Anti-corruption watchdogs at the center of protests against Zelensky
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On Tuesday, Zelensky signed into law a bill giving Ukraine's prosecutor general — who is approved by parliament, where Zelensky's party holds a majority — new power over the two agencies, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office.
The two agencies were formed after the pro-Western political pivot in Ukraine following protests in 2014. They were given a mandate to investigate and prosecute cases of high-level corruption, and Western countries strongly backed their formation to crack down on theft of foreign aid.
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The agencies had recently been investigating senior members of Zelensky's government, including a deputy prime minister, Oleksii Chernyshov, who was charged with corruption on June 23, accused of taking kickbacks in a real estate deal. Chernyshov has called the accusations against him a baseless smear campaign.
On Wednesday, amid the protests, the prosecutor general, Ruslan Kravchenko, said he would not interfere in that inquiry.
Also on Wednesday, the two agencies said they had completed and would send to court one aspect of an investigation into what could be the largest fraud in public finance in Ukraine in a decade. The case involves accusations of embezzlement from a lender, PrivatBank, that cost the country about $5 billion to bail out. An owner of the bank, Ihor Kolomoisky, had been a behind-the-scenes patron of Zelensky's presidential campaign in 2019, Ukrainian news media reported.
Kolomoisky has said that he is innocent and that the authorities who brought the charges are trying to extort money from him.
But no accusation of fraud is more infuriating to Ukrainians than one of theft from a military that is defending their homes and lives, shooting down missiles and exploding drones that terrorize cities nightly, and holding a roughly 700-mile defensive line in eastern Ukraine.
Overall, Ukraine has over the past decade improved governance and tamped down graft, according to a measure by Transparency International. And corruption has not worsened during the war, according to the group.
After Russia's invasion, government money started shifting from partly state-controlled energy, mining, and metallurgy companies — previously the trough from which corrupt officials fed — to military spending, analysts have said. Now, about half of Ukraine's national budget of about $98 billion is for defense.
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The anti-corruption bureau has announced several investigations into that spending, accusing insiders of helping to skim about $675,000 from contracts for airplane wheels and about $18 million from a contract for food staples, including potatoes.
Internal audits by the Defense Ministry have pointed to far larger instances of potential fraud or mismanagement, some stemming from an early, chaotic period in the war.
After the 2022 invasion, US intelligence expected that Ukraine's military would buckle within three days and that Russia would capture Kyiv, the capital. Ministries emptied as employees fled.
With just a skeleton staff and tremendous need, one audit showed, the government made multiple contracts for artillery shells, mortar bombs, and other weapons and ammunition at inflated prices from shadowy suppliers in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
After the war stabilized, the insider intermediaries who brokered these deals through 'special importing companies' retained a role in procurement, another audit, conducted last year, showed.
That audit showed special importing companies received 45 percent of the total value of all contracts for arms and ammunition last year, even when the Defense Ministry could have worked directly with a supplier.
According to the audit, about half of all contracts from the companies were either late or incomplete, depriving soldiers of weapons while leaving prepayments in the companies' accounts.
Artem Sytnyk, a former director of the anti-corruption bureau and a former procurement official at the ministry, said in an interview that the agency was investigating those deals.
Unless Zelensky's overhaul is reversed, those investigations will fall under the control of the prosecutor general.
This article originally appeared in
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