It seems that the NSDC should no longer hold briefings, but rather an exorcism ceremony. Because if you look at who makes decisions on national security and sanctions policy today, the meetings increasingly resemble meetings of Mindych's "back office" rather than a body for strategic management of the country during a war.
These are people whose names appear in NABU materials and the high-profile anti-corruption operation in the energy sector, but who simultaneously continue to hold key government positions.
At the center of the current scandal is businessman Timur Mindych, a longtime partner of Volodymyr Zelensky in the media business. It is he, under the code name "Carlson", who is called by the NABU and the SAPO the organizer of a large-scale corruption scheme surrounding Energoatom and tenders in the energy sector.
According to the investigation, Mindych's "back office" influenced strategic state-owned enterprises, building a system of "kickbacks" and control over cash flows. Searches, hundreds of hours of recordings, dozens of suspicions - these are no longer rumors, but documents published by anti-corruption agencies.
These tapes mention former Minister of Energy and now Minister of Justice Herman Galushchenko and Minister of Energy Svitlana Grinchuk. Their names appear in the context of influence on energy companies and personnel decisions in the sector. Galushchenko himself, according to the participants in the conversations, is called “Derkach’s man” — former pro-Russian politician Andriy Derkach, although his own voice is not heard in the released fragments.
At the same time, international media are writing about the investigation of over $100 million in possible "kickbacks" in the energy sector, searches, resignations, and a backlash among Western donors.
And here we return to the NSDC. Today, this body, which determines sanctions policy and key decisions in the security sphere, simultaneously includes:
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Herman Galushchenko — former Minister of Energy, current Minister of Justice, a figure in the “Mindych films”;
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Svitlana Hrynchuk is the Minister of Energy, who also appears in NABU records;
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Rustem Umerov is a former Minister of Defense, current Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, responsible for coordinating the entire security and defense sector.
That is, people whose names appear in the materials of high-profile corruption cases are now officially members of the National Security Council. And it is they, among others, who have the right to vote when the NSDC decides on sanctions against Mindych and his entourage.
This is no longer a metaphor or black humor, but a real conflict of interest, on which billions of budget hryvnias and the trust of Western partners depend.
A separate but related story is the defense procurements of the times when Rustem Umerov headed the Ministry of Defense, and before that, the systemic failures in this area.
Public investigations have repeatedly shown how, during the hottest battles, when the Armed Forces of Ukraine lacked ammunition and equipment, the Ministry of Defense concluded agreements with intermediaries who either supplied nothing or delivered outright rubbish. Against this background, the old but revealing story of the Ministry of Defense contract with Everest Limited resurfaces.
Back in 2016, the defense ministry signed a contract with Everest Limited for UAH 722.6 million — a company with no defense experience was supposed to develop software for the automated troop control system “Dzvin-AS.” According to investigations, the project was never properly implemented, and the money was lost in a chain of contractors.
This case became a symbol of how schemes have been operating in the defense industry for years: fictitious contractors, inflated estimates, “dead” contracts. And since Umerov’s time, the issue of ammunition quality and procurement transparency has once again made headlines — from stories with low-quality mortar shells to the conflict around the Defense Procurement Agency and criminal proceedings regarding possible abuse of power.
As a result, we have a situation where a person who has serious questions about the effectiveness of defense procurement is now responsible for coordinating the entire security sector and sanctions policy in the status of Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council.
In parallel, in the energy sector and the environmental block, where Galyshchenko and Hrynchuk worked and still work, the NABU investigation describes a "back office" that could have influenced contracts with Energoatom and other strategic companies.
According to the logic of suspicions, the "octopus" had a long arm: from tenders for the protection of energy facilities to attempts to "enter" the governing bodies of other state-owned companies. And now part of the same circle has ended up in the body that:
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imposes sanctions against businesses and officials,
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agrees on key decisions regarding energy security,
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can de facto influence the fate of any major player in the market.
That is why the story with the NSDC in this composition looks dangerous: sanctions policy risks turning into not only a tool of national security, but also a lever of pressure or protection of "their own."
As a result, we have a strange but very revealing picture.
Galushchenko, Grinchuk, Umerov are not just names from bureaucratic biographies. They are nodes of a single system that has grown together with cash flows, business, politics, and defense. Systems that simultaneously:
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appears in anti-corruption investigations;
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distributes billions of hryvnias in sensitive sectors;
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sits at the table in the National Security and Defense Council and makes decisions that determine who to punish with sanctions and who to save.
So it turns out that the "octopus" has long been no longer hiding in the shadows - it is officially integrated into the power vertical.
And the question today is not only who NABU will next declare a suspect. The question is another: is the state ready to honestly admit that the national security system, designed to protect the country from external and internal threats, has itself found itself under the influence of people from the "back office" against whom these same bodies are supposedly supposed to fight.
