Seven Years After the Oath: An Audit of Zelensky's Inaugural Promises

Not because it was poorly written - quite the opposite. It was so precise in diagnosing the Ukrainian state's pathologies that returning to it today is psychologically uncomfortable. Every thesis of that address has, over the past seven years, received its empirical verification. The time has come to name the result of that verification out loud - calmly, without hysteria, without patriotic varnish, and without invoking the war as an indulgence. Because the war is a circumstance. The oath was an oath.

Let us begin with the most important point. The candidate Volodymyr Zelensky walked onto the stage in 2019 with a simple thesis: an official who does not pay taxes, who runs a red light, who quietly steals - this is a disgrace. "Do you agree?" he asked the hall, and the hall nodded. Two and a half years later, it emerged that the author of this thesis stood at the centre of a documented offshore structure - not as an incidental beneficiary, but as one of four equal co-owners.

In October 2021, the Pandora Papers detonated across global media - a leak of documents on the hidden assets of world leaders, on which Ukrainian journalists from Slidstvo.Info worked in partnership with ICIJ and OCCRP. The investigation revealed a complex web of companies and quiet arrangements surrounding the founders of the comedy studio Kvartal 95.

The anatomy of the "Kvartal" offshores. In 2012, after the studio moved to the 1+1 television channel, its team registered more than a dozen firms in the British Virgin Islands, Belize, and Cyprus. The nucleus of the network was Maltex Multicapital Corp, registered in the BVI. The capital was divided equally - 25 percent each - between Volodymyr Zelensky and his wife, the brothers Serhiy and Borys Shefir, and the studio's scriptwriter Andriy Yakovlev. The nominal owner of Maltex was a firm called Davegra Limited, controlled by Ivan Bakanov - Zelensky's childhood friend, Kvartal's lawyer, and from 2019 head of the Security Service of Ukraine. It was Davegra that held the trust declaration with the real names of the beneficiaries. According to Slidstvo.Info's experts, such a scheme is used precisely to mask the true owners.

The pre-election manoeuvre. On 13 March 2019 - three weeks before the first round of the presidential election - Zelensky transferred his share of Maltex to Serhiy Shefir free of charge. As the president's first assistant rather than a civil servant in the formal sense, Shefir was not required to file a public income declaration. Documents from June 2019 confirm that he retained the asset after taking up his post on Bankova Street. OCCRP analysts suggest a hidden arrangement: Maltex continued to pay funds to a Cypriot company called Film Heritage, whose sole owner since 2019 has been Olena Zelenska herself, as recorded in her own declaration. The amounts of these dividends do not appear in the Pandora Papers documents.

And here it is worth unpacking the central discrepancy, without which the whole story remains a mere statement of fact.

What actually happened. In Volodymyr Zelensky's official income declaration for 2018 - the single document the candidate was legally required to submit before the election - Maltex Multicapital Corp is not mentioned at all. Not in a single line. Neither are any of the other firms in the Kvartal offshore network.

What the law required. Under Ukrainian anti-corruption legislation, a candidate for the presidency is obliged to declare all corporate rights, beneficial ownership of companies, and shares in legal entities under any jurisdiction, including foreign ones. At the moment the 2018 declaration was filed, Zelensky owned a quarter of Maltex. The transfer to Shefir took place on 13 March 2019 - after the declaration had already been submitted.

The discrepancy. The pre-election declaration was supposed to contain Maltex. It did not. This is not a "grey area" and not "the way Ukrainian business worked in 2012" - it is a specific unmet legal obligation of a specific candidate on the eve of a specific election. In any state governed by the rule of law this would have been the subject of a separate investigation. In Ukraine of 2019, it remained a journalistic discovery without procedural consequences.

The second, systemic discrepancy. The oligarch's trail. According to Slidstvo.Info, since 2012 the Kvartal offshore network has received approximately 40 million dollars from structures linked to Ihor Kolomoisky. The transactions passed through the Cypriot branch of PrivatBank - the same channel the oligarch is alleged by Ukrainian investigators to have used to siphon billions out of the bank shortly before its nationalisation. The presidential candidate ran in 2019 on the thesis "we are not Kolomoisky's people". The Pandora Papers documents indicate at least ten years of regular financial flows between his offshores and structures connected to that oligarch.

The response. Volodymyr Zelensky has not made a single public comment on the Pandora Papers. Press secretary Serhiy Nykyforov ignored journalists' inquiries. In subsequent interviews, the president himself has avoided the subject. The questions were never closed procedurally - they were simply waited out.

