Most Ukrainians are inured to stories of corruption, but a month before the country’s presidential election, a scandal has sparked outrage among even the most jaded. The son of a close business partner of President Petro Poroshenko is accused of selling smuggled Russian components to Ukrainian defense factories at wildly inflated prices.
Poroshenko, who is running for re-election on a nationalist platform, frequently stresses that he has strengthened the military to increase the price Russian President Vladimir Putin would pay for further aggression. During Poroshenko’s presidency, Ukraine’s defense and security spending has gone up sharply -- to $7.8 billion this year from about $3.3 billion in 2014. This year, about $630 million of that budget has been earmarked for weapons and military equipment.
