KYIV — President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s move to equate wartime corruption with treason is triggering a backlash from officials and watchdogs, who warn the plan could hobble Ukraine’s main anti-graft forces.
Two senior officials following the proposal, who were granted anonymity to speak candidly, say concerns are growing within Ukraine’s anti-graft agencies that Zelenskyy’s plan will take top corruption cases away from their oversight and pass them to the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), which falls under the president’s command.
The SBU could, potentially, have the power to bury corruption cases involving top officials. The move, the officials say, could put Ukraine’s anti-corruption infrastructure under threat, and anti-corruption watchdogs are sounding the alarm.
By equating corruption to treason, Zelenskyy’s office is manipulating the public’s desire for justice, said Vitaly Shabunin, head of the Anti-Corruption Action Center (Antac), a Ukrainian nongovernmental organization that monitors graft. In reality, Shabunin added, Zelenskyy’s office is pursuing other goals: to protect high-level officials from corruption charges and obtain tools to destroy opponents.
“SBU will investigate the same cases as NABU [the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine], which means that evidence in ‘sensitive’ cases for the president’s office will be destroyed. After [President’s Office Deputy Head Oleg] Tatarov’s case was transferred from NABU to the SBU — it was buried there … Now the office wants to make that into practice,” Shabunin warned.
As journalists and anti-graft organs start to uncover more alleged corruption schemes during the first months of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion which began in February 2022, Zelenskyy thinks those days were so tough that officials should be cut some slack.
“February and March 2022 — it was a fight for the existence of Ukraine. If I see the corruption cases dated that time, I demand solid evidence. If there is one [evidence], the guilty must be punished by court, not public opinion,” Zelenskyy said in a televised interview. “As for my idea of equating corruption to state treason during wartime, I think it will be a very serious instrument to make them not even think about it [corruption].”
In practice, it will mean the collapse of the anti-corruption system, Antac said in a statement.
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