One can argue whether this was a tax crime, a legal grey zone, or a routine Ukrainian business practice of 2012 designed to shelter assets from Yanukovych-era raiders. All of these arguments were heard from Bankova. From the perspective of Shefir's lawyer, they may even be flawless. But the speech of 20 May 2019 did not appeal to lawyers. It appealed to shame. And shame, it turns out, makes for poor structural reinforcement - it crumbles at the first serious load.

The president who promised to walk away

It is worth recalling another promise Zelensky made publicly, on air on the talk show "Right to Power" on 18 April 2019, days before the runoff: "If I ever break the law, I will leave on my own". This was not a stray remark in the heat of the campaign. It was a direct, unambiguous pledge, repeated in various forms during debates and on the campaign trail.

A year later, in July 2020, the president personally informed the National Agency on Corruption Prevention of his own violation of the law "On Prevention of Corruption" - the failure to declare in time his family's transactions in government bonds totalling more than five million hryvnia. The public responded with a petition reminding him of his promise. Thirty thousand signatures. The reply from Bankova: the original formulation had been taken out of context, what was meant was the impermissibility of corrupt schemes, and a technical declaration violation was "not motivated by personal gain". The president had narrowed his own pledge until it no longer applied to himself.

This is not a minor detail. It is the template that would operate for years thereafter: any inconvenient promise gets redefined from a broader to a narrower scope, while the threshold for its violation is pushed so far back that crossing it formally becomes nearly impossible. Offshores: "that was before the presidency." Schemes in the Defence Ministry: "that wasn't me signing." "Great Construction": "that's a question for Ukravtodor." Not once in seven years did the president do what he himself had pledged in April 2019 - assume personal political responsibility for a system functioning under his brand and under his personnel control. Instead of resignation, reassignment of curators. Instead of shame, the marathon.

The architect who failed to notice his own design

"Great Construction" (Velyke Budivnytstvo) entered Ukraine's information space as the headline accomplishment of the new administration - and not merely as a government programme, but explicitly as the president's personal project. Roads, bridges, schools, outpatient clinics, sports complexes - everything that in a normal state is the work of the Cabinet of Ministers operating through line ministries was, in Ukraine, deliberately removed from under the government's banner and repackaged under the presidential brand. The logo carried the president's signature. The promotional clips carried the president's voice. The annual reports framed it as the president's personal achievement. At each ribbon-cutting, the president or his curator from the Office was physically present. The architecture left no room for distancing: this was not "a Cabinet project the president supports", this was "a presidential project the Cabinet executes". From which follows one simple question that has not yet received an honest answer: if a project is officially and publicly branded as the president's, who bears personal political responsibility for its corrupt component?

Because the corrupt component was there. Investigations by "Nashi Hroshi", Bihus.Info, and Ukrainska Pravda documented a system in which a narrow circle of contractors received contracts with systematically inflated cost estimates. A new managerial caste of regional road oligarchs emerged, whose wealth grew in lockstep with the rhythm of "Great Construction" billboards. Formally, the documents were signed by heads of Ukravtodor (the state road agency), regional administrations, and line ministers. In reality, coordination ran through Bankova, via the apparatus of Deputy Head of the Office Kyrylo Tymoshenko, who later left his post amid scandals involving leased SUVs and undeclared property. The programme's communications coordinator was Yuriy Holyk - an adviser to the head of the Dnipropetrovsk regional administration, Valentyn Reznichenko, and a subject of a NABU investigation into 1.5 billion hryvnia worth of road repair contracts awarded in Dnipropetrovsk Region to a company linked to Reznichenko's close associate, the fitness trainer Yana Khlanta. In 2024, Holyk left Ukraine through the "Shliakh" system on a disability certificate and currently resides in Austria. Bihus.Info separately documented that even after the formal end of his duties, Holyk continued to visit Bankova regularly, passing checkpoints without inspection.

In no Western democracy could this configuration be split: this programme is mine, this corruption isn't. In parliamentary systems, prime ministers have resigned over far less.

The personnel matrix: loyalty as the principal currency

Here one ought to speak plainly. The appointment of Ivan Bakanov - childhood friend, former Kvartal lawyer - as head of the Security Service of Ukraine was the first serious personnel signal that the principle of "we don't surrender our own" would override any professional consideration. The cost of that appointment became clear in the summer of 2022, when the president was forced to suspend Bakanov against the backdrop of large-scale defections within the SBU's Crimea and Kherson directorates. The system performed exactly as its critics had predicted in 2019.

