Destroying Democracy in the Name of “Democracy”

The Western establishment’s sudden interest in Ukraine’s “authoritarian turn” — including explicit comparisons of Zelensky with Vladimir Putin — proves significant in its timing. Remarkably, these critiques ignore years of authoritarian and nationalist trends dating back not to the full-scale war’s start but to the 2014 Euromaidan revolution itself.

The remnants of the main opposition party, banned after the war’s start as “pro-Russian,”  became loyal parliamentary puppets voting for presidential laws more faithfully than Zelensky’s own “Servant of the People” party. They voted en masse for Zelensky’s most controversial legislation, including both the 2024 mobilization laws and the recent legislation targeting anti-corruption institutions. They even voted in favor of repressions against their former political allies.

Despite being the subject of criticism in the recent human rights report from the Council of Europe, extrajudicial personal sanctions are now in effect for roughly 1,500 Ukrainian citizens, severely limiting their economic activities, property rights, and freedom of movement. The sanctions now target ex-president and opposition leader Petro Poroshenko and threaten Czech multimillionaire Tomáš Fiala — owner of Ukraine’s most important liberal outlet, Ukrainska Pravda, which backs the recent protests.

When Zelensky first deployed sanctions against “pro-Russian” opposition figures and media in 2021, Ukrainian “anti-corruption civil society” — along with the US Embassy — lauded them. But beyond political repression, these sanctions enable corruption through business seizures and extortion, sometimes even harming American companies. This often involves the Security Services of Ukraine (SBU), which arrested the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) detectives on charges of “Russian espionage” in late July. In a press conference, the head of the SBU, Vasyl Malyuk, stated his belief that the NABU detectives should’ve been shot for their attempts to investigate national guard officers for corruption.

The sanctions hitherto supported by Ukraine’s nationalist civil society are neither constitutional nor transparent — Donald Trump’s imposed rare minerals deal may be implemented precisely with the use of sanctions to transfer Ukrainian elite’s property to Western owners.

Current criticism focuses on Andrii Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff, who has been blamed for crude attempts to control anti-corruption institutions. In fact, concentration of power by the presidential office — creating a de facto governing body more important than the constitutionally mandated cabinet — has characterized all Ukrainian governments under all presidents. This trend has survived all supposedly democratizing maidan revolutions. Yermak’s consolidation as Ukraine’s “grey cardinal” began well before the full-scale invasion, attracting minimal Western elite attention despite his indispensable role around Zelensky for years.

It’s important to note that Ukraine’s repressive political environment affects all of society with the country’s ethnonationalist policies still getting a pass from the European establishment. Language policies restrict Russian usage in public spheres to the minimum. This means virtually no schools teach Russian language and literature, preventing most children in cities like Odessa or Kharkiv from learning to write in the language they speak with their parents — a policy difficult to qualify as anything but ethnic assimilationism.

The state language official even stated that students or teachers speaking Russian at school break times breaks the law. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the country’s largest by parish numbers, faces the threat of an outright ban while churches suffer violent takeovers, priests face conscription (unlike clergy of any other religion), forcing some parishes to gather in private apartments or woods, evoking medieval scenes. And, as has long been the case, historical revisionism regarding Nazi collaboration flourishes.

Meanwhile, far-right military power expands as Azov-originated units grow into two army corps commanding tens of thousands. Freedom of speech narrows, with numerous trials regarding controversial statements made on social media, the “liking” of other people’s posts, and even in personal correspondence or private telephone conversations. Persecution for politically framed articles produces prisoner numbers exceeding Russia’s scale. According to the BBC in 2024, there are 9,000 Ukrainian citizens imprisoned for “collaborationism.” Some of these crimes involved social media posts or continuing to host football matches under Russian military occupation. The well-known human rights organization Memorial counts 524 political prisoners in Russia (falling from 769 in 2024), with some other estimates rising up to 1588.

Most brutal of all, however, is the increasingly violent conscription campaign, documented in thousands of videos showing street violence against resisting men circulating daily on Ukrainian social media. The Council of Europe reports note torture and even death occur during mobilization — not even in combat. Conscription aids overall political repression, particularly targeting some notable figures from the anti-corruption “civil society.” More evidently, conscription has acquired an explicit class character, primarily targeting poorer, less privileged groups — workers and rural residents — who possess fewer opportunities to avoid draft through bribery.

