Is Ukraine Winning or Losing Its Fight Against Corruption?

A new corruption scandal involving the country’s top prosecutor has brought renewed attention to Ukraine’s long-standing battle against corruption in high places and the steps being taken against it.Ruslan Kravchenko resigned as prosecutor general on September 7, three days after agents of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, or NABU, searched his premises in a probe of a ring that allegedly protected fraudulent call centers in exchange for regular payoffs. Mr. Kravchenko struck back a week later, before the parliament had ratified his resignation. He announced a “notice of suspicion” — effectively an indictment — reviving old allegations against the NABU chief and immediately left Ukraine on what his office called an official trip to Paris. Mr. Kravchenko’s office quickly invalidated the notice and President Volodymyr Zelensky suspended the prosecutor general that same day; parliament approved his dismissal September 15.Anton Kovalskyi, a regional prosecutor, has run the office on an acting basis since September 17, and Mr. Zelensky said on September 25 he had not yet considered potential candidates for a permanent replacement.The raids began September 4, when agents hit three addresses at once: those of Mr. Kravchenko; his deputy, Mariia Vdovychenko, who has since left her post; and Odesa’s regional military chief, Oleh Kiper. The NABU and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, or SAPO, ran the operation together, codenamed Carthage.A deputy department head at the Office of the Prosecutor General, Serhii Kropyva, was detained on suspicion of laundering close to $2 million, and a court set bail at nearly $2.7 million.Mr. Kravchenko, who denied any involvement in the scheme and has not been charged, described his decision to resign as an attempt to keep the prosecutor general’s office out of Ukraine’s internal power fights. However he has not returned to Ukraine since the scheduled end of his trip to Paris on September 18.The sums are modest next to earlier scandals; the timing is not. The graft ring allegedly working inside the agency responsible for prosecuting graft has surfaced less than a year after a $100 million kickback affair touched the president’s inner circle. It raises a troubling question: Is policing its own institutions as important to Ukraine’s survival as holding the front line?Mr. Kravchenko’s resignation changes the balance of power in Kyiv more than it changes the system itself, according to someone who has tracked Ukrainian politics in the region for years.“The Prosecutor General controls key proceedings involving MPs and acted as an institutional barrier protecting Zelensky’s parliamentary majority. His departure gives NABU and SAPO more room to move towards Davyd Arakhamia and other senior figures — but lasting change depends on who replaces him,” a political analyst, former Slovak diplomat and consultant specializing in Eastern Europe, Balazs Jarabik, tells The New York Sun.Even the operation’s codename — a reference to ancient Rome’s determination to utterly destroy a rival empire — carries significance. “The name of the operation, Carthage, suggests the anti-corruption agencies are serious about dismantling the system,” Mr. Jarabik says.The Midas Problem Won’t Go AwayAn even bigger scandal is still working its way through Kyiv’s courts. Operation Midas, unveiled last November, exposed a scheme centered on Energoatom, the state nuclear operator, in which contractors allegedly paid kickbacks of 10 to 15 percent to keep their government business. Investigators say the money moved through a back office run by Tymur Mindich, a longtime friend and former business partner of Mr. Zelensky.Investigators charged seven people in the initial wave. Mr. Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, resigned that same month. In May, investigators charged him with laundering about $10 million invested in elite construction near Kyiv, a charge he calls unfounded. Mr. Mindich, who left Ukraine shortly before charges were filed and is believed to be in Israel, was ordered held in absentia and denies wrongdoing.In August, investigators charged a deputy head of Mr. Zelensky’s presidential office, Iryna Mudra, who oversaw judicial reform, in a separate money-laundering case, and Mr. Zelensky dismissed her the same day. Investigators allege Ms. Mudra and a former lawmaker, Maksym Mykytas, laundered the cash used to post bail for a former energy minister, Herman Halushchenko, who was a suspect in the Energoatom case. Separately, authorities charged Ms. Mudra in a scheme to seize real estate by forging documents and influencing judges. She denies the accusations and says recordings released by investigators were taken out of context.Those recordings also refer to a “Kyrylo,” a possible reference to Mr. Zelensky’s current chief of staff, Kyrylo Budanov. Mr. Budanov has said his name comes up in many places and that a court should sort it out. No charge against him has been reported.Carthage and Midas are the latest chapters in a long story. Ukraine’s wartime government has faced corruption scandals almost every year since Russia invaded in 2022. Oleksii Reznikov left the defense ministry in September 2023 amid procurement scandals, among them reports that his ministry overpaid for army winter jackets and for food contracts, including eggs. That August, Mr. Zelensky fired every regional recruitment office chief in the country after some were caught taking bribes to help draft-age men evade conscription. None of this is lost on the people deciding whether Ukraine gets into the club it most wants to join.Brussels Is Watching the MoneyUkraine is trying to join the European Union, and Brussels has made clear that rule-of-law and anti-corruption benchmarks are conditions of membership. The more immediate obstacle has been political: Hungary held up ascension negotiations in two of six areas over the rights of the ethnic-Hungarian minority in Ukraine. Parliament passed a bill on minority-language education October 12, and EU member states agreed to advance the two negotiating clusters, which cover the internal market and competitiveness.Still, Brussels is said to be holding onto hope for Kyiv.“I don’t think the EU is losing patience, nor giving Zelensky the benefit of the doubt. There are substantial rule of law and anti-corruption requirements for nations who are joining the EU,” the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and a former United States ambassador to Ukraine, John Herbst, tells the Sun.Asked whether Mr. Kravchenko’s exit helps or hurts Mr. Zelensky’s case that the system works, Mr. Herbst says, “This is evidence that the anti-corruption agencies are doing their jobs.”Not everyone perceives Brussels’ patience the same way.“Formal conditionality is still in place, particularly around the independence of NABU, SAPO and the judiciary. In practice, however, preventing Ukraine’s financial or military collapse takes precedence over enforcing every reform benchmark,” Mr. Jarabik explains. “The EU has little control over the escalating institutional infighting, which is becoming existential for those involved.”In other words, Brussels has the right to withhold money if reforms fail. Even so, it won’t let paperwork undermine a country it needs to hold its ground against Russia, and it has no real say in Kyiv’s power struggle.Where the Reconstruction Money GoesAs the war grinds on, billions of dollars in Western reconstruction and emergency financing are flowing into Ukraine, moving through the same sectors in which investigators keep finding trouble: energy infrastructure, wartime defense procurement and asset recovery programs.By the numbers, Ukraine is a rare bright spot. Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index ranks Ukraine 104th out of 182 countries, up from 122nd in 2021, the year before Russia’s full-scale invasion. That makes it one of only a handful of countries to improve its standing while fighting a war on its own soil. The ranking reflects data through September 2025, before the Midas and Carthage investigations became public. Russia ranks 154th, near the bottom.The push to root out corruption dates back to the 2014 Euromaidan revolution in which Ukrainians drove out a pro-Kremlin president. NABU and SAPO emerged from that upheaval and their credibility has endured even as the scandals mount, a Russia specialist at a Washington think tank says.“That Ukraine continues to struggle with corruption, including at high levels, is no secret. But the encouraging thing is that Ukraine, slowly, painfully, is moving forward,” the deputy director of the Russia Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, John Hardie, tells the Sun.“Ukraine has real anti-corruption institutions, and they’re doing their job, even if at times they must do so despite obstruction by senior officials. That’s part of what separates Ukraine from Russia,” Mr. Hardie adds.A research fellow at the same institution reads the scandal as proof that the system is working.“Exposing corruption is not a sign that Ukrainian democracy is failing; it is a sign that Ukrainian democracy is working,” Ivana Stradner, tells the Sun. “Corruption can become a military vulnerability. Russia’s armed forces offer a grim demonstration of what corruption, theft and fraud can do to military readiness. Ukraine cannot afford to follow that model.”Ms. Stradner warns that Moscow is watching the unfolding investigations just as closely as Brussels is.“The Kremlin always exploits every corruption scandal to argue that Western governments are wasting their money and that Ukraine is incapable of governing itself,” she explains. “Ukraine must make sure corruption doesn’t give [President Vladimir] Putin a second route to weaken the country.”Institutional independence has limits once politics gets involved.“Anti-corruption agencies may be institutionally independent, but they cannot operate outside Ukraine’s political framework,” Mr. Jarabik observes. “Their emerging model is often to investigate and communicate, rather than investigate and secure prosecutions, making their disclosures instruments of political power in their own right.”Mr. Kravchenko’s resignation does not resolve the underlying problem, and it puts Ukraine’s case for EU membership in a strange position: The outcome of that bid may depend as much on how Kyiv handles its own institutions as on how it holds its own against Russia.“Zelensky seems to believe that Russia’s war shields him domestically,” Mr. Jarabik says, “and leaves the EU no viable alternative but to support Ukraine, and, by extension, his leadership.”

