War Hasn’t Deterred Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Fighters

Just one year ago, reporting on a corruption scandal in Ukraine could start with a few mouse clicks. A seasoned investigative journalist like Yuriy Nikolov—co-founder of nongovernmental organization Nashi Groshi (“Our Money”)—would access ProZorro, an online database of public procurement deals, where he could quickly examine government contracts for inconsistencies.

But since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February, the Ukrainian government has pared down ProZorro to protect national security interests, and Nikolov has had to report the old school way: by obtaining copies of government contracts from trusted sources. That is how he recently unearthed the largest corruption scandal in Ukraine since the beginning of the war, tied to a $355 million contract the defense ministry signed to buy food for troops in six regions at two to three times the market rate.

The Jan. 21 publication of Nikolov’s story took Ukraine’s political world by storm. The country’s defense ministry initially dismissed Nikolov’s findings as “manipulative” and “misleading” before later admitting to a “mistake.” One deputy defense minister resigned in direct connection with the scandal. The story also coincided with a large-scale reshuffle that involved the resignations or dismissals of an advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, five regional governors, and five other top officials. Zelensky seriously considered dismissing Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, a source close to the president told Foreign Policy, though in the end Reznikov kept his job.

Just one year ago, reporting on a corruption scandal in Ukraine could start with a few mouse clicks. A seasoned investigative journalist like Yuriy Nikolov—co-founder of nongovernmental organization Nashi Groshi (“Our Money”)—would access ProZorro, an online database of public procurement deals, where he could quickly examine government contracts for inconsistencies.

But since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February, the Ukrainian government has pared down ProZorro to protect national security interests, and Nikolov has had to report the old school way: by obtaining copies of government contracts from trusted sources. That is how he recently unearthed the largest corruption scandal in Ukraine since the beginning of the war, tied to a $355 million contract the defense ministry signed to buy food for troops in six regions at two to three times the market rate.

The Jan. 21 publication of Nikolov’s story took Ukraine’s political world by storm. The country’s defense ministry initially dismissed Nikolov’s findings as “manipulative” and “misleading” before later admitting to a “mistake.” One deputy defense minister resigned in direct connection with the scandal. The story also coincided with a large-scale reshuffle that involved the resignations or dismissals of an advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, five regional governors, and five other top officials. Zelensky seriously considered dismissing Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, a source close to the president told Foreign Policy, though in the end Reznikov kept his job.

As Russia’s war in Ukraine hits the one-year mark, investigating the evergreen topic of corruption has become fraught for Ukrainian journalists and civil society groups. They have been forced to weigh the importance of their work against fears that exposing corruption scandals could weaken Western military support for their country. So far, no Western ally has hinted it might condition aid to Ukraine on government transparency indicators, but some NATO and European Union countries have sought to better track arms shipments once they arrive in Ukraine, the Financial Times reported last July.

“There are a lot of people who hate me, who think we help Russia by discrediting Ukraine in the eyes of the West,” Nikolov told Foreign Policy. “And of course, we understand the importance of Western arms deliveries, we know that if they stop, we’ll all be killed [by Russia].”

Even before Russia’s invasion last year, many Ukrainian anti-corruption activists knew a large-scale war would put the corruption issue on the backburner. “We talked about it back in January [2022], when we were discussing contingency plans in case of a Russian attack,” Danylo Mokryk, a journalist at the investigative outlet Bihus.Info, said. “And we agreed back then that, if [an invasion] happened, nobody would care about corruption.”

When the first Russian tanks poured across Ukraine’s borders on Feb. 24, 2022, anti-corruption activists and journalists paused their work. “There was no point,” Andrii Borovyk, executive director of Transparency International Ukraine, told Foreign Policy. “We provide expertise; we do monitoring of public procurement, for example; we communicate with the government. [But] how do you do all this when there are Russian troops near Obolon?” (Obolon is a residential neighborhood in northern Kyiv.)

Transparency International Ukraine focused instead on evacuating its personnel from Kyiv and engaged in humanitarian efforts. The Anticorruption Action Centre, or AntAC—another Ukrainian anti-corruption organization—started investigating Russian propaganda as well as Ukrainian officials suspected of collaborating with Moscow in regions seized by Russian troops. The journalists at Bihus.Info used their investigative skills to report on Russian war crimes. “There was a sort of informal pact between journalists not to focus on internal problems while Russian tanks were 10 kilometers away from Kyiv,” Nikolov said. Nashi Groshi also stopped publishing reports on corruption for several months.