The coercion intertwined with this escalating mobilization is only intensifying Ukraine’s state legitimacy crisis, with fewer Ukrainians willing to sacrifice themselves to defend it. This has created a popular backlash — mass resistance to conscription escalating into riots, as recently occurred in Vinnytsia, where dozens of relatives and friends of conscripted men clashed with the police and broke into a stadium to release them. Unlike anti-corruption protests, anti-conscription riots attract far less Western public sphere or Ukrainian “civil society” attention. Vitaliy Shabunin, one of the most well-known anti-corruption activists who has complained of government pressure on him to fight in the army, publicly condemned the anti-mobilization protests.

In fact, Ukraine’s nationalist civil society has consistently supported forced mobilization. Bohdan Butkevych is one of the anti-corruption journalists who recently complained of being mobilized. Yet he’s on record having said that those who “badmouth the mobilization officers are absolute scum,” even going as far as to praise violent mobilization: “Can mobilization officers do some fucked-up shit? Hell yes, as much as they want.”

Butkevych’s peers have also supported the elimination of entire political parties from Ukrainian politics. These include the Communist Party and successors of the Party of Regions, which were dominant players until Euromaidan. Entire political ideologies — particularly communist and pro-Soviet perspectives on Ukrainian history — have also been de facto criminalized.

Some justify these measures as “inevitable” wartime evils. Others simply dismiss the fate of vatniks — a derogatory term referring to the cotton coats worn by Red Army soldiers. For Ukrainian national-liberal “civil society,” some developments — especially ethnonationalist transformations reshaping diverse, complex Ukraine in their image and likeness — represent “the country of their dream.” This struggle never concerned abstract “self-determination” but pursued a very specific vision of Ukrainian identity.

Until he backtracked, Zelensky presented the crackdown on the anti-corruption organs as yet another necessary wartime measure against “Russian influence.” But it is in fact the core issue of the class conflict that stands behind the war in Ukraine itself.

Anti-Corruption and Post-Soviet Class Conflict

Anti-corruption appears obviously beneficial — preventing public asset misuse for private gain seems beyond criticism. Yet this discourse and these policies have both embodied the interests of transnational capital and simultaneously undermined protest against ruling classes. This depoliticizing function has acquired a particularly acute form in post-Soviet societies.

As Ben Fogel observes, “Anticorruption policy has become a standard feature of post–Cold War development projects, institutionalized as a feature of the neoliberal world order.” In the End of History moment, corruption emerged as the catch-all explanation for capitalism’s failure to deliver widespread prosperity, deflecting attention from systemic contradictions to individual misdeeds and institutional inadequacies.

According to this framework, the problem isn’t the free market, it is “corrupt” politics getting in its way. The solution is an “apolitical technocracy” to unleash the benign power of the market. In fact, such discourse is quite redolent of the likes of Augusto Pinochet’s Chile or Park Chung-hee’s Republic of Korea. In Ukraine, too, the partisans of the struggle against corruption have supported many undemocratic policies.

Contemporary anti-corruption campaigns fundamentally serve transnational capital by reducing transaction costs and eliminating local capital’s competitive advantages through “transparency” requirements. Peter Bratsis demonstrates how these initiatives protect “certain kinds of particular interests (mainly those of international capital)” from rent-seeking behavior and policy unpredictability. This transforms state institutions to serve global capital’s instrumental rationality while marginalizing local economic networks dependent on personal relationships.

Crucially, neoliberal anti-corruption logic can frame any deviation from market orthodoxy such as social spending, industrial policy, and redistributive measures as corruption itself. Fogel demonstrates with the example of Brazil how even moderate redistributive policies are interpreted as corruption. Portraying “social security as ‘bribes’ to the poor and working class” ultimately enabled the far-right Jair Bolsonaro’s rise through flawed charges against left-of-center president Dilma Rousseff.

On the one hand, technocratic anti-corruption discourse elides capitalism’s contradictions to instead bolster perpetual institutional “reform,” serving transnational capital while selectively persecuting individuals. On the other hand, the inherent populism of an anti-corruption slogan redirects dissatisfaction with neoliberal ills toward generic “corrupt elites” without offering institutional alternatives.

Both feed into contemporary hyperpolitics, which fragments, disorganizes, and disarticulates classes required for genuine revolutionary anti-systemic politics. In this way, the dominance of corruption discourse reflects both bourgeois hegemony’s crisis and also working-class weakness.

