You can't have a fair election when roughly 20% of the country is under Russian control.
On April 12, 2023, journalist Seymour Hersh published
an article on Substack titled "Trading with the Enemy." Its central allegation, heavily promoted by Russian
state media and conspiracy websites like
Infowars, was that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had embezzled at least $400 million of U.S. aid money by using it to purchase discount fuel from Russia and pocket the difference.
Readers of Hersh's reporting could be forgiven if, by the end of the story, they forgot that it was allegedly an expose on Ukrainian embezzlement. Despite being the primary assertion of the story, only two paragraphs are dedicated to the claim. Hersh hides this clear lack of supporting evidence under a torrential onslaught of superfluous information.
As in his
fundamentally flawed investigation claiming U.S. involvement in the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage, his present claim is bolstered by references to actual events and tinted with conspiracy, thanks to the testimony of anonymous intelligence sources (or potentially a sole source) claiming to have non-public insight into those events.
Fundamentally, the actual news presented in his story is that someone knowledgeable supposedly told Hersh that Zelenksyy and his "entourage" have been embezzling U.S. funds by purchasing discounted Russian oil and pocketing the difference.
It's an incendiary claim for which no actual evidence is proffered.
