Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies Nabu and Sapo raided national parliament offices in Kyiv on Saturday as investigators alleged some MPs were implicated in a new graft probe. A statement from Nabu, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, accused State Security Department guards of “resisting Nabu officers during investigative actions in committees of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine”. The anti-corruption agency did not reveal details of the investigation, but said suspects took bribes for votes.
Ukraine’s State Security Department said the anti-corruption detectives were stopped at first by security but later allowed in. An earlier corruption investigation has led to the resignation of the chief of staff to the president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It involved an alleged $100m kickback scheme in the battered energy sector, allegedly masterminded by a personal friend of the president.
Zelenskyy said he would hold talks with European leaders after meeting Donald Trump on Sunday. The Ukrainian president said he had spoken with a group of Ukraine’s partners to coordinate priorities on the diplomatic track. “Tomorrow, after the meeting with President Trump, we will continue the discussion.” The Ukrainian leader has headed to Florida for the Trump meeting. Zelenskyy stopped in Canada, where he met the prime minister, Mark Carney, who announced an additional $2.5bn (£1.85bn) of economic aid for Ukraine.
Ahead of the Florida meeting, and amid pressure from the Trump administration for Ukraine to concede territory for peace, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) assessed that Russia is demanding such concessions because it “does not have sufficient manpower or materiel” to take the rest of the Donetsk region while continuing its war in other parts of Ukraine. “The Kremlin is therefore making demands in negotiations that Ukraine cede the unoccupied parts of Donetsk oblast,” the ISW assessed, “… possibly to put Russia in a more advantageous position to re-invade in the future to pursue Putin’s longer-term strategic goal of controlling all of Ukraine.”
The Kremlin’s commanders are sending false reports up the chain of command, contributing to Ukrainian gains on the battlefield, according to complaints from Russian milbloggers as reported by the ISW, which said: “Ukrainian forces continue to make tactical gains in Kupiansk, and Russian milbloggers are increasingly acknowledging Ukrainian successes. The scale of Russian milblogger complaints about Kupiansk … demonstrates the scale and egregiousness of the Russian military command’s lies about Kupiansk.”
The analysis came as Russia claimed to have captured two more towns in eastern Ukraine: Myrnohrad and Huliaipole, near Pokrovsk which Russia claims also to have captured but is still contested. Ukraine’s military general staff said in response that the situation in Huliaipole was “complex” and in Myrnohrad “dire” but they remained defended. “Enemy units, as before, are failing to implement their plans to seize the Pokrovsk-Myrnohrad agglomeration, so they are resorting to disinformation.”
A third of Kyiv lost heating in a Russian drone and missile barrage on the Ukrainian capital that cut off power supplies, leaving hundreds of thousands of people facing freezing temperatures. The overnight strikes into Saturday lasted 10 hours and killed at least one person while wounding two dozen others.