These deficiencies of anti-corruption politics manifest themselves in post-Soviet countries in particularly sharp form. Socialist modernization accumulated massive investment in state property that later became the object of predatory privatization following the Soviet Union’s centrifugal disintegration. Selective access to state benefits through complex formal and informal relations became the major competitive advantage for the dominant fraction of the emerging post-Soviet ruling class — political capitalists.

“Corruption” has emerged as the central mechanism for ruling-class reproduction with enrichment forming the basis of zero-sum fragmentation within this class. Political capitalists naturally find themselves in an anarchic struggle of all against all, exemplified by post-Soviet Ukraine and the Russia of the 1990s. They can be unified around long-term collective interests only by Bonapartist or Caesarist rulers — such as Putin — enforcing class collective interests through coercion, balancing, and patronage.

This class dynamic defined the central political conflict cutting across the post-Soviet space. One side articulated itself around “corruption” and “democracy” — opposing illegitimate exploitation of public assets and usurpation of power. The opposing camp focused on the concepts of “sovereignty” and “stability.” On the latter side stand political capitalists who tend to be organized into Caesarist regimes, relying on passive electoral consent from depoliticized working classes. The professional middle class, however, stands with the former for whom “corruption” became the catchword for “overcoming,” “reforming,” or outrightly destroying Soviet material, institutional, and cultural legacies in aspirations to join the periphery of “Western civilization.”

This is why the post-Euromaidan, anti-corruption ecosystem in Ukraine strives to be enmeshed with Western interests — “anti-corruption” is now the core issue for Western-funded NGOs presenting themselves as local representatives of “civil society.” With the aid of these Western interests, this “anti-corruption” apparatus thus fights the entire “system” (systema), whereby business interests cozy up to officials and parliamentarians through loyal law enforcement officers and purchased judges. According to NGOs and Western governments, Ukraine’s court system has been completely subverted by corrupt interests. Some basis exists for this view: since 2013, less than 0.5 percent of investigations under the most common corruption charges ended with prison terms, with almost no top officials, judges, or prosecutors among those convicted.

The response involved building a counter-system — a comprehensive “state within the state” of anti-corruption institutions constructed since the Euromaidan Revolution. Besides the NABU and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), the main pillars include the High Anti-Corruption Court (VAKS) and the National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NAZK). The aim has been to create a closed circuit to monitor officials’ lifestyles, investigate corruption cases, charge those suspected, and finally prosecute. All this is meant to avoid contamination with the local systema — particularly “regular” security services, the prosecutor’s office, and the courts.

A specific mechanism ensuring the anti-corruption system’s operation involves decisive foreign influence on key appointments. This takes place through advisory boards with foreign citizens and “experts” selected from anti-corruption NGOs, preventing local elite capture. This practice of granting decisive votes to foreign citizens or NGO experts on advisory boards has been widely implemented in post-Euromaidan Ukraine, placing key state companies in energy, transport, and finance — along with crucial judicial institutions — beyond local control. For example, just two United States Agency for International Development–funded NGOs control half the members of the Public Council of Integrity, an advisory body under the High Qualification Commission of Judges, which decides on new judicial appointments.

As a tool in post-Soviet class conflict, the anti-corruption ecosystem has proven especially hostile to state interventionism, local industrial policy, and social redistribution, functioning as a way of keeping Ukraine’s market open to transnational capital. Bill 3739 provides an excellent example. In 2020, Zelensky’s cabinet highlighted alarming deindustrialization statistics since 2014, with the economic development minister blaming Ukraine’s lack of localization requirements for state procurement. While 40 percent of Ukrainian state tenders go to foreign companies, only 3 to 5 percent of US and EU tenders go to foreigners. Bill 3739 attempted correction through basic localization requirements — standard government procedure, particularly during COVID when such measures became commonplace.

Ukrainian anti-corruption NGOs, Transparency International, the Renaissance Foundation, the EU, and the United States all violently disagreed, producing statements about the bill’s supposed “corruption risks.” Ultimately, 3739 was modified to affect only non-Western countries outside the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Beyond Western government funding, almost all anti-corruption institutions receive support from global organizations like Transparency International and Open Society Foundations, whose Ukrainian affiliate operates as the International Renaissance Foundation.

Ukrainian elites have grown increasingly unhappy with this anti-corruption oversight hindering local political capitalists’ interests. Yulia Tymoshenko, the veteran politician now leading a small parliamentary group, has taken the most consistent position in the recent conflict. She has supported control by the state prosecutor over the anti-corruption “state within the state,” criticizing these institutions as turning Ukraine into a “disenfranchised colony.”

