The Ukrainian Government Shoots Itself in the Foot

By Jim Geraghty

Wednesday, July 23, 2025

 

I share bad news from Ukraine today, and for once, it has little to do with what the Russians are doing, and represents a boneheaded, unjustifiable, entirely self-inflicted wound by the Ukrainian government. The Wall Street Journal reports:

 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a law gutting the country’s anticorruption agency, despite protests urging him not to do so and criticism that it would silence dissent and concentrate power.

 

The law effectively strips independence from Ukraine’s National Anticorruption Bureau, known as NABU, which was established in 2015 under pressure from the U.S. and other Western countries. Protests erupted after the law was pushed through parliament on Tuesday, as more than 1,000 people gathered near the president’s office, shouting “shame” and “veto the law.” It was one of the largest demonstrations against Zelensky’s government since Russia invaded more than three years ago.

 

Zelensky’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment, nor did his Servant of the People party, which controls parliament.

 

Under the law, Ukraine’s prosecutor general will have sweeping powers over NABU and the special anticorruption prosecutor. The prosecutor general is appointed by the president, effectively giving Zelensky power to block investigations into members of his administration.

 

“What’s happening is the demolition of the anticorruption infrastructure in Ukraine,” said Daria Kaleniuk, co-founder of the nongovernmental Anticorruption Action Center, who helped establish NABU after the 2014 revolution toppled a pro-Russian leader. She added that in recent months the U.S. seems to have dropped its emphasis on anticorruption efforts in Ukraine, which has freed the government’s hand to defang NABU.

 

From The Guardian, which apparently has a later deadline than the Journal:

 

In his nightly video address, issued well after midnight, Zelenskyy said he had spoken with the Nabu chief, Semen Kryvonos, and other top prosecutors.

 

Anti-corruption bodies, Zelenskyy said, would continue to function “but without any Russian influence. It all must be cleansed.”

 

“There must be more justice. Of course, Nabu and Sapo will continue their work,” he said. “It’s also important that the prosecutor general be committed to ensuring real accountability for those who break the law. This is what Ukraine truly needs.”

 

The Atlantic Council, which is about as pro-Ukrainian an institution as you will find in Washington, lays out further details:

 

Law enforcement — led by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and the Prosecutor General’s Office — announced that the centerpiece of its investigation was charges of treason against a pro-Russian member of parliament who allegedly worked with NABU detectives to influence investigations at the behest of Russian intelligence services. The SBU, whose leadership is chosen by the president of Ukraine, named two of NABU’s top detectives as having connections to Fedor Khyrstenko, the lawmaker charged with acting in Kremlin interests against Ukraine. They also alleged the detectives helped Ukrainian oligarchs flee the country to avoid criminal charges.

 

Western partners in Kyiv swiftly urged the Zelensky administration to refrain from pressuring NABU. Undeterred by such warnings, reports surfaced that Zelensky’s National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) was planning “amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code” in an effort to ensure “the purity of the work of law enforcement . . . and remove opportunities for corruption.” Observers feared this portended further obstruction of NABU’s work.

 

Ukraine’s government and law enforcement agencies insist these moves are an effort to root out Russian influence in NABU and SAPO to prevent the agencies from being co-opted against the Ukrainian state. But civil society experts and journalists are not convinced.

 

Many suggest the attempted purges are payback for NABU pursuing charges of illicit enrichment and abuse of office against former deputy prime minister Oleksiy Chernyshov, a key ally for the Office of the President. Ironically, it was Zelenskyy himself who brought back criminal liability for illicit enrichment back in 2019 during his original anti-corruption drive.

 

In terms of the war, this changes little. Russian drones and planes continue to bombard Ukrainian civilians every night. Last month, the Russian Federation launched ten times more missile and loitering munitions attacks against Ukraine than in June of 2024, and Ukraine endured the highest monthly civilian casualties in three years. As of February, Russian military forces had launched 1,762 attacks on health-care facilities, workers, and infrastructure. Russians continue to use rape as a weapon against Ukrainian civilian women as well as Ukrainian men in Russian prisons. Ukrainians in territory occupied by the Russians still can’t go to church on Sundays if they aren’t in the Russian Orthodox Church.

 

Corruption is bad. But war crimes are worse.

 

The fight for continued Ukrainian independence, and resistance to Russian military aggression, is bigger than Zelensky, or his cabinet, or the parliament.

