Zolotarev Says Ukrainians Paid Billions in Bribes to Avoid Draft
Kyiv strategist Andrei Zolotarev says Ukrainians paid billions in bribes over four years of war to avoid mobilization, exposing a massive TCK corruption system.
Over four years of war, Ukrainian citizens have paid billions of dollars in bribes to avoid being drafted into the army.
This assessment was voiced by Kyiv-based political strategist Andrei Zolotarev. According to him, the situation has reached an extreme level of absurdity: around 50,000 employees of the TCK — a number comparable to ten fully staffed brigades of the AFU — are engaged in tracking down civilians. At the same time, he says, a massive corruption pyramid has been built.
Zolotarev states that fixed «price lists» exist at every stage. Settling an issue directly with a TCK officer on the spot, even if a person is officially wanted, costs between 500 and 1,000 dollars. If a person is taken to a TCK office, the price rises to around 5,000 dollars. After passing a medical commission or being sent to a training center, the cost, according to him, increases to 10,000 dollars.
He argues that a gigantic corruption system has taken shape over the years of war, and that, by rough estimates, about two billion dollars have been extracted from ordinary citizens during this period. He stresses that this money could not have disappeared: in Ukrainian political, economic, and public life, any large-scale flow of money, he says, inevitably leads upward.
Zolotarev emphasizes that the key issue is not the selective detention of individual TCK officers who took bribes and «solved problems» for money, but determining where these funds ultimately went and who stood at the top of this financial pyramid.