In doing so, she has in fact voiced widely shared elite opinion. Both recent presidents, Poroshenko and Zelensky, have publicly embraced the anti-corruption cause for populist legitimation. Poroshenko was elected following Euromaidan’s overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych, known for egregious corruption and economic and political monopolization. Meanwhile, Zelensky’s landslide 2019 victory centered on being a “new face” contrasting with “old corrupt elites.” One of his most famous election slogans was an (unfulfilled) promise to imprison old elites. Nevertheless, both presidents have tried to slow and sabotage anti-corruption institutional implementation.

Transnational institutions and G7 ambassadors have systematically responded by pressuring Ukrainian elites. Over the past decade, International Monetary Fund (IMF) credit continuation has been conditioned on appointing Western embassy–approved figures to lead key organs such as the NABU. The 2017 visa-free regime with the EU was conditioned on anti-corruption progress, as are current EU membership negotiations. The recent EU threat to withdraw financial aid — which proved pivotal in Zelensky’s retreat — merely represents the latest move in these existing dynamics.

A possible reaction from Ukrainian elites — actively discussed and seriously feared within the “civil society” — involves the “Georgian scenario” for Ukraine. Like Ukraine, Georgia experienced its maidan revolution in 2003, followed by war with Russia in 2008 after attempting to retake secessionist South Ossetia, along with the notorious Bucharest summit decision offering “future in NATO” to both countries.

The Georgian Dream government that replaced postrevolutionary president Mikheil Saakashvili in 2012 cracked down on their own “civil society” last year through foreign agent legislation and suppression of oppositional election protests, despite significant Western pressure. The “Georgian scenario” represents a “revolt of the elites” establishing Caesarist rule independent of “civil society” and transnational institutions. It also required certain accommodations with Russia. However, it is more accurately viewed as part of the local elites’ “sovereigntist” balancing between the greater powers amid the disintegration of the international order.

Anti-corruption defenders might argue that despite serving narrow comprador “civil society” and transnational capital interests, these institutions still benefit the broader population by checking local “oligarchs'” predatory practices, strengthening state institutions through independent oversight, and preventing authoritarian usurpation of power. This claim proves far from accurate. The anti-corruption institutions themselves operate inefficiently, engage in corrupt practices, and interfere in international and domestic politics. As a result, most Ukrainians see them hardly different or even worse than other mistrusted institutions of the Ukrainian state.

Is Anti-Corruption Effective?

It should be noted that the neoliberal shock therapy applied vigorously to Ukraine’s economy has had disastrous effects for its military-industrial capacities. For instance, many nationalists in the military often complain about the fact that Ukraine, once the high-tech center of the Soviet Union’s military-industrial complex, is no longer even able to produce artillery shells. Yet the city of Dnepropetrovsk once produced the most advanced ballistic missiles in the Eastern Bloc.

Meanwhile, the interior ministry paid over a billion dollars from 2018 to 2021 to purchase 110 airbus helicopters from France. Many criticized the decision not to support the Ukrainian aeronautics company Motor Sich, which suffered seriously from the loss of the Russian market in 2014. Interestingly, Poland refused the same deal in the interest of protecting its own domestic producers despite the fact that Poland is often held up as a shining example of the superiority of “Western free market values” as opposed to “backward state interventionism.” Incidentally, Poland recently dissolved its equivalent of the NABU for ineffectiveness.

Indeed, the NABU is both ineffective and unpopular. According to a regular USAID-funded survey on the perception of the situation with the corruption and anticorruption institutions conducted in 2024, only 5 percent believed that the level of corruption decreased in the last year, while 49 percent said it increased and 35 percent believed it did not change. Moreover, according to the same survey, only 10 to 13 percent of Ukrainians trusted the various “anti-corruption institutions.”

For comparison, much more people trusted SBU (29 percent), the president and his office (22 percent), or the police (17 percent). Furthermore, just 14 to 15 percent said that the anti-corruption institutions actually “want to eradicate corruption.” More people believed that SBU wanted to eradicate corruption (20 percent). Only a few percent claimed to have heard about any “anti-corruption measures, reforms, or campaigns” of the “anti-corruption institutions” in the last year, with 46 percent perceiving the governmental measures against corruption as “completely inefficient” — almost the same percentage as in 2018 before Zelensky was elected (51 percent). An international audit in 2024 found that 54 percent of Ukrainians distrusted the NABU specifically.

