Zelenskyy Just Found a New Way to Cash In on the Same Soldiers Americans Paid For

Volodymyr Zelenskyy's inner circle just got caught stealing $100 million from Ukraine's own nuclear power company.

Now he wants to turn Ukraine's conscripted soldiers into even more cash for cronies.

The men who survive the war deserve to go home – but the same president whose regime raided restaurants and tackled men outside rock shows to fill the trenches just announced plans to legalize private military companies.

The Men Who Never Had a Choice and the Ones Who Did

Before anyone celebrates Ukrainian private military companies, consider who would staff them.

The majority of Ukraine's fighting force was drafted – pulled into service through a mobilization process so coercive that Ukrainians coined their own word for it: "busification."

Recruitment officers grabbed men outside churches, grocery stores, and their own homes, loaded them into buses, and delivered them to conscription centers.

Ukraine's own Human Rights Ombudsman reported complaints against enlistment officers exploded from 18 in 2022 to more than 6,000 in 2025 – a 33,000% increase.

Some men died before they ever reached the front.

These weren't warriors who chose this life.

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They were farmers, teachers, truck drivers, bicycle delivery guys, and fathers who were told they had no choice.

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Gallup polling shows support for continuing to fight has collapsed among ordinary Ukrainians – from 63% in 2023 to just 24% in 2025.

The men themselves have made their position clear.

Zelenskyy’s conscription goons on the other hand made a choice to force others to die for them.

And then there’s the Azov Battalion – the neo-Nazi thugs who the likes of the New York Times was, rightly scared shiftless about right up until Joe Biden and the neocon warmongers put them on the payroll.

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Zelenskyy's New Plan to Export Thugs

On May 6, Zelenskyy ordered his government to draft legislation legalizing private military companies in Ukraine before the end of 2026.

He frames it as a "security export" and a "real business opportunity for veterans."

Notice what that framing leaves out.

Nobody asked the conscripts whether they want to become mercenaries after the war ends.

Sure some of them may decide they like the life or can’t resist what will likely be fairly lucrative work.

But there’s no question who will be among first in line to sign up for Zelenskyy's sell-sword squads – it’ll be the Azovs and busification body snatchers.

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The thought of those folks exporting their craft out to other countries should terrify anyone.

Imagine for a second where they might end up working, and who for.

Perhaps the remaining vestiges of the Venezuelan and Cuban Communists.

Maybe the Mexican cartels will be interested.

Heck, it’s not hard to imagine Netanyahu trying to ensure they stay on the US taxpayers’ dime – after all his party supported Hamas not that long ago in a bid to undercut the Palestinian Authority.

Zelenskyy is looking at nearly a million soldiers – roughly 6% of Ukraine's entire workforce – and seeing a product he can sell to the highest bidder.

That is not veteran policy.

That is an exit strategy for the people who profited from the war and likely deployment of some of the most ruthless killers and psychopaths on the planet to America’s doorstep.  

Who Actually Benefits

The corruption record makes this impossible to ignore.

In November 2025, Ukraine's National Anti-Corruption Bureau launched Operation Midas – exposing a scheme to embezzle at least $100 million from Energoatom, Ukraine's state nuclear company.

Timur Mindich – a co-owner of the production company that made Zelenskyy famous and launched his presidential run – was named the presumed mastermind.

Mindich fled the country.

Andriy Yermak, Zelenskyy's Chief of Staff and the man insiders called the "shadow cardinal" of Ukrainian politics, was formally charged and arrested in May 2026.

He posted $3.2 million bail.

These are not fringe figures.

They are Zelenskyy's closest allies, enriched during a war funded overwhelmingly by American taxpayers.

The America First Policy Institute called the Ukraine conflict "an avoidable crisis" prolonged by Biden's "incompetent policies" and refusal to pursue serious diplomacy.

Biden's answer was always more money – more than $113 billion in total U.S. support, with no coherent strategy and no meaningful oversight.

Senator Mike Lee said it plainly in 2023: Ukraine had become "America's new endless war."

What This Is Really About

A PMC sector built around willing veterans – men who chose a life in arms – is a defensible concept.

What Zelenskyy is proposing is different.

He is building a framework to take men who were conscripted without consent, who survived a war they didn't choose, and route them into an industry where politically connected operators collect the profits.

Mindich himself became, in the words of researchers tracking the scandal, "a prominent figure in the new oligarchy that grew up around the supply of military goods" after the full-scale invasion began.

That is the machine that would run Ukrainian PMCs.

The survivors of busification deserve to go home – to their families, their farms, and the ordinary lives they were pulled from.

Trump got Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table for the first time in three years.

A real peace deal – the kind Biden refused to pursue while the checks kept clearing – is the only thing that actually gives these men their lives back.

Zelenskyy's PMC legislation tells you exactly what he has in mind instead.

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Sources:

• "Zelensky Orders Legislation to Legalize Private Military Companies in Ukraine," SOFX, May 2026.
• Emma Bussey, "Golden Toilet Scandal: Zelenskyy Faces Deepest Crisis Yet as Allies Accused in $100M Wartime Scheme," Fox News, November 2025.
• "The Corruption Scandal Engulfing Ukraine Won't Die Down Anytime Soon," Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, February 2026.
• "Ukraine's Conscription Crisis Is Getting Increasingly Bloody," Responsible Statecraft, May 2026.
• Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Keith Kellogg and Fred Fleitz, "America First, Russia, and Ukraine," America First Policy Institute, April 2024.
• Senator Mike Lee, "Ukraine Is Officially America's New Forever War," lee.senate.gov, October 2023.