking away from where the really big problems are. Because we talked about hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions. So we don't want to talk about that.

So we talk about golden toilets, hundreds of billions here, a bit of trickery with drones, a bit of trickery with resoups, a V2, Rockets for the Second World War, which is what the Flamingo missile basically is. We talk about these things rather than go after the really important big money that has basically gone into Ukraine and disappeared from it. And of course, it's also a very, very good way of not talking about the situation on the front lines, which you talked about earlier in the program, which is collapsing in ways which put the whole viability of Ukraine in jeopardy too. So you talk about all of this and you distract attention from, as I said, the big financial scandals and the collapse on the front lines.

The only uncertainty for me about this is the extent to which the ultimate point of this whole operation. is to get rid of Zelensky himself, whether this ultimately targets Zelensky. Now, Zelensky's credibility ought, in theory, to be completely shot to pieces. He's been talking for the last couple of months about how Ukraine is holding its own, how the Russians aren't making any progress, how everything in Ukraine is firm and strong, and we see that this is all completely untrue and absolute and utter nonsense. There'd been various rumours at various times that the United States, which as you absolutely rightly say, created Nabu has been looking for ways to get rid of him.

So it may be that the ultimate end point of this whole operation and the reason why members of his own entourage, because that's what they are, are being targeted, is in order to come after Zelensky himself. But I still have difficulty believing that all of these people who have been hugging Zelensky in Europe, the Europeans, the neocons in Washington, Lindsay Grant and company really have decided to part company with Zelensky himself. And I suspect that at some level, they probably have enough understanding of Ukrainian realities to know that Zelensky himself is removed from the scene, then you will get a political chaos and collapse there. Because the only figure of even notional legitimacy left in the political system is Zelensky himself.

And of course, if you turn around and tell the Western public, well, this man who we've been hailing as the superhero, the man who is holding Ukraine together, the new Churchill, all of those things is actually a compulsive liar and a financial cheat and a fraud. If they start turning around and telling the Western public that, then it seems to me the whole credibility of the Ukraine project, such as it is, collapses utterly. And again, I can't quite believe that that is what they want to do. Yeah, I agree with you. I still haven't been able to figure out exactly where all this is heading, or what the purpose of all of this is, because a hundred million, once again, like you said, is nothing compared to the hundreds and hundreds of billions that have been poured into Ukraine and that have been lost.

Gone into a black hole that's unaccounted and not audited. At first, I thought maybe this is Zelensky going after his one-time buddy. And maybe now he just wants to clear the deck like he did with Kolomoisky. Right. You know, Kolomoisky made him. And then when Olensky got powerful, he basically threw Kolomoisky in prison, right, got rid of him. Yes. And I thought that maybe this is what he's trying to do with Mindich.

But then I thought, you know, he tried to dissolve Nabu, or at least to take Nabu and to fold it underneath his control because he wanted this investigation to go away. That's obvious. So that leads me to believe that this wasn't about Zelensky trying to consolidate more power and trying to remove any loose ends, even if that loose end is his. his good friend and his business partner. So, yeah, I think you're right. This is probably some sort of palace intrigue, oligarch fighting,

maybe even some collective West figures that maybe they want to position themselves in a place where they're more able to collect the last sums of money that are going to come in, the 140 billion or Zelensky's talking about 250 billion now that he wants. not only the Russian frozen assets, but he wants more. So maybe these are people who are just trying to position themselves in a better place to receive that money, to manage the really big sums. So, you know, take a look at this $100 million, which is, you know, a cup of coffee as we fight to see who's going to control the big hundreds of billions that are going to

come into Ukraine in the next couple of months. I'm sure there's a connection to what's going on here with the story. that have been running against Zillusioni, say from the Wall Street Journal, which just a couple of days ago, once again talked about how Zulugni was the mastermind behind Nord Stream. So I think maybe those are the rival parties that are duking it out. You have Zelensky and his group, and then you have Zalusini, I don't know, Klichko, Poroshenko, these guys. So that could be a dynamic. But the technique that we're seeing here is something that is used often in Greece. that you create a mini scandal and you put some people in prison or you put an investigation

together in the case of Greece. I'm thinking, you know, 10 years ago, Bassoc and all of that. And it distracts away from the big money that has gone missing or the big scandal that could unfold, but no one's paying attention to any of that because everyone's focused on these smaller scandals. Absolutely. I think you're absolutely right. Again, it's very difficult to work out who the various players in this intrigue are.

And in some ways maybe, you know, there isn't very much value in trying to, in trying to work it out. Only if Zelensky himself, only of his position, is undermined, then I think that then it becomes more important. But just to say, when I first heard about this. I thought exactly the same as you. I thought it was probably Zelensky, who was the ultimate instigator of this, because publicly at least he's backing this.

And it's not unlike things that he's done in the past. I think too many people close to him are now being implicated. And you're starting to see people like Umarov and others, the former defense minister, being basically sent away to make it plausible. that it is in fact Zelensky. It seems to me it is more likely that it's opponents of Zelensky who are involved.

But when we say opponents of Zelensky, everybody in Ukraine in the political system is implicated in this, is implicated in this corruption. In all sorts of ways. And I think coming back, I think the Greek

example that you've given is a very good one, by the way. Probably more and more people could see that the writing is indeed on the wall. So you find some small-time player, which is what this person looks like relative to some of the others. You find some small-time player. You create a big appearance of a scandal about him. You talk about what most people would think are lots of money,

hundreds of millions of dollars. And of course you don't talk about the hundreds of billions, which are the ones that have really disappeared. And to understand how bad the situation is, look at Ukraine. What has, what have all of those hundreds of billions of dollars and euros that have gone into Ukraine? What have they left? actually physically behind. What roads have they built? What factor is that they resulted in? What, what, yeah, and we're looking now before even February 2020, but of course even more so, since February 22. I mean, even weapon systems and things of that kind. I mean, it's difficult to really see that all of this money has actually left anything substantive behind. It's exactly the same as Afghanistan, if you remember, something like a trillion dollars went

into Afghanistan. And it didn't even result in a railway line, a single railway line being built. And all of the roads that there are in Afghanistan were built before in the 1960s by the Russians and nothing apparently has changed there. So the fact that there's been so much money going in and it's leading so little behind, That really tells you the reality of what project Ukraine has been all about all along. And like you said, and the comparison with Greece is spot on, I think. Somebody's trying to make you look away from that.

Yeah. Zelensky doesn't even get up out of bed for a hundred million. Yeah. And you're throwing stories about golden toilets, which of course attract attention. And it makes it all very important. Birthday parties and his apartment and surveillance. And was it in suitcases at cash? And you talk about all of that.

And it makes good television. But it doesn't really actually come anywhere close to looking at the underlying realities of what has happened. All right. We'll end the video there. The durand.com. We are on XRumble and Telegram. Take care.

And on Substack as well, by the way. It's upstack as well. Take care.