Ukraine risks backsliding on its endemic corruption problem — and even creeping toward authoritarianism — activists warn, following police raids against a high-profile anti-corruption campaigner and opposition figures.
On July 11, armed police raided the home of Vitaliy Shabunin, the co-founder of Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Center. He has accused President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of “taking the first, but confident steps toward corrupt authoritarianism,” including backing laws offering amnesty to those accused of corruption in the defense industry, and passing over an independently selected candidate for a key anti-graft role.
The move has perturbed even some of Zelenskyy’s supporters — people who are simultaneously worried about the heavy-handed and potentially spurious crackdown on dissent, and that such criticisms against the Ukrainian leader might be used in bad faith by opponents in Moscow or Washington.
“This is the red line which President Zelensky has crossed — and the red line is in a very wrong direction in terms of the development of Ukraine,” said Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, the Kyiv-based watchdog that Shabunin co-founded. She said the State Bureau of Investigations did not have the necessary court documents for the search.
Shabunin has been charged with evading military service and fraud, with prosecutors alleging that while on secondment from the front lines to continue his activism back in Kyiv, he conducted activities unrelated to his military service. His defense team and supporters say the secondment was all aboveboard and ordered by his superiors, and that the allegations are trumped up and political.
The case has caused grave alarm for many inside Ukraine and abroad, with even some of those who praise Zelenskyy for making progress on corruption flagging it as cause for concern that he may be engaging in some of the same questionable practices they’d hoped he was rooting out.
Zelenskyy pledged to reduce corruption when he was elected in 2019, and many expert observers say he has been effective at doing so, but the tide of criticism around Shabunin’s arrest comes when the president is under intense pressure to fight off Russia and keep alive support from the United States and the West that has been at risk of faltering.
It’s not just Shabunin’s own organization that’s concerned. A group of 59 nongovernmental and civil society organizations, both inside Ukraine and abroad, have signed an open letter to Zelenskyy saying the arrest “bears signs of political motivation, abuse of rights” and either “gross incompetence” or “a deliberate attack to pressure” Shabunin.
NBC News has contacted Zelenskyy’s office and the State Bureau of Investigations for comment but has not received a response.
The president has been a longtime vocal advocate on the issue of fighting corruption, particularly when it comes to suggestions from the U.S. and elsewhere that the billions of dollars in military aid his country is receiving might be being misappropriated.
“Where we saw risks that something could be happening with weapons, we cracked down hard,” he told the “Lex Fridman Podcast” in January.
Last year Shabunin himself dismissed the idea that foreign arms could be embezzled, telling the BBC that “all weapons supplied by Western allies end up in the hands of Ukrainian troops who use them effectively. It is impossible to steal Western weapons.”
Shabunin appeared in court Tuesday and was released on “recognizance” — essentially released without having to post bail — until the next hearing Aug. 20.
The German Marshall Fund, a Washington think tank and one of the international signatories of the letter to Zelenskyy, said Ukraine had made “monumental strides” on corruption in the past 11 years.
Nevertheless, “it’s always concerning when a government targets its vocal critics with flimsy charges in politically motivated investigations,” said Josh Rudolph, head of the fund’s malign finance and corruption team. “Although this is not a sign of corruption per se, it displays an alarming disregard for the fundamental values of freedom and the rule of law at a time when the international community has been rallying around Ukraine because it is defending those very values from Russia’s brutal assault.”
Shabunin is not the only recent arrest to cause alarm. The opposition UDAR party, headed by former heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Klitschko, says that a raid in April on the home of Kyiv City Council deputy Dmytro Bilotserkivets — again, they said, without the necessary documents — was a clear attempt to put pressure on political dissent.
Corruption in Ukraine is a fraught and delicate topic, ripe for weaponization often in bad faith.
Russia uses it as an example to support its otherwise untrue criticisms — such as Ukraine being run by neo-Nazis — while American and European politicians hold up such examples to bolster their pre-existing arguments about whether to support Kyiv’s defense against Moscow.
“The issue of corruption in Ukraine has long been highly politicized,” said Mariya Omelicheva, a professor at the Pentagon-funded National War College in Washington, D.C.
Ukrainian “corruption is almost always co-opted — either by Ukraine’s supporters or, more problematically, by its adversaries,” she added. “This is particularly sensitive in the current U.S. political climate, where both parties — Democrats and Republicans — have used Ukrainian corruption narratives for domestic political purposes.”
There is also a feeling among some Ukrainians that President Donald Trump’s “America First” focus has allowed officials abroad to act with greater impunity knowing Washington’s hitherto exacting gaze is currently less troubled by world affairs.
“Our international partners, particularly the United States, don’t care anymore about good governance and anti-corruption and reforms,” Kaleniuk said. Washington “for the last 12 years had a powerful impact on how Ukraine develops, and the U.S. was usually tough on good governance, anti-corruption reforms and developments critical for democracy,” she said. “But now America doesn’t care about that.”
While it’s true Trump historically spoke warmly of Russian President Vladimir Putin and appeared to accept many of his war demands, in recent weeks he has been increasingly hostile to the Kremlin and signaled a renewed support for Ukraine, pledging Patriot missiles for Kyiv and tariffs on Moscow.
It’s also true that Ukraine — and Zelenskyy — have achieved some progress in the corruption fight in recent years. Transparency International, the best known international group that tracks this topic, says Ukraine has steadily improved in its annual “Corruption Perceptions” index — although it still ranks 105 of 180 countries worldwide.
Nevertheless, domestically there are plenty of Ukrainians alarmed at what they see is a negative direction of travel when it comes to corruption in their country. Though the immediate fight is against Russia, the ultimate battle is for their values of liberty and democracy, supporters say, without which the battlefield struggle becomes pointless.
“We are fighting for freedoms and for dignity,” Kaleniuk said. If those are lost, “only Russia will applaud.”
Alexander Smith and Freddie Clayton reported from London. Erin McLaughlin from Washington, D.C., and Anastasiia Parafeniuk and Daryna Mayer from Kyiv.