But despite all these problems, the Ukrainian government’s 2025 “roadmap for joining the EU” simply recommended expanding all anti-corruption organs. This, despite the fact that NAZK is by far the most highly-paid government agency — twice the level of the Ministry of Finances. And while the NABU consumed nine billion hryvnia of budget funds over the past decade, it only gave back one billion hryvnia in budget revenues. The managers of the NABU, it should be noted, receive salaries of up to 300,000 hryvnia or approximately $7,000 a month.

In May 2025, a group of Western experts conducted an independent audit of the NABU. It found a striking lack of effectiveness when it came to self-monitoring, uninvestigated leaks, a low percentage of cases involving high-level corruption, an absence of transparent statistics, and a systemic tendency toward isolation from other agencies. Interestingly, said audit found that only 7 percent of those accused of corruption are actually top officials. This runs contrary to the same audit’s praise for the NABU’s “targeting of top officials,” and the standard narrative in pro-NABU, USAID-funded Ukrainian press such as Ukrainska Pravda. According to them, while the ordinary justice system simply charges low-level corruption cases, the NABU keeps top officials on edge.

The audit also uncovered a decline in the number of corruption suspects in the defense sector: falling from twenty-five accusations in 2023 to seven in 2024, only 3 percent of all accusations. There were also fewer total defendants in the sector, falling from nineteen in 2023 to fifteen in 2024. This is highly questionable given the constant corruption cases in the Ukrainian army. The most well-known such case, the “expensive eggs” that Minister of Defence Oleksii Reznikov profited off in 2023, merely led to Reznikov’s resignation. Despite a NABU search on the ex-minister, he never faced real consequences.

Meanwhile, there were no notices of suspicion issued to high-ranking officials of law enforcement and regulatory agencies in 2023 and only a single one in 2024. Suspicion notices for senior officers of law enforcement agencies decreased from one in 2023 to zero in the period from January to August 2024.

Indeed, the 2024 poll commissioned by NAZK itself found that the perception of corruption among the population and business has become worse than before the full-scale invasion. Sixty-nine percent of Ukrainians noticed a rise in corruption, an 8 percent rise compared to the previous year. For comparison, in 2021, 42 percent of the population (only 26 percent in 2020) and 36 percent of business believed that corruption had become worse.

Corruption in “Anti-Corruption”

Besides its ineffectiveness, NABU has also always been dogged by corruption scandals. The problem with constructing a “state-within-a-state” anti-corruption closed circuit, insulated from local interests, is that one still needs to employ minimally competent detectives and prosecutors, many of whom come from the old corrupt systema.

For example, head of NABU Artem Sytnyk from 2015 to 2022 was well-known for his ties with president Poroshenko. In 2018, the USAID-funded publication Skhemy uncovered evidence that the president paid a number of nighttime visits to Sytnyk. Sytnyk was then convicted of corruption by a Ukrainian court the following year. Despite his unsuccessful appeals, he remained head of the NABU until the end of his contract three years later. He then took up a top position at the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption, which he occupied until June 2024.

Despite such a suspicious history, Transparency International Ukraine has always publicly supported Sytnyk’s appointment to head anti-corruption organs. In 2018, it emerged that the head of the SAPO, Nazar Kholodnitsky, had a listening device installed in the aquarium of his office as part of an investigation into him by Poroshenko’s general prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, and the NABU. In response, Kholodnitsky revived a number of corruption cases against Lutsenko from the previous year. Recordings revealed that Kholodnitsky was engaged in corrupt dealings with a range of individuals under investigation by his organ at the time. Kholodnitsky was accused by Sytnyk of leaking information to suspects investigated by the NABU in March 2018 but remained at his post until August 2020, when he resigned of his own will.

In June 2024, it emerged that three high-ranking detectives that had worked at the NABU since 2015 had taken advantage of their position. First, one of the detectives got the NABU to accuse the deputy director of security at the state railway company Ukrzaliznytsia with corruption, leading to the individual’s dismissal. Soon after, the NABU detective in question left the NABU and took over the empty post at Ukrzaliznytsia. His two colleagues also followed suit, receiving enviable positions at the railway company soon after. These posts were often occupied only a few days after leaving their position at the NABU — technically illegal, with a year the minimum period.

