Corruption remains a serious problem, and political will to fight it has been inconsistent. Anticorruption agencies have repeatedly been ensnared in politically fraught conflicts with other state entities and elected officials. Since 2022, however, Ukraine’s anticorruption agencies, monitored closely by Ukraine’s civil society, have uncovered multiple cases of embezzlement among high-level government officials, leading to dismissals. And despite severe disruption to governance caused by the 2022 full-scale invasion, authorities have been able to push through improvements to the country’s anticorruption apparatus.
In July 2025, Ukraine’s parliament passed and President Zelenskyy signed a law watchdogs said would strip the independence of the country’s key anticorruption bodies—the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO)—by subordinating them to the office of the prosecutor general. The new law prompted protests in major Ukrainian cities and drew warnings from the European Commission that the move could jeopardize Ukraine’s EU accession. Lawmakers repealed the measure days later.
Ukraine’s anticorruption agencies continued to expose high-level corruption scandals in the following months, including involving inflated wartime defense procurement contracts and a bribery scheme inside Ukraine’s parliament. In November, the agencies exposed a large-scale embezzlement scheme at one of Ukraine’s largest energy companies. In the wake of the energy-sector scandal revelations, Andriy Yermak, an influential aide to Zelensky, resigned as the president’s chief of staff and from top national security bodies. The resignation and other developments were regarded as reflecting long-standing problems with structural corruption in Ukraine and the Zelensky’s administration’s willingness to respond to public pressure on the issue. In a related development, by the end of the year a number of Ukrainian anticorruption initiatives and media outlets that undertook anticorruption reporting lost funding due to the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
A 2025 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) review of Ukraine’s anticorruption efforts said that despite the full-scale Russian invasion, “the country’s anticorruption progress has been significant,” highlighting improvements in evaluation of anticorruption strategy, strengthened whistleblower protection, and strengthening of the specialized anticorruption agencies.