Zelensky's Other War: Ukraine's Endless Struggle With Corruption

Latest stories Bessent's bond gambit echoes Japan's decades-long debt trap Mark Carney shows the world how to bite back at Trump's tariffs S Korea's AI economy can't compete with China through conformity

On August 5, Olha Stefanishyna, the former deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration, former justice minister and former Ukrainian ambassador to the US, was formally charged with illicit enrichment and filing false asset declarations. She denies the allegations.

Meanwhile, a separate investigation into her time overseeing Ukraine's asset recovery and management agency - where contracts allegedly went to companies linked to her ex-husband - remains open but hasn't yet led to formal charges.

And as if Fedorov's point about systemic corruption needed any further proof, Iryna Mudra, the deputy head of Zelensky's presidential office, who oversaw judicial reform and the special tribunal on Russian aggression, was dismissed by the president on August 19. His decision came after Ukraine's anti-corruption agencies launched a new investigation into allegations of money-laundering.

These are not just five unrelated crises. They are symptomatic of exactly the accusation that Fedorov made: that corruption has led to a systemic crisis of governance.

What Fedorov didn't specifically mention was that none of this is new, or peculiar to Ukraine in wartime. The new country emerged from the Soviet collapse with an economy substantially captured by a small circle of oligarchs who controlled industry, media and – at various points – the presidency itself.

The Orange Revolution of 2004 and the Euromaidan revolution a decade later were explicitly in response to widespread anger at public perceptions of official corruption. Zelensky himself was elected in 2019 on a platform built largely on fighting corruption.

What the war has changed is not the underlying motivation of corruption – human greed, pure and simple – but where the opportunities are to realize it. The privatization auctions of the 1990s and the gas-trading schemes of the 2000s created a class of oligarchs that have come to dominate Ukrainian politics for the past three decades.

The procurement contracts and reconstruction funds of the 2020s are simply the new assets up for grabs that the same oligarchic networks are fighting over now.

Arguably, though, the damage they do is compounded by the war. A 2023 sham contract for undelivered mortar munitions worth some $40 million left a critical gap in an already stretched defense budget, straining frontline capabilities.

A $100 million scheme in 2025 which syphoned off funds intended to protect Ukraine's energy grid damaged both the economy and made ordinary Ukrainians' lives more miserable during the winter.

The crisis now reaches deep into the Ukrainian parliament. On the day that Mudra was charged, the Ukraine's parliamentary law enforcement committee blocked five bills intended to strengthen the country's fight against corruption.

These bills are a non-negotiable EU requirement for releasing over €2 billion in aid to Ukraine before the end of the year and a key item on Kyiv's to-do list for the accession negotiations.

Corrupt system 'protects itself'

Fedorov's video is both the statement of a deeply felt personal grievance and a diagnosis of a system that may be beyond the point of repair. Fedorov alleged that his own reforms of defense ministry procurement, worth billions of dollars a year, were what cost him his post.

“The old system,” he said, without naming Zelensky directly,“lives by its own rules too often. It protects itself. It is scared of change.” The asymmetry he describes is stark: reformers get sacked, while insiders with the kind of connections implicated in the November 2025 scandal seem able to avoid prosecution.