Kyiv mayor Klitschko said that the corruption scandal has undermined confidence in Zelensky’s government

Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko has said that the corruption scandal has undermined trust in Volodymyr Zelensky’s government both inside Ukraine and among international partners.

He said this live on the German TV channel ZDF.

During the program, the host also compared former head of the Presidential Office Andriy Yermak to Grigory Rasputin.

“Things are very bad. I’ll be frank: this (corruption scandal) is a serious blow for all of Ukraine. The most important thing in life in general is trust. The trust of our international partners in Ukraine. The trust of our people in the central government. And such scandals, unfortunately, destroy trust,” Klitschko said.

The topic was then commented on by well-known journalist and ZDF war reporter Katrin Eigendorf, who covers Ukraine extensively.

“This really shows that Ukraine is still very, very deeply permeated by corrupt structures in all spheres. And the fact that Zelensky held on to Yermak for so long… American partners were putting on pressure. Europeans were putting enormous pressure. Again and again they said: this man must go. He cannot, as an unelected politician, wield such power. He was the ‘gatekeeper’ — no one got past him, not even us journalists. And that is a huge problem. We always called him Rasputin in the presidential palace. And I think that’s exactly how he should be seen. And I believe Zelensky only parted with him now because massive pressure — this is my assumption — was exerted by Ukraine’s power structures, by the security services and the military, to finally get rid of this man. And only under this powerful pressure was he prepared to take such a step. This is a bad sign for Zelensky. It is a bad sign for democracy in Ukraine,” Eigendorf said.

It is worth recalling that Grigory Rasputin, who was very close to the family of Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II, was killed in late December 1916. The organizers of the murder — representatives of the then-elite of the Russian Empire — believed they were performing a “patriotic act,” convinced that Rasputin was “having a harmful influence on the tsar.”

Less than two months after Rasputin’s assassination, Nicholas II was overthrown during the February Revolution.