NABU investigation revealed the depth of corruption and nepotism in the nationalised Sense Bank

While EU institutions and member states were overwhelmed last week with providing Ukraine a 90 billion euro loan and endorsing the 20^th sanctions package against Russia, the Ukrainian political elite, at the same time, were watching a bit of a different movie, writes our NABU source.

Journalists and members of the Ukrainian parliament published recordings made by Ukrainian National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) investigators in an apartment on Hrushevskoho Street in Kyiv during the summer of 2025, which disclosed notorious details of Ukrainian corruption in time of war.

No one in Ukraine questioned if recordings were true or not. First of all, everyone in Kyiv believed they knew very well what had allegedly been happening over the last few years in the entourage of Ukrainian President Zelensky, so nothing new for Kyiv insiders was published. But still, to listen to details – in Russian, by the way – of how the most important political decisions of the state during the war were made was really entertaining and often really shocking. Secondly, all the conversations in the private apartment of an Israeli citizen, who was the closest business partner of President Zelensky, were later followed by decisions of the president or the Ukrainian government, which reconfirmed that what was discussed there later was taken as instructions to act by the highest political level.

Released in batches by Ukrainska Pravda, the so-called Mindich tapes have convulsed Ukrainian public life and sent shockwaves through the country's political and financial establishment. “Send two [million of USD as a kickback] to Moscow”, “I speak to Vova [Zelensky] before Shabatt” or “50% [of kickbacks] to me” became already top common phrases among Ukrainian journalists or politicians.   The latest part of the recordings concerns Sense Bank - once Alfa-Bank Ukraine, now state property - and raises questions that extend far beyond Kyiv.

Mindichgate

The Mindich affair – called 'Mindichgate' in Ukraine – is the largest corruption investigation under President Volodymyr Zelensky. At its alleged centre is Tymur Mindich, a sanctioned businessman close to Zelensky's inner circle, suspected of orchestrating a corruption scheme valued at some $100 million centred on the state nuclear energy monopoly Energoatom. Nine suspects have been charged. Mindich himself fled to Israel in November 2025. The case also allegedly ensnares, at various levels of criminal exposure, former Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Chernyshov, former Energy and Justice Minister Herman Halushchenko. Under investigation but not yet charged are Andriy Yermak, Zelensky's long-time chief of staff, and Rustem Umerov, the current Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council.

The new tapes published in late April 2026 extend the scandal directly into Sense Bank. They purport to record an alleged telephone conversation on 9 May 2025 between Oleksandr Tsukerman – described by NABU investigators as an alleged co-organiser of the corruption schemes within the Mindich network and a key figure in its alleged money-laundering infrastructure – and Vasyl Vesely, a businessman who had become an adviser to Sense Bank's management following nationalisation. Earlier investigative reporting by Ukrainska Pravda had already identified Vesely as the de facto "overseer" of Sense Bank on behalf of the presidential office, a figure without whose approval no significant decision was made.

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In the recorded conversation, Vesely enumerates the specific individuals he wishes to see appointed to Sense Bank's nine-member supervisory board: "Piotr Nowak, Jerzy Shugayev, Eva de Falck, Oleksandr Shchur, Mykola Hladyshenko, and Oleg Mistiuk". He and Tsukerman then proceed to discuss the arithmetic of board capture: "There should be five or six of our members there, in this whole crowd of nine," Vesely allegedly states. Forty days later, on 18 June 2025, Ukraine's Cabinet of Ministers appointed precisely those six individuals to the supervisory board of Sense Bank. The tapes also contain references to "Khirurg" – the Surgeon – an alias Ukrainian investigative media identify as Andriy Yermak.

The institutional consequences have followed swiftly. Mykola Hladyshenko, the supervisory board chairman whose name appeared on Vesely's wish list, suspended himself from his duties on 6 May 2026 following the tapes' publication, citing the need for public circumstances to be clarified. He denied knowing Mindich or Tsukerman, while acknowledging an acquaintance with Vesely and a prior business relationship with him. The National Bank of Ukraine announced it had initiated a review of Hladyshenko's compliance with independence criteria and separately began an inquiry into whether Sense Bank's CEO, Oleksiy Stupak, meets qualification requirements. Zelensky, in a statement that struck many observers as tone-deaf given the circumstances, confirmed at a Cabinet meeting on 7 May that Sense Bank "must be privatised this year," pressing for a sale that critics argue would reward the very capture the tapes appear to document.

Parliament Takes Notice

Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada has not treated the matter as routine. A Temporary Inquiry Commission (TIC) on economic security summoned senior officials to testify, including former presidential first aide Serhiy Shefir and Umerov, on 13 May 2026. The commission requested the Prime Minister, the Finance Ministry and the National Bank to investigate potential outside influence on Sense Bank's management and called for the suspension of both Hladyshenko and CEO Stupak during the audit. The TIC's chairman framed the summons in blunt terms: new tapes showed Mindich issuing instructions to Umerov when the latter was defence minister, and the parliament intended to get to the bottom of it.

