Ukraine is investigating a Defense Ministry official suspected of colluding with Russian operatives to supply the Ukrainian Armed Forces with faulty bulletproof vests and camouflage uniforms that make loud rustling noises. Such equipment, deemed by soldiers as dangerous for use on the front lines, has cost the government tens of millions of dollars.
Investigators believe that a Bulgarian firm called Mimaltemer LTD, whose owners are Russian nationals, supplied the defective jackets and bulletproof vests and transferred more than $1 million to the account of a Ukrainian Defense Ministry official’s former wife. Both he and his wife have since fled Ukraine.
One set of invoices show that Mimaltemer supplied the Ukrainian army with close to 50,000 uniforms and 82,000 bulletproof vests between 2022 and 2023, which the military paid $91 million.
“It's like the worst of Shanzhai. Someone was churning out these items so quickly without taking a moment to look at them,” said Anna Suvorkina, an engineer at the Veteranka workshop, as she examined an army winter jacket. Suvorkina has been sewing for the Ukrainian Armed Forces for over two years and noted she has never seen a jacket of such poor quality.
Ukrainian soldier Dmytro “Kalynchuk” Vovnianko lambasted the fatigues for their poor insulation and how moving in them generates enough noise to be detected from at least 20 meters away. “These are pants for the army, you understand? Camouflage…,” he wrote on Facebook in 2023.
Mimaltemer’s owner, Isa Israilovich Merzhoyev, holds a Russian passport. His wife, French national Oksana Merjou, is the company’s director and the one who negotiated the sale of the faulty uniforms with Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense.
A deep-dive into the company showed only one employee listed on its 2021 registry. This begs the question as to how it could have possibly produced more than 130,000 uniforms and bulletproof vests in just a few months between its first contract and its first delivery.
Further investigative work revealed that the company actually acted as an intermediary and purchased the uniforms from a separate manufacturer in TĂĽrkiye, also called Mimaltemer LTD. The defective fatigues and body armor units were then ultimately sold to Ukraine at more than a 33 percent markup.
Merzhoyev, however, insisted that the bulletproof vests supplied to Ukraine were of the highest quality and denied any overpricing.
“You have been supplied with the best bulletproof vests produced by Türkiye. 20,000 pieces of these vests were kept as a reserve for the Turkish army,” he asserted. Merzhoyev then blamed any discrepancies on “the mafia operating in Ukraine,” but failed to provide any proof despite promising to do so.
Court registry documents show that the Merzhoyev family has been on friendly terms for many years with a Ukrainian Defense Ministry official, who played an important role in the supply of the lackluster vests and jackets.
Merzhoyev’s son, Mimalt, has a controlling interest in a company called Azur, co-owned with Yevgeniia Vdovychenko, a Ukrainian citizen born in 2000. Yevgeniia’s father, Gennadiy Pavlovych Vdovychenko, was the head of the Department of Development of Material Support of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in 2021.
The court registry filings show that Vdovychenko divorced his ex-wife Nataliya Volodymyrivna Vdovychenko in 2016 and that part of the proceeds from the military uniform sales — no less than $1.26 million — went into her personal accounts.
Vdovychenko is now a wanted man in Ukraine and on the run, according to a Ministry of Internal Affairs statement. He is charged with abuse of office as well as obstructing the lawful activities of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and faces up to 15 years in prison.
He, along with two other Defense Ministry officials, are also accused of embezzling nearly $47.2 million in state funds related to the substandard uniform sales with Mimaltemer.
