In a case of life imitating art, Zelensky ended up winning the real-world Ukrainian presidency just three-and-a-half years after the show’s launch, with more than 73% of the vote. The show starred Zelensky as a humble history teacher whose anti-corruption rant in class is filmed by a student, goes viral online, and wins him national office.
Kholomoisky’s relationship with Zelensky goes back to around 2012, when Zelensky and his partners in a television production company, Kvartal 95, began making regular content for TV stations owned by Kholomoisky.Ī comedian and actor who had been famous since the 2000s, Zelensky began his political rise a few years after taking on a starring role in the political satire “Servant of the People,” which began airing on Kholomoisky’s network in 2015. This appointment raises questions as to whether Burisma served as a CIA-front operation that was designed to help finance the anti-Russia militias in eastern Ukraine. Black was a career CIA officer who served as director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center following the September 11 attacks. Six months after Hunter Biden departed, Burisma appointed Cofer Black to its board-a position that he maintains. Then-Governor Kholomoisky with Yuriy Bereza, head of the Dnipro Battalion in March 2014.
Russian media, quoted in State Department emails, referred to Burisma as “part of Kholomoisky’s financial empire.” The New York Post reported that Kholomoisky had a “controlling interest” in Burisma Holdings-the Ukrainian energy company which employed Hunter Biden as a board member for $50,000 per month. These units included the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion which terrorized the people of eastern Ukraine, along with the Dnipro and Aidar battalions, which were sometimes deployed as personal thug squads to protect Kholomoisky’s financial interests. According to Oleg Noginsky, the president of the Suppliers Customs Union, after Ukraine’s February 2014 Euro-Maidan Revolution, Kholomoisky “hired the guys who carried out the Odessa massacre”- the killing of several dozen supporters of deposed Russian-allied President Viktor Yanukovych who were holed up in a trade union building.Īs Governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast from 2014 until 2016, Kholomoisky bankrolled anti-Russian units operating with the Ukrainian army in Donetsk and Luhansk-which voted to secede after the post-Maidan government tried to impose the Ukrainian language on them. Putting on a friendly face: Kholomoisky posing for a photo in 2014. Allegedly, he was not averse to shoving the head of a visitor in it as a reminder never to cross him.
Second, Kholomoisky “displayed a ruthlessness that made even other oligarchs, no strangers to violent crime, blanch.”Ī writer for Forbes magazine reported that, in one instance, he saw “hundreds of hired rowdies armed with baseball bats, iron bars, gas and rubber-bullet pistols and chainsaws forcibly over” a steel plant that Kholomoisky eyed.įor the full Bond-villain effect, Kholomoisky put a shark tank in his office. First, he had a background in metallurgy-in the science of making and molding metals and alloys in demand. [Source: Born in Soviet Ukraine in 1963, Kholomoisky was among those to benefit after the Soviet collapse in the early 1990s from the sale of formerly state-owned enterprises like steel plants and gas wells at fire-sale prices.Īccording to The American Spectator, Kholomoisky had two advantages over other nascent oligarchs. Department of Justice filed a civil forfeiture complaint-the fourth against him-which alleges that Kholomoisky and Gennadiy Bogolyubov, who owned PrivatBank, one of the largest banks in Ukraine, embezzled and defrauded the bank of $5.5 billion which went missing.
Steering One of the Biggest Ponzi Schemes in World History
This report is ironic given that, since Ukraine’s war with Russia began over four months ago, Radio Free Europe along with the rest of the Western media has depicted Zelensky as something equivalent to a reincarnation of Winston Churchill and Mother Teresa, driving a campaign for his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize and inspiring a flamboyant musical tribute during the 2022 Grammy awards. in March 2021 due to his “significant corruption.” See video report below. In 2019, the CIA-run Radio Free Europe reported on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s connection to Ihor Kholomoisky, a Ukrainian oligarch whom the State Department banned from entering the U.S.