On the morning of November 28, Ukrainian law enforcement did something it had never before done in its history: It showed up at the apartment of the head of the president’s office to investigate him for graft.
Commentators around the world have noted the strain that an unfolding scandal has put on the Ukrainian presidency at a time when the United States is pressuring the country to make concessions to Russia. But just as striking is the fact that an investigation into energy-sector kickbacks at the highest levels of government and business is happening at all. This is in many ways a victory for Ukrainian democracy, and for a civil society that, since the 2014 revolution on the Maidan, has worked tirelessly to hold its government to account, even during wartime.
In July, Ukraine’s Parliament passed a law limiting the independence of anti-corruption bodies, and President Volodymyr Zelensky initially signed it. But under pressure from the street, he restored everything to the way it was before. Now nobody—not even the president himself—is authorized to stop the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine from carrying out its mission on behalf of the Ukrainian people. Andriy Yermak, a very close ally of Zelensky’s and, until last week, the president’s point person for the peace negotiations, hasn’t been officially charged, but he was forced to step down as the investigation closed in on his possible connection to the case.
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I have been a political journalist in Ukraine for 17 years, a span that encompasses the 2010–14 presidency of Viktor Yanukovych. Corruption is hardly a new subject for Ukrainian journalists, but the treatment of this year’s scandal is certainly different from anything we witnessed before Maidan. Take, for example, an incident from April 2013. Journalists scouring Yanukovych’s official income declaration noticed that the president claimed to have received a fee of $2 million in 2012 for books he had written. This was very odd. First, the Donetsk printing house listed as having paid him the fee specialized in advertising products and cardboard packaging, not in books. But more important, Yanukovych was not a popular author. He was not a writer at all. Rather, the president’s literary work consisted of brochures for his political party and collections of interviews, none of which was sold in stores where it could have earned any profit. I was able to find these documents only at a single library, where the data I analyzed suggested negligible circulation. Everything pointed to a primitive scheme to launder his illegal income. That’s what Ukrainian journalists wrote at the time.
Our articles garnered no official reaction. No one offered an explanation for the $2 million. Nor did the president’s lawyers file suit to deny the media’s claims of corruption. That’s because the authorities were completely indifferent to public opinion and to what journalists wrote. They were brazen in their graft, and confident that they could continue being so. No doubt they saw $2 million as a piddling sum to worry about when much more significant embezzlement was going on. At that time, Yanukovych had already built himself a luxurious private residence, called Mezhyhiria, by illegally seizing a protected area in the Kyiv region totaling 137 hectares. Only the revolution halted his appetites. He fled to Russia in 2014.
Today, the situation is completely different. The Maidan Revolution led to the establishment of official anti-corruption bodies in 2015. Their creation was among the reforms that enabled a visa-free regime between Ukraine and the European Union in 2017. And now, in 2025, these bodies, and not journalists, are the ones to have uncovered large-scale corruption in the president’s circle.
Zelensky reacted to the scandal very quickly. He imposed personal sanctions on his former business partner, Timur Mindich, who the investigation alleges was one of the organizers of the embezzlement scheme in the energy sector. (Mindich had already fled the country.) Parliament has dismissed two ministers. On November 26, the anti-corruption bureau questioned the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, Rustem Umerov. In 2013, for law enforcement to investigate ministers and close friends of the president by questioning them or searching their homes or offices was unthinkable. Now it’s everyday life.
The scheme in question appears to have been a very old-fashioned one. Based on recordings of conversations among the accomplices, certain officials and businessmen were receiving 10 to 15 percent kickbacks from contracts with the energy sector. That’s pretty much standard operating procedure from 20 or 30 years ago. Maybe Zelensky was so focused on the war that he didn’t know anything about it. But to imagine that his closest aides didn’t strains belief. After all, Zelensky has made sure that the most important decisions for the country—in politics, war, economics, diplomacy, and governance—emanate from his office on Bankova Street. He places a premium on personal relationships. But fighting corruption may require detachment.
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The war has heightened our society’s emotional reaction to scandal. Ukrainians are surrounded by death and destruction, and many pay daily for their country’s independence with the lives of their loved ones. To see politicians stuffing their pockets with cash under these circumstances is very painful. Perhaps the officials involved have forgotten that morale is everything—that if Ukraine doesn’t hold on, a Russian occupation will come for all of us, including the corrupt themselves.
The rawness of these emotions can be a problem for the anti-corruption movement, too. Trials can take years, and in the rush to see justice done, activists are sometimes impatient with or even forget about the presumption of innocence. Journalists can ruin an official’s reputation ahead of any verdict. These are habits we can improve, emotions we can learn to temper, as we build trust in the institutions that Ukrainians have erected and defended to hold the powerful to account.
In spite of everything, the Ukrainian state remains surprisingly functional four years into this full-scale war. Trains run, banks operate, and drones are manufactured. Cafés and restaurants serve their patrons even during power cuts. Many businesses have purchased generators in preparation for winter blackouts. And Zelensky has so far withstood external pressure and refused to capitulate. His legitimacy is broadly recognized among Ukrainians, regardless of how much Russian propaganda denies it. But his political future in a peaceful country, whenever that circumstance arrives, will depend on what he does now and how he responds to the mood of the public. Because Ukrainian civil society has shown that it will not remain silent about matters of justice, even during a war.
The post Ukraine’s Corruption Scandal Is Bad. But Exposing It Is a Win. appeared first on The Atlantic.