But the truly diagnostic stories are Oleh Tatarov and Rostyslav Shurma. Two figures who became the genuine test of sincerity on the "zero tolerance" pledge.

Tatarov - a lawyer from the Yanukovych era, curator of the law-enforcement bloc within the Office of the President, the man against whom NABU repeatedly attempted to open cases that were each time rescued through procedural manoeuvres.

Shurma - Deputy Head of the Office, in charge of the economic and energy portfolio, whose own brother Oleh turned out to be co-owner of solar power plants in Zaporizhzhia Region that, until summer 2023, continued to receive "green tariff" payments from the Ukrainian state budget while located on Russian-occupied territory and effectively disconnected from the unified energy system. An August 2023 Bihus.Info investigation documented more than 320 million hryvnia of such payments. In September that year, Shurma did not deny the fact on Radio Liberty, citing only that "other companies did the same". A month later, NABU opened a criminal investigation. In January 2026, NABU and the SAPO issued a formal notice of suspicion; in February the Interior Ministry put him on the wanted list; in April the High Anti-Corruption Court ordered his pre-trial detention in absentia. The former Deputy Head of the Office is currently in Austria, having moved there after searches were conducted at his residence near Munich, declaring his "readiness to cooperate with the investigation remotely".

Both Tatarov and Shurma were not incidental hires - they were structural elements of the system. Both remained in their posts for years despite open investigations by anti-corruption agencies. Shurma was dismissed from the Office only in March 2024 - seven months after Bihus.Info's first investigation, when keeping him on simply became too awkward in front of international partners. Tatarov outlived all his critics and remains in the system to this day. Personnel decisions on Bankova were made not on the principle of zero tolerance, as the 2019 candidate had promised, but on the principle of "hold on as long as possible, release only when the bottom is already visible".

In 2019 the future president asked, from that same rostrum, that his portraits not hang in officials' offices. Seven years on, the portraits indeed are not on the walls - but the appointments to key positions speak for themselves. The curator of security services remains in office with NABU cases against him still open. The curator of the economic portfolio remained for seven months after the first investigation into the "green tariff" scheme. This is not an accusation - it is a documented chronology. And it shows that the operative principle of personnel policy turned out to be not zero tolerance, but its opposite: maximum tolerance toward one's own, for as long as politically feasible.

Diia: an interface over the legacy software

"The state in a smartphone" - the 2019 formula referred to the elimination of the bureaucratic stratum. De-professionalisation. Automation. A button instead of a bribe. Estonia and Singapore had figured this out; the model was finally meant to reach Kyiv.

What actually arrived is a different piece of software. Not the state that was promised.

Diia is a front end. An elegant wrapper. A UI/UX interface layered over existing state registries, pulling data from them and displaying it to the user. Digital passport. Driver's licence. Statements. Business registration. єMaliatko (child registration). All of it works, and all of it has genuinely improved the daily lives of millions of Ukrainians. That is not the issue. The issue is that the 2019 speech promised something else - the dismantling of the system. What was delivered is a wrapper, inside which the very same system continues to operate in its previous regime.

Diia does not control the Defence Ministry's budget. Diia does not allocate mineral rights. Diia does not process customs payments on major freight. Diia does not control procurement at Energoatom or Ukrzaliznytsia. Diia does not determine who gets a disability certificate from MSEC. Diia does not exist where the real money of the Ukrainian state circulates - where that money is siphoned off, where an entire industry of corrupt rent persists, the same post-Soviet architecture continues to function without any smartphone in sight.

What was substituted was not digitalisation - what was substituted was the very concept of reform. A citizen receives a certificate of no prior convictions in two seconds on a phone, and this is offered as evidence that the state has changed. Meanwhile, the head of a regional disability assessment commission owns dozens of properties registered through nominees, because disability status is sold at fixed rates outside any smartphone. The 2023-2024 scandals involving disability certificates purchased by prosecutors and judges were not a glitch. They are precisely the analogue reality Diia does not touch in principle.

Diia in its 2019 iteration was meant to be the operating system of a new state. Diia in its 2026 iteration is a pleasant application running on top of the old state. These are fundamentally different products sold under the same name.

