Former Ukrainian energy and justice minister German Galushchenko was charged Monday with money laundering and participation in a criminal organization. He had been arrested the day before while trying to leave the country.

Ukraine's National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office announced that Galushchenko was "exposed for money laundering and participation in a criminal organization."

According to the Washington Examiner, the charges connect to a sprawling $100 million kickback scheme that has already ensnared multiple high-ranking officials and business figures in what investigators have dubbed "Operation Midas."

The name fits.

The Scheme Inside Energoatom

State auditors determined that a high-level criminal organization comprising government officials and businessmen infiltrated Energoatom, Ukraine's state nuclear energy company, to launder money and secure benefits illegally. Contractors working with Energoatom allegedly had to pay up to 15% of the contract value just to receive payment for services they had already rendered. That is not a fee. It is a shakedown baked into the machinery of a wartime state.

Investigators found that more than $7 million was transferred to foreign accounts naming Galushchenko's wife and four children as beneficiaries. According to the anti-corruption agencies, some of that money was placed in "a deposit, from which the family of the high-ranking official received additional income and spent it on their own needs."

Those needs apparently included tuition at elite schools in Switzerland for the children. A minister overseeing Ukraine's energy sector during a war of national survival, while his family parked millions abroad and educated their kids in Swiss boarding schools.

A Pattern, Not an Outlier

Galushchenko served as energy minister from 2021 through 2025, a period that spans the entirety of Russia's full-scale invasion. He later became justice minister before resigning in November after being implicated in the kickback scheme. The man entrusted with Ukraine's legal system was himself a subject of criminal investigation.

He is not the only figure caught in Operation Midas. Former deputy prime minister Oleksiy Chernyshov has also been identified in the case. And then there is Tymur Mindich, co-owner of the Kvartal 95 comedy troupe and a key business partner of Volodymyr Zelensky before he became president. Mindich was reportedly heavily involved in the kickback scheme, according to authorities. He fled Ukraine in November 2025 and was later filmed by the Ukrainian Truth news outlet in Israel, according to the Washington Post.

The proximity to Zelensky matters. Mindich was not some peripheral bureaucrat. He was a business partner of the president. Kvartal 95 is the comedy production company Zelensky co-founded, the one that launched his public career. None of this means Zelensky himself is implicated in the scheme, but the circle around him is shrinking under the weight of its own corruption.

Why Americans Should Care

The United States has sent tens of billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine. Conservatives have raised questions about oversight and accountability for that spending since the beginning, and they were called Putin apologists for their trouble. Stories like this one do not vindicate Putin. They vindicate the skeptics who said that pouring money into a country with deep institutional corruption problems without rigorous accountability was a recipe for exactly this.

A $100 million kickback operation running through a state energy company while American taxpayers fund Ukraine's defense is not a minor embarrassment. It is the precise scenario that critics warned about. Contractors being extorted for 15% of their contract value means inflated costs, degraded services, and resources diverted from a war effort that Western nations are bankrolling.

To Ukraine's credit, NABU pursued the case and made the arrest. Galushchenko did not slip away quietly into exile. He was caught at the border. That matters, and it distinguishes this moment from the kind of systemic impunity that defines true kleptocracies. But one arrest does not resolve the underlying problem: a governing class that treated wartime desperation as a business opportunity.

The Border Says Everything

Consider the sequence of events. Galushchenko resigned in November after being implicated. He was not immediately detained. He remained free long enough to attempt an exit from the country and was stopped only at the last moment. Mindich, his alleged co-conspirator, successfully fled to Israel. The system caught one and missed the other.

That gap between implication and accountability is where corruption thrives. Officials who know the walls are closing in do what officials always do: they run. The question is whether the institutions tasked with stopping them move fast enough.

Ukraine arrested a former minister at its border and charged him the next day. That is a start. But Mindich is in Israel, $100 million flowed through a criminal organization embedded in a state enterprise, and the full scope of Operation Midas remains unclear.

The golden touch, it turns out, left fingerprints everywhere.