At first glance, the 60-year-old heavy-set man with a grey beard and unruly ash-coloured curls, wearing glasses and a blue tracksuit and carrying a leather briefcase, looks like a caricature of an Eastern European businessman from the 1990s.
But this is how one of Ukraine’s richest and most influential men, Ihor Kolomoiskyi, appeared in court last week.
It comes as Ukrainian authorities are pushing a new, wartime anti-corruption drive – something signalled most recently by president Volodymyr Zelenskyi earlier this month. Describing a Ukraine of the future in his daily public address, Zelenskyi said the situation would change for “those who ransacked Ukraine and put themselves above the law” in the past.
