The Weekend Intelligence: Operation Midas
Economist Podcasts
The Economist
4.4 • 5K Ratings
🗓️ 6 December 2025
⏱️ 44 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Ukraine has been hit by a corruption scandal. One that strikes at the core of the political establishment in a way never before seen—and this in a country with a long and turbulent history of corruption. It has toppled President Zelensky’s right-hand man. It could mean the President himself won’t survive re-election when the war is over. And the timing couldn’t be worse—right in the middle of a peace deal Ukraine has had little part in composing.
The Economist’s Ukraine correspondent, Ollie Carroll, has been following the scandal and the investigation that brought it crashing to the surface for months. On The Weekend Intelligence he takes us deep inside "Operation Midas”.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Economist. |
| 0:08.2 | The timing couldn't be worse. |
| 0:11.1 | The war in Ukraine has been dragging on for nearly four long years. |
| 0:15.8 | America and Russia are bandying a peace plan that Ukraine had little part in composing. |
| 0:22.9 | And now the president's closest confidant is in the headlines, for all the wrong reasons. And that's just one part of the giant |
| 0:30.2 | crisis now engulfing the country. Ukraine's history of corruption is long and torrid. When Volodymyr Zelensky was elected in 2019, |
| 0:39.8 | he campaigned as an anti-establishment figure who promised to root out fraud. Things did seem to be |
| 0:46.2 | getting better. But now, detectives have unearthed the biggest corruption scandal in Ukraine's history. |
| 0:53.8 | Today, we're going to track that scandal and that of Operation Midas, |
| 0:58.5 | the multi-agency probe, into how $100 million, probably more, |
| 1:03.5 | was stolen from a country at war, by its own elite. |
| 1:08.3 | This story has everything. |
| 1:10.5 | Crazy code names like Che Guevara, Alibaba and Rocket. It has |
| 1:15.3 | bribes, bugs, spy cams and luxury villas. And like all good oligarch dramas, it has a golden |
| 1:22.0 | toilet. It might be salacious, but for the bigger picture. An existential war in Europe, a president who will not bend, government bodies that fear being branded traitors if they act, and traitors if they don't. |
| 1:42.9 | I'm Rosie Bloor, and today on the Weekend Intelligence, my colleague Oliver Carroll takes you inside Ukraine to the core of the rot. |
| 1:51.6 | Olli is among the few reporters who was on the trail of this scandal months before it hit the news, |
| 1:57.6 | exhaustively following leads, talking to sources and trying to untangle the many tentacles |
| 2:02.9 | of the investigation. You'll need to listen carefully. We've voiced some tapes of leaked |
| 2:08.5 | conversations so they're in English, but there are lots of names here and lots of government |
| 2:13.3 | agencies. And of course, the jigsaw is not yet complete. This story is still unfolding. |
| 2:20.3 | And it could yet spell the end for the man who stands as a figurehead of the values |
... |
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