Is Ukraine Winning or Losing Its Fight Against Corruption?

Is Ukraine Winning or Losing Its Fight Against Corruption?

More from the New York Sun

Moscow Declares Plague Lab Death Case ‘Closed’ — but Nobody Is Saying What Killed Darya Shipilova

A Michigan Man Sat in Jail 10 Days Before Feds Revealed He Was an Alleged Saddam Spy

Ozempic-Style Drugs for 8-Year-Olds? Prescriptions to Young Kids Explode 310-Fold

‘Sickening’ Allegations Against Meghan Markle’s Father Threaten To Complicate Harry’s Bid for Royal Reconciliation

Risk of Blue Wave Ebbing as Tumultuous Midterm Campaign Season Draws to a Close

After American Intervention in Nigeria, Little Progress Is Notched in Effort To End Christian, Civilian Murders

Unintended Consequences of Trump’s Policy Moves Haunt the Impending Midterms

Blakeman Welcomes Mamdani’s First Campaign Event With Hochul

More from the New York Sun

Moscow Declares Plague Lab Death Case ‘Closed’ — but Nobody Is Saying What Killed Darya Shipilova

A Michigan Man Sat in Jail 10 Days Before Feds Revealed He Was an Alleged Saddam Spy

Ozempic-Style Drugs for 8-Year-Olds? Prescriptions to Young Kids Explode 310-Fold

‘Sickening’ Allegations Against Meghan Markle’s Father Threaten To Complicate Harry’s Bid for Royal Reconciliation

Risk of Blue Wave Ebbing as Tumultuous Midterm Campaign Season Draws to a Close

After American Intervention in Nigeria, Little Progress Is Notched in Effort To End Christian, Civilian Murders

Unintended Consequences of Trump’s Policy Moves Haunt the Impending Midterms

Blakeman Welcomes Mamdani’s First Campaign Event With Hochul