Nearly every month adds a new case to a string of high-profile arrests and dismissals. In late May, the former deputy head of the presidential administration, Andrii Smyrnov, was charged with “illicit enrichment” by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, which said he had acquired real estate, vehicles and other assets worth more than 10 times his reported salary and savings.
In April, President Volodymyr Zelensky fired Illya Vitiuk, the head of the cybersecurity department at Ukraine’s Security Service, days after local media reported that Vitiuk’s wife had bought an apartment for more than $500,000 in an elite Kyiv neighborhood.
Within the past year, the country’s chief justice, Vsevolod Knyazyev, was charged with taking more than $2 million in bribes and promptly dismissed. And a prominent oligarch, Ihor Kolomoisky, who was once a stronger supporter of Zelensky, was jailed on suspicion of fraud, embezzlement and money laundering, and then charged with financing a murder-for-hire scheme in the early 2000s.
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Ukrainian officials say the cases are evidence of a concerted — and successful — effort to fight graft. All the accused maintain their innocence, and their cases have not yet come to trial.
“That the number of cases has doubled doesn’t mean that there is twice as much corruption,” said Oleksandr Klymenko, head of a special anti-corruption unit in the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office. “On the contrary: It means that we’re twice as effective as before.”
Western capitals, however, aren’t so sure. Billions are at stake in Ukraine’s fight against corruption — not just the country’s own tax money but also Western military and economic aid.
While there have been no direct allegations of American money or weapons being mishandled or misappropriated, Republican members of Congress cited corruption concerns as among their reasons for obstructing a $61 billion aid package — a months-long delay that allowed Russian forces to advance.
One accusation, that Zelensky used foreign money to buy two luxury yachts, was proved false and traced back to Russian disinformation sources. Still, dozens of independent agents from the State Department’s Office of Inspector General are posted to the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, where they have wide-ranging oversight powers and sit in on many diplomatic meetings.
For decades, corruption thrived in Ukraine. Oligarchs controlled key industries and seats in the parliament. Public servants, including judges, were for sale. But many Ukrainian officials say the country has taken great strides in recent years and is not getting sufficient credit.
Klymenko’s office is one of many anti-corruption bodies created since the 2014 Maidan Revolution, when hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets in part because they were fed up with rampant corruption under President Viktor Yanukovych.
Other new offices include: the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, which investigates corruption cases; the High Anti-Corruption Court; the National Agency on Corruption Prevention, which formulates anti-corruption policy; and a special anti-corruption department in the Defense Ministry. Numerous civic groups and media outlets are also devoted to exposing corruption.
But U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, say it is still not enough. Ukraine “has taken important steps,” Blinken said in Kyiv last month. “But more remains to be done.”
In a speech, he said Ukraine needs “a strong and predictable regulatory environment; open and fair competition; transparency; the rule of law; effective anti-corruption measures.”
“Winning on the battlefield will prevent Ukraine from becoming part of Russia,” Blinken added. “Winning the war against corruption will keep Ukraine from becoming like Russia.”
Senior officials in Kyiv, including Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, bristled at the scolding. “There is a perception of the level of corruption and there are facts about the level of corruption,” Kuleba said at a news conference with Blinken.
A meeting between Zelensky and Blinken was tense — with the Ukrainian leader expressing his appreciation for U.S. military aid but appearing frustrated by Blinken’s focus on corruption, according to people familiar with the discussion who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
Many in Zelensky’s camp argue privately that, though corruption remains a challenge, an anti-corruption effort would distract from what they say should be the primary focus: defeating Russia.
Senior Ukrainian officials complain that Americans and Europeans often use the stereotype of Ukraine as corrupt as an excuse for delaying or opposing vitally needed aid — and that the accusation is not only cliché but evidence of hypocrisy in capitals with their own corruption issues.
“It’s absolutely not fair,” Deputy Prime Minister Olha Stefanishyna, who is overseeing Ukraine’s E.U. membership bid, said in an interview last year. “We always want to say, ‘Why you are lecturing us? We can see that your prime minister has been convicted of corruption.’”
Stefanishyna said she did not have any particular country in mind, but events of the past two years offer several examples. Leaders in Portugal and Spain, as well officials in the European Parliament, have faced corruption allegations.
After Western officials urged Kyiv to impose tighter lobbying rules, Stefanishyna pointed to a report last year that the top official in charge of E.U. enlargement, Gert Jan Koopman, since 2009 had owned a luxury hotel in Bali, Indonesia, which he was not required to disclose under E.U. rules.
Olga Savran, manager of the anti-corruption network at the international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said that some of Ukraine’s harshest critics were spouting off “politicized misinformation” and that Ukraine is neither “a basket case [nor] a lost cause.”
“It’s a half-full, half-empty glass — there’s a lot of progress,” Savran said. Corruption remains a major problem in Ukraine’s “power structure,” though, which is still based “on oligarchic control and high-level corruption, and that trickles down to all other levels.”
The Ukrainians note that they are striving to meet the rule-of-law standards required to join the European Union, while Russia is an increasingly totalitarian dictatorship where corruption is rampant.
Still, the Ukrainians cannot afford to ignore the Western complaints — no matter how unjust they view them.
Even some of the biggest corruption cases have left a mixed image. Knyazyev, the chief justice, visited Washington just weeks before his arrest on a bribery charge in May 2023 and was presented as a pillar of propriety.
He met — and impressed — numerous senior U.S. officials, including Sen. James E. Risch (Idaho), the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“I’ve told them face-to-face that if you want us out, all you got to do is show the ugly head of corruption just a tiny bit and you’re going to lose us and probably a lot of other people,” Risch said in an interview. “They get that,” he added.
Officials say the greatest pressure to eradicate corruption comes not from the West, but from the Ukrainian population. Public outrage over election fraud and government corruption sparked two revolutions in the country and, in 2019, similar anger propelled Zelensky to the presidency on promises that he would eradicate corruption.
But while such rhetoric may please Ukrainian voters — and Western officials — it risks setting unrealistic expectations, experts said.
Key to these efforts is judicial reform, the “cornerstone” of anti-corruption, said Daria Kaleniuk, head of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, one of Ukraine’s main corruption watchdogs.
“If judges are corrupt, society is without rights, and it’s easy to lean into autocracy,” Kaleniuk said.
For some, the greatest setback would be for Russia to win the war.
“In time of war, we have journalists who investigate corruption cases,” said Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, the former head of Transparency International in Ukraine and now an opposition member of parliament. “Do Russia or Belarus have that?”
Stefanishyna said there is “a huge tendency,” pushed by Russian propaganda, to view Ukraine as “a failed state.”
“Whatever we do is never seen as a real success,” Stefanishyna said. But given the billions in aid flowing to Kyiv, she said, she understands that Ukraine needs to be seen “as saintlier than the pope.”