As Russian troops left the Kyiv region in late March 2022, Ukraine’s journalists and civil society cautiously went back to work. “The pause on criticizing the authorities couldn’t last forever,” Mokryk said. “Especially when you see how corruption was one of the main reasons for the Russian army’s failures, you understand that corruption leads to defeat.” According to a May 2022 article published by Royal United Services Institute think tank, “corruption remain[ed] a problem for the Russian armed forces” and appeared to be the root cause of everything from crumbling body armor to rotten combat ration packs. There are also stories of Russian men bribing their way out of the draft.

By summer 2022, the war had already profoundly transformed Ukraine’s anti-corruption landscape. Renowned investigative journalists—such as Denys Bihus, the founder of the eponymous outlet—as well as state anti-corruption prosecutors and investigators had either joined the front line, turned to investigate Russian war crimes, or fled the country altogether—eroding the manpower needed for anti-corruption work.

More immediately problematic was the partial closure of public databases such as ProZorro. The database had been set up in the wake of 2014 protests calling for enhanced transparency, but Kyiv now feared it could provide sensitive information to Moscow. The government removed listings of deals linked to military operations from ProZorro and also closed a register that had compiled information about the assets of more than 1.3 million public officials. “That [made] it much more difficult to, for example, assess candidates to a public position, something that used to be extremely easy,” said Vadym Valko, a lawyer and analyst at AntAC.

It had become common practice for Ukrainian journalists and activists to flag potentially corrupt officials by comparing their low official salaries with their asset declarations—looking, for example, for expensive cars and properties. Following Nikolov’s reporting in January, those same civil society members are now pushing for the databases to be better tailored to wartime conditions. That effort has so far seen some success, with Ukraine’s parliament on Feb. 25 passing a fast-tracked law that will make public the prices of non-confidential goods (such as food supplies) procured by the military.

The database of asset declarations remains closed, however. “We understand that there can be sensitive information,” Borovyk, of Transparency International Ukraine, said. But, he added, “there is room for improvement and discussion, to see what parts of the declarations should be publicly available.”

Anticorruption investigations have been made more difficult—but not impossible. By autumn 2022, Nashi Groshi had resumed reporting on suspicious public procurement deals, from government spending in the notoriously corrupt road repair sector to a Ukrainian company’s purchase of generators at two to four times the market rate. Bihus.Info reported in October 2022 that a Chevrolet Tahoe SUV used by a key Zelensky advisor had been gifted to Ukraine by General Motors for humanitarian purposes.

Bihus.Info now supplements its traditional reporting on shady deals in Ukraine’s corridors of power with stories about the war. Because of the ongoing conflict, “we’re being more careful, constantly asking ourselves whether such or such story needs to be told,” Mokryk said. “It’s just a question of responsibility.”

Before publishing his bombshell investigation, Nikolov also took precautions. “You know, I had a lot of doubts when I was working on this story; I really did not want to publish it,” he said. To minimize the story’s potential impact on the war effort, the journalist first sent his findings to the defense ministry and presidential office, hoping officials would quickly admit to their mistakes and address them. (They didn’t.) He also waited to publish until the conclusion of a crucial international meeting on aid to Ukraine.

Ukraine’s activists have nevertheless praised a state anti-corruption infrastructure they say has been able to withstand the shock of the invasion. “In the first three months, the high anti-corruption court handed five convictions with prison sentences,” Borovyk said. “I went to their building at that time; it was loud [because of shelling] and they kept working.”

“The system works,” Valko said, noting that Ukraine’s High Anticorruption Court pronounced 37 verdicts in 2022, three more than the previous year. He also praised the December 2022 dissolution of the infamous Kyiv administrative court, considered one of the country’s most corrupt.

Activists argue the war in Ukraine has only made the country’s fight against corruption more crucial. They point both to the importance of continued Western support as well as future challenges such as reconstruction. “We’ve been developing a digital reconstruction management system so that all future donors … can see exactly where their money is going,” Borovyk said.

But according to Nikolov, how Ukrainian authorities respond to corruption scandals in wartime is just as crucial. “To me, the important thing is that the authorities show that [Ukraine] isn’t a story about corruption, but a story about the fight against corruption,” he said.