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Ukraine entered the war as one of Europe's most corrupt states, and with a set of independent anti-corruption bodies that its Western backers had insisted on. Those bodies have since reached into the president's own circle. The dispute is over whether that shows a system cleaning itself or a government stealing in wartime, and over who controls the investigators.
The wider war, its history and each side's full account: Russia's war in Ukraine.
On 15 September the president dismissed the prosecutor general, Kravchenko, after his resignation on 8 September in a corruption scandal. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau is investigating more than 60 lawmakers and is probing the former military intelligence chief, Budanov. More than 100,000 Armed Forces personnel have declared assets under the corruption push.
Independence. The investigators and the special court answer to no minister. The president's office says they have become a state within the state; their defenders say that is the point.
Foreign money and foreign say. The European Union and the lenders tie their funds to the survival of these bodies and have a voice in who staffs them. That protects them from the government, and it means part of Ukraine's justice system is answerable abroad.
The war. Procurement for an army at war is secret, urgent and enormous, which is where the largest thefts have been found.
A country in which the president's closest aide can be charged while the war is on is a country whose institutions work. The schemes uncovered, in energy and in arms buying, stole from soldiers and from people sitting in the dark. When the government tried in 2025 to put the agencies under its own prosecutor, Ukrainians came into the streets in wartime to stop it. Membership of the European Union depends on keeping them free.
No government has moved against corruption as this one has, and it does so while fighting for the country's life. But agencies that leak, time their cases for effect and answer to embassies are being used in a political struggle, and Russia has people inside them. In war the state needs one chain of command.
Every case proves what Russia has said since 2014: Kyiv is run by thieves who sell their country and pocket Western money, and their sponsors know it.
The investigators' side leaves out how few of the great cases have ended in a conviction, and that an outside veto over appointments would be tolerated in no member state of the Union.
The president's office leaves out that its move against the agencies came as they closed in on the president's friends, and that it was reversed only under pressure from the street and from Brussels.
Moscow's leaves out that such investigations of men around the president are impossible in Russia.
Not one voice, but on this close to it: polls put corruption beside the war as the country's chief problem.
Names and terms the sides do not share. This page keeps them out of its own voice.
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