The "Dynasty" Cooperative

Here the thing must be called by its proper name. In Russia, they once built "Ozero" - a cooperative of dacha friends who later sat astride Gazprom's pipelines and the oil sector. In Ukraine over the past seven years, an analogous structure has emerged. Call it the "Dynasty" cooperative - and the name is not merely a metaphor. In November 2025, after materials from Operation Midas were made public, it emerged that "Dynasty" is the literal name of an elite construction project on eight hectares in Kozyn outside Kyiv, into which funds from the Energoatom scheme flowed and where, according to investigators, a participant codenamed "R2" - likely the Head of the Office of the President Andriy Yermak - appears alongside the others.

In other words, "Dynasty" is not a journalistic figure of speech. It is a documented configuration of power, made visible through meticulously recorded wiretaps.

On 10 November 2025, NABU and the SAPO unveiled Operation Midas. According to the investigation, a "high-level criminal organisation" had been demanding kickbacks of 10 to 15 percent on Energoatom contracts from its counterparties. The total documented volume of the scheme exceeds 100 million dollars. The published recordings feature:

"Karlsson" - the businessman and organiser. Identified by investigators as Tymur Mindich, co-owner of Kvartal 95, partner of Serhiy Shefir in the Cypriot offshore Green Family Ltd, in whose apartment at 9 Hrushevskoho Street Zelensky celebrated his birthday in January 2021. Mindich left Ukraine hours before the searches; on 1 December the High Anti-Corruption Court ordered his pre-trial detention in absentia.

"Che Guevara" - Oleksiy Chernyshov, former deputy prime minister, former minister of national unity, earlier head of the Kyiv regional administration. According to NABU data, direct cash transfers from the scheme to Chernyshov personally totalled 1.2 million dollars and approximately 100,000 euros. Investigators determined that it was Chernyshov who brought Mindich into the "Dynasty" project at Kozyn in June 2020.

"The Professor" (also "Sigismund") - Herman Galushchenko, at the time of the case minister of justice, previously minister of energy. According to the investigation, between 2021 and 2025 some 12.9 million dollars were laundered to his benefit. In February 2026 he was detained, charged, and held in custody with bail set at 200 million hryvnia.

"Tenor" - Dmytro Basov, former director of security at Energoatom and physical enforcer of the kickback collection. "Rocket" - Ihor Myroniuk, former adviser to the minister of energy, for over a decade an assistant to the pro-Russian MP and former member of the OPZZh party Andriy Derkach, currently charged with state treason.

"R2" - a participant whom NABU materials indicate was brought into the "Dynasty" project roughly at the same time as Mindich, in June 2020. Not officially named by the investigation. MP Yaroslav Zhelezniak publicly suggested that "R2" is Andriy Yermak. There has been no official confirmation. There has also been no denial.

This, in highly condensed form, is the architecture of the "Dynasty" cooperative. The core: Kvartal 95, its co-owners and partners. The coordinator: the Head of the Office of the President, whose post has de facto absorbed both the Cabinet of Ministers and the Verkhovna Rada in matters of decision-making. The security bloc: under Tatarov. The economic bloc: under Shurma until 2024 (dismissed only after the first Bihus.Info investigation, now under arrest in absentia and hiding in Austria). The energy circuit: through Galushchenko and Chernyshov. The communications support for "Great Construction": through Holyk and Tymoshenko. The money: through Energoatom, road contracts in Dnipropetrovsk Region, and other state arteries.

This is not a conspiracy theory. These are the materials of open NABU and SAPO criminal cases as of May 2026.

In 2019 Zelensky promised "a country of different opportunities" - a state where the rules are the same for everyone and competition replaces personal access to power. In practice the reverse arrived: the rules are determined by proximity to Bankova, access to the Head of the Office matters more than any procurement regulation, and the principal state revenue streams are distributed within a cooperative of friends and partners from the Kvartal 95 studio.

"Keep Silent Until Victory"

And here the 2019 speech crosses the principal line - the line of what the president himself once called a disgrace.

In October 2023, the editor-in-chief of ZN.UA, Yulia Mostovaya, publicly recounted at the National Media Talk conference in Kyiv a closed-door meeting between Zelensky and the country's leading editors. The meeting was held off the record, following a high-profile Bihus.Info investigation into the Defence Ministry's 17-hryvnia eggs. At that meeting the president asked the journalists - the exact formulation Mostovaya later quoted publicly - to "keep silent until victory. If we do not keep silent, there will be no victory at all."

Pause for a moment. This is said by the same politician who in 2019 called headlines about presidential corruption a disgrace from the rostrum of the Verkhovna Rada. The same one who promised to resign at the first violation of the law. The same one who spoke of "a country of different opportunities" and of the little mirror above each official's desk.

