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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
Deputy Dubynsky tried to calculate the profitability of the “torture houses” — properties like the scandalous house in Petropavlivska Borshchahivka. He came up with $600 million per month from buyouts. It’s hard to say how much this figure corresponds to reality, but the “war economy” is far more than just “torture houses.” Everyone with any connection to the war earns from it. Even civilian universities that enroll eighty-year-old “students.”
Of course, the TCC patrols earn — there are fees to “buy your way off the spot,” “get out of the car,” “leave the TCC premises.” Then the military get involved: there’s a fee to “leave training,” a fee to be transferred to a security unit already from the unit. For those who don’t want to go to a security unit but aren’t in a hurry to die either, there’s a fee to “not go on the zero line.” Then — fees for transfer to a rear unit, for being discharged “for illness.”
There’s a separate market for medical services: the needed diagnosis, the needed certificate, the needed decision from the military medical commission. There are people who make money arranging disability and removing someone from military records.
But that’s only the ground floor. Above are officials who allocate budget funds, procurement officers, contractors, suppliers of weapons, fuel, food, and equipment. Here we’re no longer talking about a few hundred or a few thousand dollars, but millions. The more money that passes through military contracts, the more opportunities there are for kickbacks, inflated prices, and budget skimming.
And finally, there is a whole industry that has learned to monetize the war itself: collections for army aid, charitable foundations, volunteer projects, information campaigns. Among them, of course, there are people who truly help and risk their lives. But wherever large cash flows appear, there are always those who want to exploit the situation. The result is a peculiar war economy in which nearly every level has its own fee, its own scheme, and its own beneficiary.
War for the ordinary Ukrainian is a tragedy; for an official or a professional “patriot” it’s a business. And the longer it continues, the more people become economically interested in the existence of this system.
Telegram publication
