KYIV — The Ukrainian parliament on Thursday approved a bill submitted by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week that returned independence to key state anti-corruption agencies.
Lawmakers in the judiciary committee had unanimously supported Zelenskyy’s new bill on Wednesday, after domestic protests – and a backlash from Brussels — helped shoot down a previous bill that would have kneecapped corruption watchdogs.
The same MPs who voted for the law that brought the independent National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAP) under the oversight of the politically appointed prosecutor general of Ukraine ultimately U-turned on the decision in the new vote Thursday.
The bill now goes back to Zelenskyy to be signed into law.
Many current MPs are subjects of NABU investigations. The agency has charged 71 current and former MPs with corruption, 42 of them during the period between 2022 and 2025. Thirty-one of the charged MPs still sit in the Ukrainian parliament.
While many of the lawmakers implicitly admitted they erred originally in scuttling the independence of NABU and SAP, some Ukrainian political heavyweights — such as former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko — defended the controversial vote last week.
“This bill, the president submitted under colossal pressure, is not about NABU and SAP, and not about the fight against corruption. NABU and SAP are organs of political pressure on Ukraine’s government from outside. We are not a country that can be ruled by foreign powers as a dog on a leash,” Tymoshenko said during the parliament session on Thursday. “I don’t care who takes away our sovereignty, East or West.”
At the same time, she does not believe the EU will take away funding if Ukraine stops reforms, and claimed that by voting to strip SAP of its independence, she was actually fighting foreign governance of Ukraine, the same narrative Russia pushes to justify its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
At first, Zelenskyy signed the disputed bill immediately, claiming both NABU and SAP — which were investigating corruption allegations against some of his closest allies — were not effective enough and were filled with Russian agents.
But after several days of protests across Ukraine, and pressure from the European Commission and EU member countries, Zelenskyy said he heard the people and submitted the bill that returned the independence to NABU and SAP.
The new bill introduces mandatory polygraph testing for officers, and Zelenskyy reiterated that his prime motivation was to clean the law enforcement agencies of Russian influence.
Both NABU and SAP praised the new bill.
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