Four years later, that same politician, behind closed doors, asks journalists to look away - not from abstract corruption, but from concrete corruption in his government, in his Defence Ministry, in his Office. And he asks this not publicly, not in a national address, not in an honest acknowledgment that "yes, we have a problem, let us solve it together", but off the record, informally, with direct pressure on chief editors. Mostovaya herself notes that the journalists would have accepted these terms had the president added that he himself would mercilessly combat this rear-area corruption for the sake of frontline capacity. He did not add that.

He simply asked them to be quiet.

This is precisely the "disgrace" he himself in 2019 had urged not to tolerate. Only now from his side of the table.

War and obligations

There is something here that, at present, is not socially acceptable to say out loud, yet without which the entire analysis loses its point. Martial law is a legal category. It permits the concentration of authority, restrictions on certain freedoms, the postponement of elections - all of this is normal for a state under attack. All of it is provided for by law.

But martial law changes nothing about one specific thing: the list of facts that require a public answer. The Maltex offshores connected to the president's wife - a fact the president has never publicly addressed. The Pandora Papers - a fact the president has never publicly addressed. Operation Midas - a fact to which the president responded by declaring that "a president of a country at war cannot have friends", after which he imposed sanctions on Mindich. That is better than nothing. But it is not an answer to the question: who brought these people into the orbit of power ten years ago, and why was not a single name on the NABU recordings coincidental?

The "not the right time" argument is convenient above all because it is universal. It was inconvenient in 1991, when institutions had to be built. It was inconvenient in 2014, when the Euromaidan reforms had to be completed. It became absolutely convenient after 2022, when any question to the authorities can be relabelled as a stab in the back of the front. This rhetorical construction is not defensive. It is offensive, because it produces an instrument for shutting down any internal criticism. And that is precisely what makes it, in the long run, dangerous for the very statehood in whose defence it is ostensibly deployed.

What remains

In 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky sincerely (or convincingly) believed that corruption was a problem of bad individuals occupying public office. Replace the bad ones with honest ones, and the system would function. This was an engineering error of fundamental order. The system does not reduce to the individuals within it. The system is held in place by institutions - an independent judiciary, a competitive parliament, a free press, checks among the branches of power, impartial law enforcement. When these balances are progressively eroded and political decisions converge onto a single point - the Office of the President - the corrupt rent converges on the same point. This is not the choice of an individual bad actor. It is the structural consequence of concentration.

Volodymyr Zelensky did not dismantle corrupt rent - he gave it a radical rebrand. "A country of different opportunities" turned out, in practice, to be a different configuration of the same post-Soviet practices, but wrapped in flawless UI/UX design, amplified by professional communications, and legitimised by international recognition. The unconditional heroisation of the wartime leader, made possible by the ferocious resistance of Ukrainian society to Russian aggression, became a durable media shield for the internal architecture of power. Yet behind this facade, what occurred was not a movement toward European institutions but a systemic regression: hyper-concentration of powers in the Office of the President, monopolisation of the information space through the single broadcast marathon, the transformation of parliament into an obedient voting instrument, and the construction of a rigid disciplinary vertical over the judiciary. Economic flows and strategic state assets have been consistently sealed off to a narrow circle of individuals whose only legitimate status is personal proximity to the Head of the Office and the first assistant.

This institutional degradation is a serious illness, but not a catastrophe. It cannot serve as indulgence for treason or capitulation to the external enemy, on which Moscow is counting. On the contrary - it is an existential challenge for society itself. Citizens who withstood carpet bombing and broke the back of the imperial blitzkrieg strategy will not allow this neo-feudal contour to be preserved inside the country. Sooner or later the nation will emerge from martial law and will put before Bankova the same fundamental questions about justice and transparency that were being asked back in 2019.

Political pragmatism recognises only two indicators of genuine reflection: words and personnel. Words mean direct public acknowledgment of systemic mistakes without offloading the blame onto "predecessors" or "circumstances". Personnel means the immediate isolation and dismissal of subjects of NABU investigations, not their evacuation abroad or their retention in office until the final media crisis. At present the system is demonstrating absolute deafness on both fronts. And here lies the principal long-term threat: if the promises of 2019 are finally fixed in public memory as a cynical pop idol that did not survive the test of practice, the next leader at the helm of the state will find themselves in a zone of complete institutional unknown - in a scorched field of total distrust, where no oath sworn on the Constitution will carry any weight at all.