Former Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine Kyrylo Shevchenko – himself a figure of controversy who left Ukraine in September 2022 under a cloud of corruption allegations and is the subject of an Austrian investigation – has nonetheless contributed a pointed public commentary on the tapes' significance. His thesis: the recordings reveal that the locus of economic decision-making in Ukraine has migrated from legitimate state institutions to criminal networks. Whatever one makes of the source, the argument finds uncomfortable support in the documented facts. A board whose composition was dictated in a phone call between a corruption suspect and the alleged creature of the presidential chief of staff is difficult to square with the governance standards that Western donors and international financial institutions have made a condition of continued support.

Sanctions, Aid, and Accountability

The Sense Bank affair cannot be insulated from its geopolitical context. Western sanctions were devised as instruments of strategic pressure on Russia – a means of imposing real economic costs on figures deemed to sustain Vladimir Putin's war machine. Ukraine's own sanctions, which provided the legal basis for the nationalisation, were presented as aligned measures in the same campaign. The claim – advanced forcefully by Ambassador Markarova in Washington throughout 2023 – was that seizing these assets served the collective interest of the democratic world.

If the Mindich tapes are authentic – and Ukrainian parliamentarians, after reviewing the evidence, have not seriously questioned that authenticity – then the narrative of righteous expropriation is badly compromised. A bank seized from sanctioned Russian oligarchs appears to have been captured almost immediately by domestic criminal networks with access to the highest levels of the Ukrainian state. The suspicion, increasingly voiced in Ukrainian investigative media, is that the institution became a vehicle for laundering the proceeds of domestic corruption, including funds that may have originated in Western aid flows directed to Ukraine. While no forensic audit has yet been published to substantiate the money-laundering allegations in detail, the structural conditions – a state-owned bank with a board appointed by criminal fiat, operating outside effective institutional oversight – are precisely those that enable such schemes.

The broader damage is systemic. ABH Holdings' $1 billion ICSID arbitration against Ukraine was already testing the resilience of the nationalisation's legal rationale. The investment treaty arbitration will now proceed against the backdrop of evidence that the post-nationalisation governance of the bank was allegedly orchestrated by figures under criminal investigation. Ukraine's lawyers will be hard-pressed to argue that the expropriation served a legitimate public purpose when the public record suggests it served the private purposes of a corruption network. Beyond the courtroom, every Western government and multilateral institution that endorsed or tacitly accepted the sanctions framing must now reckon with whether that endorsement was based on complete information.

The sanctions institution itself – already under mounting pressure as the Fridman-Aven designations were partially challenged in the EU Court of Justice, which in April 2024 found insufficient evidence for two of the three grounds underpinning early EU measures against the pair – cannot afford the reputational injury of association with what the tapes appear to describe. Sanctions derive their authority from the perception that they are principled instruments of international law, applied consistently and for verifiable public purposes. That authority is not easily rebuilt once it is spent.

The Path Forward

The appropriate response to this scandal is not concealment. The impulse to manage the narrative - to depict the Mindich tapes as Russian disinformation, to accelerate privatisation before an independent audit can take place, or to allow the parliamentary commission to be neutered by executive obstruction – would compound the original wrong and store up far greater damage for later. Ukraine's partners in Washington, Brussels, and London have invested enormous political capital in arguing that aid to Ukraine is an investment in democratic governance. That argument cannot survive the revelation that governance failures of this magnitude were swept under the carpet.

The necessary steps are demanding but not mysterious. An independent forensic audit of Sense Bank's operations since nationalisation – conducted by an external firm with no connection to the Ukrainian state – should be commissioned immediately, with its findings made public. The parliamentary inquiry commission must be given full access to evidence and protected from interference. Individuals named in the tapes who remain in positions of authority should be suspended pending the outcome of investigations. If the suspicion that Western aid was channelled through the bank to private accounts proves well-founded, Ukraine's international partners have not merely a right but an obligation to pursue recovery and accountability.

None of this is. The temptation to defer hard internal reckonings until the war is over is understandable. But the lesson of post-conflict reconstruction in every comparable context is that corruption networks, left undisturbed, harden into permanent structures. The boil must be cut now. The alternative – allowing the scandal to fester until it is weaponised by those who wish to discredit anti-Russian sanctions and the entire architecture of Western support – is far more costly than the short-term disruption of honest accountability.

Ukraine's greatest strategic asset is not its military capability or its territorial position. It is the moral clarity of its cause that a democracy has the right to defend. The Sense Bank muddies the clarity. Restoring it requires exactly what the rule of law demands in every jurisdiction: investigation, prosecution, and transparency, without fear or favour – including when the trail leads close to power.

Photo by Glib Albovsky on Unsplash

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