• Corruption
• Ukraine

August 4, 2025, 8:23 AM View Comments ()

Since late July, Ukraine has been gripped by the most serious domestic political strife since Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president in 2019. Amid an intensifying wave of Russian drone and missile attacks on civilian targets in Kyiv, Odesa, and other major cities, a protest movement led mainly by young Ukrainians has emerged to oppose Zelensky’s recent steps to take control of Ukraine’s previously independent anti-corruption agencies.

Last week, Ukrainians showed Zelensky—who has centralized authority since Russia’s invasion in February 2022—the limits of his power. On July 31, the Ukrainian Parliament passed a law revoking an earlier piece of legislation—rushed through the legislature and signed by Zelensky only the previous week—that had abolished the independence of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office by placing them under government direction. The scale of the protests over this transparent attempt to constrain and politicize anti-corruption investigators, along with sharp criticism and threats to freeze aid by Western governments, quickly forced Zelensky to relent.

The initial new law was ominous because its passage coincided with coordinated actions by the Ukrainian Security Service and prosecutor-general, including more than 20 searches against NABU agents around the country. These searches focused on a series of alleged transgressions involving the state secrets and included allegations of one agent’s possible collaboration with Russia—a charge that many Ukrainians consider politically motivated. The searches gave Zelensky’s loyal Security Service and newly appointed prosecutor-general access to NABU agents’ smartphones and computers, which likely contain significant information on current corruption investigations, including those focused on several of Zelensky’s cabinet ministers and advisors.

For many Ukrainians, the raids and legislation were evidence of an authoritarian drift by Zelensky and his closest advisors. Over the last year and a half, Zelensky’s administration has frozen the assets of his political rival and predecessor as president, Petro Poroshenko, on the grounds of “national security”; concentrated control over television news content to keep critics of the government off the airwaves; banned broadcasts of all parliamentary proceedings; and opened frivolous criminal cases against government critics and anti-corruption activists. For several years, these and other measures were largely ignored by Ukraine’s Western partners and tolerated by most Ukrainians, who were willing to give their wartime leader wide scope for action.

The events of the last few days have created a tipping point in the sentiment at home and abroad with major implications for Zelensky’s and Ukraine’s future.

First, the protests likely signaled the beginning of the end for the Zelensky era—a natural process in a vibrant democracy like Ukraine’s. Notwithstanding Ukrainians’ strong support for Zelensky as their wartime leader, public trust in him had been waning well before last week, as had his political prospects. According to a June poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, 41 percent of respondents thought that Ukraine was trending toward authoritarianism. These trends are likely to be accelerated by the widespread public disapproval of Zelensky’s latest actions.

A June poll by Socis showed that if a presidential election were held now, the former commander in chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Valery Zaluzhny, would trounce Zelensky—60.5 percent to 39.5 percent. (Many Ukrainians believe that Zelensky dismissed Zaluzhny last year precisely because of the latter’s growing popularity.) The polls are even worse for Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, which stands to not only lose its majority in parliament but also run behind several other political parties and coalitions.

Second, the anti-corruption controversy marks the end of the carte blanche that Zelensky had been given by Ukrainian society and the international community. The attention of international donors is now fixed not just on supporting Ukraine militarily and financially but also on Zelensky’s domestic policies. In the future, aid for the domestic economy is likely to be linked more rigorously to reform and good governance benchmarks—something the European Union is particularly well-placed to enforce, since Ukraine’s EU accession process is coupled with strict criteria on governance and rule of law. EU leaders and officials’ loud warnings to Kyiv to not backslide on anti-corruption—or else risk the accession process—surely played a major role in making Zelensky fold so quickly.

That said, it is important for the media and international community to understand that despite Zelensky’s recent actions, the country has seen a serious reduction of grand corruption—under both Zelensky and Poroshenko. That reduction was brought about by measures such as transparent bidding for government contracts, privatization of government assets, banking reforms, and the sharp reduction of the political and media influence of Ukraine’s oligarchs. In Transparency International’s 2024 Corruption Perception Index, Ukraine ranks a few places behind India and Argentina, just ahead of Turkey and Brazil, and incomparably far ahead of Russia.

Until recently, Zelensky had largely refrained from trying to halt investigations of his political allies or former business partners. Indeed, most parliamentarians who are now subject to corruption charges and other malfeasance come from the Servant of the People party. Most spectacularly, September 2023 saw the arrest of Zelensky’s former media partner and early political backer, Ihor Kolomoisky, who was accused of fraud and money laundering hundreds of millions of dollars. For more than a year and a half, the oligarch has been in jail awaiting trial.

Moreover, Zelensky’s rapid stand-down in the face of public disapproval and international pressure shows that he is acutely sensitive to public opinion and remains democratically accountable.

Finally, the recent turbulence in Ukraine demonstrates the resilience of Ukraine’s civil society and the ability of Ukrainians to effectively defend their freedoms and democracy. The protestors have shown political maturity and civic responsibility in wartime by refraining from disruptive calls for resignations or early elections amid Russian attacks. Nor have there been attempts to question the legitimacy of Zelensky’s presidency. Instead, the focus has been on heaping scorn on those in power and on demands for amelioration that respect democracy and pluralism.

Despite more than three years of war, Ukrainians remain deeply committed to their democratic future. When Russian forces were in Kyiv suburbs during the invasion’s early weeks, polls showed 58 percent of Ukrainians thought that the country needed a strong leader more than a democratic system. A year later, 59 percent now prefer adherence to democracy over a strong leader. This preference, coupled with a healthy skepticism of their leadership, clearly prevails today.

There are deep roots for why Ukrainian civil society is so ready to protest for a free and democratic society, even in the middle of a brutal war. For centuries, Ukrainians were a stateless people under the control of Poland, Lithuania, Austria-Hungary, tsarist Russia, and eventually the Soviet Union. (There were a few brief exceptions, such as the Cossack Hetmanate state and an independent Ukraine after the Bolshevik Revolution.) That history has instilled a deep sense of the state as the “other”—an occupying regime—among Ukrainians. The state usually repressed national identity, and pride in the state would have meant pride in something alien and distant. The corollary of this is that Ukrainian civil society, not an alien government, embodied national identity and aspirations to self-rule.

When the Soviet Union finally dissolved in 1991, this spirit of healthy state skepticism lived on. As the central government of post-Soviet Ukraine was alternately dominated by cultural Ukrainians and Russified Ukrainians, each group continued to exhibit skepticism of their leaders and state. Russia’s long war on Ukraine, which began in 2014 and turned into a full-on invasion in 2022, did more to solidify Ukrainian solidarity and unity than anything else, but skepticism of the state survived even during wartime. Ukrainians were never swept by a wave of adulation for their leaders, even after Zelensky’s massive electoral victory in 2019. The only state institution to receive unequivocal support, understandably, has been the military.

Despite all the worries, the reality is that Ukraine remains a highly open society in which the public has little or no fear of vigorously and publicly expressing its views. In spite of government efforts to consolidate broadcast media under its influence, the effect on the public is offset by the proliferation of internet media, which 86 percent of Ukrainians now consider their main source of information. Many of these online publications are fully independent and often very critical.

For three and a half years, Zelensky has been the inspiring and heroic leader of a courageous country at war; internationally, he has been the personification of Ukraine. In recent months, this image has tarnished, and the end of the Zelensky era may now be in sight But the events of the past two weeks also demonstrated once again that Ukrainians are unified in the face of Russian aggression, committed to their country’s defense, intolerant of corruption, and fiercely attached to their freedoms. That should be reason enough for the West to continue to bet on Ukraine’s future as a free, democratic, and successful state.