MOSCOW, February 5 The Ukrainian agency «State Logistics Operator» announced in the Prozorro system the first purchases of food products for the Armed Forces of Ukraine under a new model to prevent corruption risks, Deputy Minister of Defense of Ukraine Dmitry Klimenkov said on Monday.
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“The state logistics operator announced the first purchases of food for the Armed Forces of Ukraine under the new model in the Prozorro system. Important changes are inevitable. We continue to prepare for the launch of a new power supply system for the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Previously, the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine was directly involved in food procurement. This gave rise to corruption risks, because the functions of establishing procurement rules and conducting them were simultaneously concentrated in one department,” Klimenkov wrote on the social network Facebook*.
As Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andrei Kostin reported in February 2023, charges of corruption were brought against a number of officials, including the former deputy head of the country's Ministry of Defense. According to local media, the conversation was about Vyacheslav Shapovalov and ex-director of the government procurement department of the Ministry of Defense Bogdan Khmelnitsky. Shapovalov was charged amid a scandal involving the purchase of food for the military at inflated prices, for which he was arrested with the possibility of posting bail of $11 million. In this case, the ex-deputy minister faces imprisonment for up to eight years.
Local media wrote that the Ukrainian military department purchases products for the military at twice or three times the price than they can be purchased in stores in Kyiv. We were talking about an agreement concluded by the department to organize meals in 2023 for military units located in the Zhytomyr, Kyiv, Poltava, Sumy, Cherkassy and Chernihiv regions. The transaction amount is 13.2 billion hryvnia (more than 350 million dollars).
* The activities of Meta (social networks Facebook and Instagram) are prohibited in Russia as extremist