As the $60bn-plus Ukraine aid supplemental was being discussed in Washington late last year, a story emerged on Russian-linked sites claiming that President Zelenskyy had bought two super yachts for around $75m.
The claims were false but rapidly gained credence among anti-Ukraine aid activists in the US and beyond. Among them were the Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Green and the Ohio GOP Senator JD Vance.
“Anyone who votes to fund Ukraine is funding the most corrupt money scheme of any foreign war in our country’s history,” Taylor Greene said above a link to the yacht story.
The allegation that Ukraine is hopelessly corrupt and that US aid is funding a self-interested elite entirely indifferent to the war’s outcome is a popular theme among social media accounts hostile to the dispatch of aid.
But the argument, even when it does refer to fact, relies on old evidence. It takes no account of considerable — and accelerating — Ukrainian improvements since.
The gold standard for measuring global graft is Transparency International (TI)’s Corruption Perceptions Index. In 2014, Ukraine was placed a dismal 142nd (out of 180), the same year that the country’s pro-Kremlin President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in the Maidan uprising.
Since then, it has risen steadily through the ranks. The country’s efforts saw it rise to 117th by 2020 and 104th in 2023, the highest it has ever been. Russia, by comparison, has dropped from 136th place to 141st, and its overall score has been in sharp decline since 2020. It returned its worst-ever result last year.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has been conducting reviews of Ukraine’s anti-corruption efforts for years. Its annual report in March also showed significant improvements. It examined five key areas for the anti-graft effort. Anti-corruption policy and judicial independence were both judged to show high performance, with asset disclosure and specialized anti-corruption institutions assessed as outstanding. Enforcement against corruption offenses was judged only average.
The report noted, for example, that: “specialized anti-corruption bodies demonstrated a remarkable level of enforcement of high-level corruption cases with the number of convictions growing despite the war.”
Both the OECD and TI had tough criticisms of the anti-graft effort and noted that they are a long way from good enough. While it’s encouraging to see the President of the Supreme Court Vsevolod Kniaziev dismissed in May last year after allegedly accepting a $2.7m bribe, it’s also worrying that a judge of that seniority is accused of such a crime.
But there is a widespread understanding among anti-corruption experts that Ukraine is trying to fix the corruption aircraft while it’s in flight and under attack from flak batteries. The country is engaged in a war of national survival, which not only makes the task extremely hard but offers new opportunities to dishonest officials. The scandal of more than 30 conscription officers allegedly taking bribes in return for deferments was one such example in August.
But Ukrainians themselves are at the forefront of the drive to crack down on corruption. In April, a Ukrainian outlet indicated that one of their journalists “appeared” to have been targeted by enlistment officers as revenge for his work investigating Ukraine’s cybersecurity chief. The journalist Yuriy Nikolov, who had been key to exposing defense ministry scandals, was targeted by two men who tried to break down his door in January, calling him a provocateur and a traitor.
The same month, the Mediarukh media association directly addressed Zelenskyy, asking that he “take over control of the investigation” into a string of attacks and smear campaigns against journalists.
“There is still a lot of work to be done in this area,” said Anastasiia Mazurok from TI Ukraine. “But there are opportunities for achievement too.”
It is not always easy to find out what is going on. Wars encourage secrecy and inevitably that is greater close to the front line. Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia, both under pressure from the Russians at the moment, are understandably much less transparent than Lviv, close to the Polish border.
“Municipalities still restrict citizens’ access to information about their activities, share limited information about the appointment of personnel without a competition, and engage citizens in decision-making in a restrained manner,” Mazurok noted.
The most important thing to remember in the long, uphill slog against corruption, is that it can be done.
Take Latvia, which once had a reputation for deep corruption. Citizen pressure has raised its ranking to that of Spain, at 36 in TI’s index, a rise of more than 20 places since it became an EU member in 2004. Super-clean Estonia today ranks 12th — higher than Japan, France, the US, and the UK.
The fight against corruption does something more profound than a league table can measure. It gives citizens a stake in their own country and a sense that the powerful are forced to play by the same rules as ordinary people.
Given the terrible sacrifices that Ukraine has had to make over the past decade of Russian aggression, that is central to the pride of the new battle-hardened state. Ukrainians flooded into Maidan back in 2014 to hold their government to account, and they then filled the ranks to hold onto their independence. It is this that makes Ukraine so unlike Russia.
There has been significant progress in Ukraine’s fight against corruption and it will continue. It would be insulting to all Ukrainians, soldier and civilian alike, to deny this achievement and question their commitment to building a land fit for its heroes.
Aliide Naylor is the author of ‘The Shadow in the East’ (Bloomsbury, 2020). She lived in Russia for several years and now reports from the Baltic states and Ukraine.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
