The preservation of the West’s goodwill toward Ukraine matters.
Events are moving fast inside Ukraine. On Tuesday, the country’s parliament passed legislation that would weaken the independence and authority of two institutions designed to promote good governance – the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO). Despite profound opposition to the law from Ukrainian opinion leaders, journalists, activists, and social reformers, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed the legislation into law late Tuesday night.
“Anti-corruption infrastructure will work without Russian influences,” Zelensky said in defense of the controversial move. “Defending the Ukrainian state requires a strong enough law enforcement and anti-corruption system,” he later added, “one that ensures a real sense of justice.”
But his fellow countrymen appear unconvinced. “It’s totally a betrayal of everyone who is on the front line, for everyone who is fighting for our liberty, for everyone who is fighting for Ukraine not being Russia,” said one 29-year-old doctor in an interview with NPR. “And it’s definitely not an honest move.” To judge from the protests in Ukraine’s streets against the law — the first anti-government protests since the start of Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the first mass demonstration against the Zelensky government — Ukraine’s urban population seems inclined toward the doctor’s view.
As many observers have noted, the whole affair is too sordid and counterproductive to ignore the implications. “The rush appears to have been sparked by investigations into members of Zelenskyy’s circle and the president’s desire to further consolidate control over powerful institutions during wartime,” the Financial Times’ well-sourced reporter in Kyiv, Christopher Miller, wrote. “Civil society leaders said he had timed the move on the assumption that western allies would be too distracted — including by U.S. President Donald Trump’s turbulent policy moves — to notice internal Ukrainian politics.”
“It’s no exaggeration that Ukrainian public opinion is in an absolute firestorm after the parliament today approved a law essentially dismantling independent anti-corruption agencies, just days after SBU raided key investigators,” the Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov observed Tuesday. The exercise hasn’t just inflamed tensions inside Ukraine. It has also frustrated Kyiv’s European and G7 partners. “Ukraine’s path towards EU accession,” said EU economy commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis, “will require strong capacity to combat corruption.” No one knows this better than Zelensky himself, who ran for the office he occupies on a platform seeking better relations with Russia and stricter anti-corruption measures to smooth the path to E.U. accession. So much for that.
“In all wars, there is tension between security needs and democratic preservation,” R.T. Weatherman Foundation President Meghan Mobbs wrote. And while she conceded the efficacy of the NABU and SAPO as anti-corruption bodies was hardly beyond question, giving the political class control “over investigations is dangerous.” Moreover, “external public perception of countries and bodies (i.e., EU and G7) matters greatly, whether you like it or not,” she added.
Zelensky’s maneuver is all but certain to retroactively ratify criticisms of his government among Western elements who have been hostile toward Kyiv’s cause from the outset. They can go and peruse the various inspectors general reports detailing where U.S. support for Ukraine is going if they have concerns. They haven’t yet. Regardless, the negative headlines will suffice for evidence of the charge they’ve been making for years: that Zelensky’s government is a corrupt enterprise unworthy of preservation against Russian subjugation.
That would be backward logic — at least, if it comes from those who perceive themselves to be hard-nosed realists. The value of Ukraine as a bulwark against Russian aggression against America’s treaty-bound allies in Europe doesn’t depend on the existence of compatible values, though that would be nice. It is a raw, dispassionate argument over the relative benefits of denuding Russian hard power and its ability to project force abroad.
And yet, values do matter. Shared ideals matter. The preservation of the West’s goodwill toward Ukraine matters. To the extent that Zelensky’s cave jeopardizes those intangible assets, there could be hard-power consequences that flow from them.