Ukraine Must Defeat the Culture of Soviet Corruption

L ast November, Ukrainian detectives released audio from an apartment in central Kyiv, where men sat counting cash pulled out of the country’s nuclear-power utility Energoatom. The scheme ran to something near a hundred million dollars. Its alleged architect was a longtime business partner of President Volodymyr Zelensky. Importantly, Zelensky himself has not been charged with any wrongdoing. The money laundering ran through property tied to the family of a former parliamentarian who now sits in the Russian senate. It ran while Ukrainian infantrymen were freezing in dugouts outside Pokrovsk and while Ukrainian mothers were short of heat and electricity because Russian missiles had shredded the grid that those same officials were supposedly hardening.

That is the war within the war, and Ukraine will not win the war against Russia until it wins the war against the culture of corruption it inherited from the former Soviet Union.

The larger war of attrition is in its fifth year. Russia purchases square kilometers at a rate that would embarrass a Great War staff officer and pays for each in men and machines it can replace only by hollowing out its own future. Ukraine cannot match Russia in mass. It never could. Its wager, from the first week, has been that a free society converts a dollar into combat power more efficiently than a kleptocracy; that Russian shells sold off the back of a truck, Russian body armor stuffed with cardboard, and Russian generals promoted for loyalty rather than competence would not prevail in the long term.

The trouble with that wager is that it indicts both parties, but in different ways. Russia is a full blown kleptocracy, which is one of the main reasons it has not defeated a much smaller nation after 4.5 years of full-scale invasion. But $100 million skimmed from Ukraine’s nuclear power utility is not a scandal in the ordinary political sense, the kind a spokesman rides out for a week. It is a matter of national survival: interceptors not bought, transformers not hardened, and drones not fielded. The illegal gains are instead converted into apartments in Kyiv and cash in foreign bank accounts. Every such theft narrows one of Ukraine’s biggest advantages over its huge invader.

This is not a defect of Ukrainian character. It is the residue of Soviet institutional design, in which the plan was a fiction, the shortfall was made up through lies, and everyone was “corrupt.” In the Soviet system, corruption was the only reliable way of getting ahead, or in many cases, simply surviving.

Ukrainians survived 70 years in the Soviet Union, but learned all the wrong lessons. Those lessons are hard for a society to unlearn. The future of Ukraine now depends on its leaders charting a new course based on integrity, accountability, and the rule of law. It is not easy, but it must be done. Poland is not perfect, not by a long shot. But its post-USSR success proves that transformation is possible. It shows how an entire nation benefits when most of its elites play by and enforce fair and equitable rules.

Ukraine has come a long way in the 35 years since it left the disintegrating Soviet Union. Since 2014, it has built — largely under Western pressure but increasingly on its own momentum — a genuine anti-corruption architecture: an independent bureau of investigators, an independent prosecutor’s office, and a specialized High Anti-Corruption Court that has done the thing such courts never do in places like Russia: convict people who matter. That the Energoatom scandal came to light at all is a testimony to Ukraine’s new anti-corruption institutions. Nobody is releasing incriminating wiretaps of Rosatom (the Russian equivalent) executives plundering state assets.

The anti-corruption system’s first real test came a year ago this month, when the country’s parliament voted to fold Ukraine’s two major anti-corruption agencies under the prosecutor general’s control, which is to say, to end them. Regular Ukrainians who had spent three years absorbing missile barrages without complaint came into the streets to object. It was the first mass protest of the war. The law was reversed within days. The agencies were not saved by Brussels, whose displeasure was real but slow, nor by an American administration, which has trouble with its own corruption issues. They were saved by a citizenry that had come to regard the rule of law as its best chance to defeat the Russian invaders and build a rich and free nation. That is the big difference between Kyiv and Moscow, and it is this difference that will truly matter in 50 years.

The work is unfinished and visibly so. In the past two months, Ukrainian investigators have charged National Guard logistics officials over embezzled procurement, exposed a colonel siphoning military property in Kharkiv oblast, and returned with fresh charges to Energoatom. One may read that record as evidence of rot, or as evidence that the antibodies are functioning. Both readings are correct. What matters is which trend is stronger.

Time is short. Two-thirds of Ukrainians now tell pollsters they want negotiations with Russia to begin. Western publics are tired, Western treasuries are strained, and corruption remains the single most effective argument for those in Washington and Europe who would prefer to abandon Ukraine. Every scandal is worth an army division to Moscow, and the Kremlin knows it.

Ukraine has already expelled the Russian army from more territory than anyone predicted. The harder campaign is to expel the Soviet culture of corruption from Ukrainian society: to make contracts binding, bidding transparent, courts effective, and stealing shameful. Independence in 1991 was a wonderful and necessary first step. But establishing a functioning nation where all are equal under the law and opportunity is not just for the well-connected few, that is the task of a lifetime.

Ukraine’s future is being decided now. Will its rulers turn away from the endemic corruption that destroyed the Soviet Union and has deeply weakened and impoverished today’s Russia? If it does, it will defeat Putin and his kleptocrats and go on to build a free and prosperous nation. If it does not, history is clear and it is not pretty.

The choice must be made by each Ukrainian, especially those who are leaders. Continue to benefit financially from the culture of corruption that destroyed the Soviet Union? Or stand up, sometimes at great personal cost, for a new Ukraine built on freedom, equal opportunity for all, and the rule of law?

This is the huge leadership challenge that Zelensky faces. He can lead Ukraine into a strong and prosperous future. But he will need the help of all his Western allies and the support of other Ukrainian leaders. The time for choosing is here. The future of Ukraine hangs in the balance.

I will be in Kyiv to speak at Ukraine’s Independence Day celebrations next week. I will be delivering this very message at multiple events. Most regular Ukrainians understand and support the need for transformation. May Ukrainian leaders, and especially those who benefit personally from the old system, understand and embrace the change that is needed.

Gregory Slayton and Sergei Ivashenko are co-authors of the recent book Portraits of Ukraine: A Nation at War. They are giving all profits from book sales to pro-Ukrainian charities.