 

Some defenders of Ukraine would argue the country’s reputation for corruption is blown out of proportion; in the most recent global assessment, Ukraine ranks 104th out of 180 countries, and over the past decade, it has been slowly improving its evaluation in the Corruption Perceptions Index published by Transparency International, graded at a 35 out of 100 in 2024; it was graded at a 25 in 2013. You can argue Ukraine’s level of corruption is just a little below par for the course in the region; Moldova scored a 42, Romania scored a 46, Hungary scored a 42, and Turkey scored a 34. Remember, those last three are in NATO.

 

On my trips to Ukraine, I was warned to not even make a joke about bribes while crossing the border; the combination of Zelensky’s anti-corruption agenda and the war had created a sudden new culture where everyone was paranoid about being accused of taking bribes.

 

But modest improvement in a lousy grade on corruption still isn’t a good grade, and nobody’s going to be all that enthusiastic about helping preserve the independence of a country that is getting more corrupt instead of less.

 

If you make the government agencies with the duties of investigating corruption in government dependent upon authorization from the president, you’ve created a giant conflict of interest and a formula for minimal investigation or enforcement of the law against the president’s allies.

 

It would be like if an American president just decided, out of the blue, that he was ordering the attorney general to restrict enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and cease initiation of any new FCPA investigations or enforcement actions — er, never mind, bad example. Or if the president decided to cut the staff of the public integrity section of the U.S. Department of Justice from 30 to just five people and revoked the section’s authority to file new cases — eh, wait, another bad example. Or if the president decided to appoint his personal lawyer as a U.S. attorney — wait, wait, scratch that one, too. Or if the president decided to start selling memecoins while setting federal cryptocurrency policy — eh, nope, can’t make that comparison. Maybe if a U.S. president accepted a plane from a foreign government? Nah.

 

Oh, I’ve got it! It would be like if the American president declared, after promising to reveal everything the government knew about the strange death and myriad connections of a notorious sex trafficker, suddenly insisted that his former friend was “somebody that nobody cared about.”

 

Eh, the bottom line is, surely the U.S. government will be deeply disappointed that the Ukrainian government is making moves that weaken the fight against public corruption. In other news, later today the pot will be issuing a harsh statement about the color of the kettle.

 

Our own missteps aside, there’s no getting around the fact that critics of further U.S. assistance to Ukraine — ahem — point to Ukraine’s corruption as a reason why they don’t deserve our help. This asinine decision of the Ukrainian parliament and Zelensky has strengthened the hands of the critics and weakened the hands of supporters like me.

 

Way to go, guys. While you’re at it, do you want to give yourselves a paper cut and stick it in lemon juice?

 

The silver lining or two is that across several cities in Ukraine — in a country where a Russian bomb, missile, or suicide drone could fall out of the sky just about anywhere at any given moment — thousands of Ukrainians gathered to protest the enactment of this new law:

 

The protesters gathered in a park immediately below a rococo 19th-century government building, the House of Chimeras. The crowd was made up of students, young activists and army veterans, some of them draped in blue and yellow Ukrainian flags. Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, also took part, together with his brother Wladimir.

 

Veronika Mol, an artist, said she worried Ukraine was sliding back to the era of Viktor Yanukovych, the corrupt pro-Russian president who fled to Moscow in 2014 after months of street protests.

 

“I’m surprised this has happened. It looks like some madness. I don’t know what their motives are,” she said.

 

“People are the power in Ukraine. Not the president or government. It’s terrible we still have to remind them.”

 

There was vocal condemnation of the bill from prominent soldiers, a celebrity chef and Ukraine’s media. The writer Illia Ponomarenko said civil society was fighting “the dark side of its own state” in parallel with the war against Russia.

 

Ukrainians are not automatons, obedient to their leader under all circumstances, even during wartime. They want independence, freedom, and good government.

 

The argument over wartime elections in Ukraine — a constitutional impossibility and at best a supreme logistical challenge and extraordinary risk to public safety — has been hashed out, over and over again. But it’s getting easier and easier to see why the Ukrainian people ought to have a shot to evaluate the performance of their elected leaders and decide whether they want to keep the current crew in charge.

 

ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, Hunter Biden is denouncing the former Obama speechwriters who host the Pod Save America podcast, the Pod bros are shooting back, and this represents a serious threat to America’s strategic popcorn reserve.