Ukraine is celebrating this year’s independence day on August 24 in the presence of key allies from the coalition of the willing — and the unfolding of another major corruption scandal.
It all started when Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s defence minister until his dismissal as part of a government reshuffle last month, posted a nine-minute video on August 19 that was widely seen as a direct challenge to the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. One part of the challenge was what amounted to a call for elections in wartime — something that both Zelensky and a majority of Ukrainians have repeatedly rejected.
The other part of Fedorov’s challenge was his diagnosis of a “systemic crisis of governance”.
Corruption in Ukraine isn’t simply anymore about this scandal or that minister. It is a pattern of elite behaviour that has outlasted every Ukrainian government since independence, survived revolutions in 2004 and 2013/4 fought explicitly in the name of ending it, and is now, according to the account of a one-time member of Zelensky’s inner circle undermining a war for national survival.
Ukraine’s problem is that accountability is no longer working as a deterrent against corruption. And the depth of this problem has become more obvious over the past year.
In July 2025, Zelensky signed a law stripping the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the special anti-corruption prosecutor’s office (SAPO) of their independence, prompting the largest street protests in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022. It forced Zelensky to reverse course within days.
In November, a bribery scheme worth an estimated $100 million in the energy sector reached into Zelensky’s own inner circle, forcing out his justice and energy ministers. As part of the fall-out from that scandal, Zelensky’s long-time chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, resigned in November 2025.
In July 2026, Fedorov’s own removal from his post as defence minister came after a rift with the armed forces’ commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi. The rift was partly about strategy and partly about procurement reforms –allegedly threatening entrenched interests – that Fedorov had been keen to push through. Like a year earlier, large-scale public protests ensued. Unlike then, however, the protests – focused on individuals rather than programmatic reform – had only a limited effect. Zelensky replaced Syrskyi but remained unyielding on the issue of reinstating Fedorov.
On August 5, Olha Stefanishyna, the former deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration, former justice minister, and former Ukrainian ambassador to the US, was formally charged by NABU and SAPO. For now, she stands accused of illicit enrichment, while a separate investigation into her time overseeing Ukraine’s asset recovery and management agency — where contracts allegedly went to companies linked to her ex-husband — remains open but hasn’t led to formal charges yet. The charges came two days after Zelensky officially dismissed her as ambassador to the US.
And as if Fedorov’s point about systemic corruption needed any further proof, Iryna Mudra, the deputy head of Zelensky’s presidential office, who oversaw judicial reform and the special tribunal on Russian aggression, was dismissed by the president on August 19 after NABU and SAPO launched a new investigation into corruption, code-named Operation Forest Gump, a continuation of Operation Midas that was at the heart of the scandal in November 2025.
These are not just five unrelated crises happening over the course of a little more than a year.
They are symptomatic of exactly the accusation that Fedorov made: corruption has led to a systemic crisis of governance. What Fedorov didn’t specifically mention was that none of this is new, or particular to wartime. Ukraine emerged from the Soviet collapse with an economy substantially captured by a small circle of oligarchs who controlled industry, media and, at various points, the presidency itself.
After the Orange Revolution of 2004, the Euromaidan revolution a decade later was also fought explicitly against that system. NABU and SAPO were created the following year, in large part because the reforms Ukraine’s post-Maidan governments had promised were not being delivered on their own. Zelensky himself was elected in 2019 on a platform built largely on fighting corruption.
What the war has changed is not the underlying motivation of corruption – pure and simple human greed – but where the opportunities are to realise it. The privatisation auctions of the 1990s and the gas-trading schemes of the 2000s have become the procurement contracts and reconstruction funds of the 2020s. Arguably, though the damage they do, is compounded by wartime: a 2023 sham contract for undelivered mortar munitions worth some $40 million leaves a critical gap in an already stretched defence budget and strains frontline capabilities, while a $100 million scheme in 2025 which syphoned off funds intended to protect Ukraine’s energy grid damaged both the economy and made ordinary Ukrainians’ lives more miserable during the winter.
This shift towards defence and reconstruction as the most profitable sectors for corruption has been enabled by the justifiable imposition of martial law and emergency procurement rules. After all, Ukraine is a country at war. The resultant limitations on parliamentary oversight and press scrutiny have been partly compensated by the increased leverage that Ukraine’s western partners now have: following widespread public protests, it was pressure from the European Commission and allied governments that forced the NABU and SAPO reversal within little more than a week in 2025.
This ensures the continued work of NABU and SAPO in exposing corruption. At the same time, however, it also demonstrates the limitations of a judicial approach to corruption. The European Commission’s 2025 assessment of Ukraine’s accession process found that Kyiv had made some progress across all 33 negotiating chapters, but singled out corruption as a major impediment to further progress: recent developments, the Commission wrote, “cast doubts on Ukraine’s commitment to its anti-corruption agenda.” This was a judgment squarely aimed at the attempted curtailing of NABU’s and SAPO’s independence.
Yet, in the latest round of scandals, the reaction has been muted. Fedorov’s dismissal was mostly met with surprise rather than criticism. The subsequent corruption revelations caused hardly any reaction – and so far none that speak to the underlying “systemic crisis of governance” identified by Fedorov. This is all the more surprising given that this crisis now reaches deep into the Ukrainian parliament as well: on the day that Mudra was charged by NABU and SAPO and dismissed by Zelensky from her post as deputy head of his office, the Verkhovna Rada’s law enforcement committee blocked five bills intended to strengthen the country’s fight against corruption. These bills are a non-negotiable EU requirement for releasing over €2 billion of aid to Ukraine before the end of the year and a key item on Kyiv’s to-do list for the accession negotiations.
Fedorov’s video is both the statement of a deeply felt personal grievance and a diagnosis of a system that may be beyond the point of reform and repair.
Fedorov alleged that his own reforms of defence-ministry procurement, worth billions of dollars a year, were what cost him his post. “The old system,” he said, without naming Zelensky directly, “lives by its own rules too often. It protects itself. It is scared of change.” The asymmetry he is describing is stark: reformers get sacked, while insiders with the kind of connections implicated in the November 2025 scandal are able to leave the country.
Zelensky was elected in 2019 to end exactly this kind of corrosive corruption. At that time, ending it looked mostly like a matter of political will. Even if Zelensky himself ever had this will, many of those around him clearly did not. Add to this more than four-and-a-half years of full-scale war, and corruption in Ukrainian public life is now embedded in sectors – arms procurement, air-defence contracts, energy-grid protection – where failure costs soldiers’ lives and adds yet more misery to the plight of ordinary Ukrainians.
Ukraine’s survival as an independent state has always depended on not losing the war against Russia. It plainly depends just as much on winning the older, quieter war against a system that, in the words of one of the president’s own former ministers, is still “scared of change.” Based on past evidence, Fedorov’s solution – elections – is unlikely to be a solution on its own and western pressure has clear limitations.
Without a solution, the problem will continue to fester and lead to more alienation between state and society in Ukraine.
Finding and implementing a workable solution will be impossible without a change of culture among Ukraine’s elite – and that will determine how good a wartime leader Zelensky ultimately proves to be and how sincere his partners are in supporting not just him but the survival of a democratic Ukraine.
This analysis is an extended version of Tetyana Malyarenko’s and Stefan Wolff’s article published in The Conversation on 24 August 2026.
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