One of the NABU detectives also suddenly declared around $870,000 worth of cryptocurrency and significant real estate holdings. Meanwhile, his father-in-law was appointed to a managerial position at the Odessa branch of Ukrzaliznytsia. The final detective, meanwhile, acquired shares in major companies such as Ferrexpo and Myronivsky Khliboprodukt. Both of these companies have also been subject to criminal investigations by NABU.

Ukrainian government officials have also complained of NABU’s corrupt tendencies. Mayor of Odessa Genadiy Trukhanov complained in a court statement that the NABU demanded he pay $500,000 to avoid prosecution back in 2017. When he refused to pay, he was officially charged with corruption by the NABU. He blamed deputy director of the NABU Gizo Uglava. Uglava was dismissed in mid-2024 for systematic leaks to those being investigated by his “independent organ.”

In 2023, the head of the NABU’s department of detectives, Andriy Kaluzhinsky, was accused of protecting the scandalous oligarch Igor Kolomoisky. Kaluzhinsky apparently kept Kolomoisky constantly informed on the progress of the investigations against him and managed to drag out the period until his arrest as long as possible. Not long after that scandal, Kaluzhinsky resigned from his post, declaring that he had joined the army.

Corruption now seems to be widespread among NABU employees. One Ukrainian publication studied twenty-three financial declarations for 2023–24 by NABU employees involving cryptocurrency assets. It found that fifteen of the declarations contained fake or suspicious details. The publication concluded that cryptocurrency was an excellent way for NABU employees to launder corrupt revenues — they could simply claim that putative bribes were merely the results of currency fluctuations.

In wartime, NABU’s purpose seemed to become reduced to simply releasing societal steam on some of the most glaring corruption scandals. When it came to top government officials like Reznikov, the NABU investigation was just for show, with nothing emerging from their raids.

NABU and American politics

Rather than acting as independent watchdogs, the anti-corruption officials have become deeply involved in the political intrigues of their patrons. This was most clear with the Russiagate scandal. The NABU, itself created under the Obama presidency and supported by USAID, played a significant role in this affair. It was the NABU that first published documents claiming to show Paul Manafort’s involvement with Russian government structures.

In a 2019 recording leaked by Ukrainian parliamentarian Borislav Rosenblatt, Sytnyk even boasted of “working for Hillary [Clinton]” at the time. SAPO head Kholodnitsky confirmed that Sytnyk was desperate to earn the approval of Mrs Clinton. Serhiy Kaluzhinsky, the NABU detective in charge of the Manafort materials, is himself Sytnyk’s godfather.

Serhiy Leshchenko, journalist at the USAID-funded Ukrainska Pravda, bragged that his role helping the NABU spread this investigation “had put the nail in Trump’s coffin.” He is currently a member of Zelensky’s presidential administration. Oleksandr Tsyvinsky, another key leader of NABU’s detectives at the time, also played a major role. Coincidentally, it is Zelensky’s refusal to appoint Tsyvinsky to the position of the head of the Bureau of Economic Security this year that has partly precipitated the current showdown between the president and the anti-corruption organs.

Back in 2016, American media outlets blew up the NABU’s “leaks” in the relatively successful campaign to pressure Trump to become more militaristic toward Russia. However, once Trump won, the NABU itself soon distanced itself from the affair. The head of SAPO, Kholodnitsky, criticized the NABU for its politicized investigation of the years-old case. Ultimately, the NABU only managed to get SAPO to investigate one individual in relation to the case, but this also fell apart.

Besides, the entire “Manafort case” didn’t even concern corruption but rather the fact that Ukrainian politicians (and their American consultants) in the pre-2014 period received untaxed salaries — placing the case outside of the NABU’s jurisdiction. Former parliamentarian Taras Chornovil told BBC Ukraine that US ambassador Marie Jovanovich was the person behind the entire affair, which was confirmed by then prosecutor general Lutsenko. Lutsenko also declared that his office was investigating the NABU and Sytnyk in particular for interference in US elections.

Regardless, it is undeniable that the NABU’s involvement in US politics was detrimental to Ukrainian national interests. Consequently, Ukraine became embroiled in American partisan politics, which played out poorly after Trump returned to power in 2025.

Anti-Corruption and War

Taking into account their role in the post-Soviet class conflict, it is no surprise that the anti-corruption organs play the role of vetoing any attempt to debate the country’s violent conscription and peripheral integration into the Western international order.

