Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has fired all regional military recruitment chiefs due to allegations of widespread graft. Ahead of the drastic move, all recruitment offices in Ukraine had been audited. According to the State Investigation Bureau, a total of 112 criminal cases were opened against representatives of recruitment offices, with 33 cases of suspected misconduct and 15 lawsuits launched.

“This system should be run by people who know exactly what war is and why cynicism and bribery during war is treason,” Zelenskyy said after meeting with the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine.

Going forward, Zelenskyy said, all recruitment chiefs will be replaced by “soldiers who have been at the front or who cannot be in the trenches because they have lost their health, lost their limbs.”

Bribes and fake medical certificates

This is not the president’s first attempt to tackle corruption in Ukraine. In recent weeks, several recruitment heads were mired in scandals. The former military commissioner of Odesa, Yevhen Borisov, for example, is accused of having accepted bribes and thereby amassed the equivalent of several million euros since the beginning of the war against Russia. According to media reports, Borisov is also alleged to have purchased luxury real estate in Spain, and expensive cars for relatives. He was dismissed from his post and arrested when these allegations surfaced.

The audit of Ukrainian enlistment offices also revealed that, among other things, the recruitment chief of Oblast Zakarpattia, in western Ukraine, had used soldiers in the construction of his private estate. And in the city of Rivne,