Lawfare Daily: All Things Ukrainian Energy with Anastasiia Lapatina

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4.7 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 20 November 2025

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Lawfare Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina has written two recent articles for Lawfare on energy and the Ukraine war. The first deals with the ongoing Russian attacks on the Ukrainian civilian power grid—attacks which actually interfered with the recording of this very podcast. The second details an ongoing corruption scandal rocking the Ukrainian political system, emerging from an alleged kickback scheme in the energy sector. Lapatina sits down with Benjamin Wittes to talk about the current power outage affecting her ability to record, the Russian strikes, the Ukrainian strikes against Russia, and the most significant corruption scandal to affect President Volodymyr Zelensky since the dawn of the war.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Nearly every news alert in 2025 has raised questions, some old, some new, about the law and national security.
0:08.0	And now you get the chance to ask Lawfare directly. It's time for our annual Ask Us Anything Mailbag podcast, an opportunity for you to ask Lawfare this year's most burning questions.
0:19.0	You can submit your question by leaving a voicemail at
0:22.1	202-643-8474 or by sending a recording of yourself asking your question to Ask Us Anything Lawfare
0:32.8	at Gmail.com by December 16th.
0:38.5	It's already been called the largest scandal in, you know, recent Ukrainian history,
0:43.1	even not all of Ukrainian history.
0:44.8	And it's happening in the energy sector.
0:46.4	And if you're the Minister of Energy, and this is happening right under your nose,
0:49.8	then you're definitely, like, regardless of whether she was charged or not,
0:52.7	she still has political responsibility over the fact that it happened on her watch.
0:57.3	It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare, with Lawfare
1:04.0	Kiev Fellow, Anastasia La Patina.
1:08.3	Is Zelensky directly implicated? Is he part of all of these corruption schemes,
1:12.8	in which case he is, of course, guilty? Or is he just so incompetent at his job and so completely
1:22.1	oblivious? Today we're talking energy, attacks on energy infrastructure in Kiev, attacks on Russian
1:31.3	refining capabilities all over the Russian Federation, and a massive energy scandal that has
1:40.2	broken out in Ukrainian domestic politics.
1:51.3	So, Nastya, we were supposed to have a video recording session today, and we are not recording video.
1:52.3	We're recording audio only, and you do not have any lights on.
1:59.5	Why is this?
2:05.5	What's going on? Yeah, so there is a power outage happening in Kyiv right now at my address. It was supposed to be over by the time we're scheduled
	...

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