On the one hand, this was clearly demonstrated when just about every anti-corruption NGO became a signatory of the famous “red lines of civil society” in 2019, which warned Zelensky against implementing his election promise of peace with Russia by means of compromise. The anti-corruption organs forbade the government from doing anything that could hinder Ukraine’s integration into NATO and the EU. They warned against reintegrating the breakaway regions of the Donbas with special political rights, fearing that they would veto Euro-Atlantic integration.

After carefully sabotaging and slowing down the anti-corruption measures, Poroshenko now found himself as an active backer of the protests to “maintain the NABU’s independence.” As we mentioned earlier, Poroshenko was himself found to have maintained close, secretive relations with the NABU leader Sytnyk during his presidency.

And in 2023, the VAKS announced for the fifth time it had closed its investigation into what may be one of Ukraine’s most important corruption schemes — the Rotterdam+ case. This scheme involved then president Poroshenko’s collaboration with the country’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, to tie electricity prices to those in Rotterdam, Belgium. As a result, Ukraine’s impoverished consumers may have overpaid the government more than twenty billion hryvnia. Under his rule, Poroshenko claimed that protests against rising energy prices (a key IMF demand) were a plot by the Russian security service, the FSB. Despite years of investigation, the VAKS has made no progress on the case, and allows key figures to escape due to the expiry of the statute of limitations.

Much of the July showdown between Zelensky and the anti-corruption organs is merely one front of the sharpening Poroshenko-Zelensky conflict. At the start of 2025, new government sanctions were announced against the ex-president.

The anti-corruption “civil society” vigorously supports the war until victory, viewing a compromise with Russia as threatening Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic integration and opening opportunities for the “Georgian scenario” that would directly threaten their interests. This explains their typical support for coercive conscription and silence regarding ordinary Ukrainians’ riots against it. Simultaneously, in 2024, 133 NGOs executing Western donor-funded projects received official mobilization exemptions.

Zelensky’s Retreat

Zelensky appears to have retreated from his original intentions toward NABU, likely responding less to street pressure than to European blackmail threatening aid suspension. In a country that experienced three maidan revolutions with massive participation within one generation (in 1990, 2004, and 2014), nonviolent protests gathering at most thousands in the largest cities represents nothing unprecedented, despite being the first major demonstrations since the full-scale war began.

Does this prove Ukraine’s democratic resilience? Hardly. Beyond the certainty that conflict with anti-corruption institutions and opposition will continue, no “cadre solutions” emerged — no dismissals of those who prepared and pushed legislation against anti-corruption independence. Instead, the rushed bill’s withdrawal within a week left parliamentarians feeling manipulated by the presidential office. The SBU, whose head openly discussed shooting anti-corruption detectives on television, along with other law enforcement involved in the crackdown, likely remains unhappy about the retreat. Finally, the anti-corruption protests legitimized demonstrations about Ukraine’s aggravating social, economic, and political issues that may achieve broader resonance, particularly those concerning brutal conscription.

Consequently, without strengthening democracy, the protests weakened government in the same manner as previous maidans — often praised as democratic and nation-building revolutions. In fact, these deficient revolutions that replaced social revolutions in the post–Cold War era can overthrow authoritarian and corrupt governments but, unlike social revolutions, cannot construct more stable, stronger, and national-popular alternatives. This does not mean that the maidans “change nothing.” They actually do have palpable consequences: polarization along the non-class lines, destabilization and authoritarianism being imposed from within and beyond Ukraine.

This conflict occurs at a dangerous moment when Ukraine faces a deteriorating frontline situation primarily because of the manpower shortage, internal conflicts over conscription, language, religious persecution, and the disintegration of the Western ruling class, which impacts the continuation of the NATO support. Unless the ongoing negotiation process — newly revived after the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska — leads to a breakthrough, Ukraine may approach a bifurcation point. This will require either intensifying war efforts, which would mean implementing highly unpopular measures such as conscripting those younger than twenty-five along with women, or accepting some of the heavy Russian demands, possibly backed by Trump. Both decisions demand strong, trusted government to prevent further destabilization.

Now, by consistently failing to ensure ruling-class unity — even through authoritarian measures — Ukraine opens itself to Caesarism from abroad. Having rejected the “Georgian scenario” and facing diminishing chances (particularly due to Western disunity) of becoming an East European Israel or South Korea as aspired to by comprador elites, Ukraine may be heading toward becoming an East European Syria.