But guess who hasn’t shied away from calling out corruption in Ukraine? Ukrainians. No one knows better what an existential threat corruption can be, sapping the public trust and the legitimacy of the state. Ukrainians consider corruption the country’s second-most-serious problem, behind only the Russian invasion, according to a poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology this year. They know that they must root out money laundering and the influence of oligarchs as a condition of joining the European Union. Since the war started, the percentage of Ukrainians who say they are willing to stand up for their rights when they interact with bureaucrats doubled — from 26 percent in 2021 to 52 percent this year. That raises hopes that Ukrainians are starting to resist corruption with the same can-do spirit that repelled the Russian invasion.
Yuriy Nikolov, a founder of the online news platform Nashi Groshi (Our Money), broke stories about the Ukrainian Defense Ministry paying huge markups for supplies — 46 cents for eggs that should have cost five cents, $86 for winter coats that were worth just $29. A week ago, President Volodymyr Zelensky dismissed his defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, who, although not personally implicated, had been tarnished by the scandal.
Another Ukrainian platform, Bihus, exposes expensive cars and luxury vacations purchased by politicians since the invasion. It took aim at Bohdan Torokhtiy, a lawmaker whose wife, Alina Levchenko, documented high-end stays at resorts and villas across Europe and the Middle East on Instagram in the early days of the Russian invasion while other Ukrainians were fending off the attack. It also reported that she had been hired as an adviser to an executive at Antonov, a state-owned aircraft company, despite having no experience in the industry. She didn’t reply to my request for comment on social media. Her Instagram account has since become private.
Ukrainian lawmakers are pushing back against the scrutiny. For more than a year, Ukrainian watchdog groups and the international agencies that fund them have been encouraging the government to reinstate wealth declarations by politicians, a requirement that was suspended in the early days of the invasion. Last week, lawmakers in Kyiv passed a bill that would reinstate the obligation to declare but keep the information closed to the public for a year or longer. In less than 24 hours, more than 83,000 people signed a petition asking Mr. Zelensky to veto the bill. “Many Ukrainians are unhappy with this decision of the Parliament,” Andrii Borovyk, the executive director of Transparency International Ukraine, told me. “Attention is very big.”
Vitalii Shabunin, the chairman of the board of the nonprofit Anti-Corruption Action Center in Kyiv, wrote a scathing column about the decision in Ukrainian Pravda, an online newspaper based in Kyiv. Access to declarations has helped expose “top corrupt people,” he wrote. Now lawmakers “want to keep the ‘war fortunes’ of officials a secret and absolve themselves of crime.”