During the first two months of the war in Ukraine, Oleksandr Novikov, 40, lived with a clique of his associates in the basement of the austere offices of the National Agency for Corruption Prevention in Kyiv.
“We have an ammunition room – it has machine guns. We were ready to fight on those streets,” says Novikov, looking out the window of his third-floor boardroom.
It’s Novikov’s fourth and final year as head of Ukraine’s anti-corruption agency, and while the Russians didn’t land on his doorstep in the Ukrainian capital last February, the former prosecutor’s appetite for fighting against all odds has not yet been sated.
In 2021, Transparency International ranked Ukraine as the second most corrupt country in Europe, behind only Russia, a position Novikov sought to reverse only to find his task made significantly more difficult by Covid and Vladimir Putin.
Under the guise of the pandemic, Parliament lifted the need for political parties to submit financial reports to its agency, while the need to protect civil servants in occupied parts of Ukraine from the attention of Russian forces led to the suspension of the public and mandatory register of their identities and income in the past year.
Novikov wants both back – and more. The value of the financial register was evidenced by the forthcoming indictment in absentia of Viktor Medvedchuk, godfather of Vladimir Putin’s daughter and a leading pro-Kremlin politician in Ukraine, for his alleged failure to declare assets held in Cyprus. He was jailed and exchanged for Russian prisoners last year on other charges and has not spoken out.
Add to that the billions of dollars and euros in Western aid that has poured into the country. Some Republicans in the US Congress have called for an audit of aid use. It’s Novikov’s job to keep the cash safe. But to add to his frustration, the January 10 deadline had passed for the government to adopt a three-year anti-corruption strategy that would impose additional audit requirements for recovery and reconstruction projects.
“I have all the tools we need to ensure transparency, accountability and integrity in the use of this money — but not all of those tools are enabled,” he says.
Anger appears to have been further fueled by the government’s apparent initial lethargy in targeting Russian individuals and organizations operating in Ukraine’s economy.
Public tensions erupted last year after Novikov hinted that Andriy Smirnov, deputy head of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office, was behind slow progress in compiling a list of those hit by economic sanctions.
Smirnov, who explained the delays as legal complexity, accused Novikov of “spreading gossip” and “self-admiration”. Novikov says he just wants things to be done and for the “Russian narrative” of Ukraine as a corrupt state to be swept away.
Some might think that the dramatic events of the last few days would worry a missionary corruption czar. At the national level since Saturday, a number of deputy heads have been ousted amid corruption allegations, while a number of regional governors have resigned without explanation. “There will be no going back to what used to be,” Zelenskyy promised in one of his regular evening speeches.
The first domino fell when Ukraine’s Deputy Infrastructure Minister Vasyl Lozinskyi was fired from his post after he was accused of inflating the price of winter equipment, including generators, and allegedly siphoning $400,000. He is said to be under house arrest after about $38,000 in cash was reportedly found in his office. He has not commented.
One of the president’s oldest and most influential advisers, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, another deputy head of Zelensky’s office, then resigned. He was under investigation for his use of a Chevrolet Tahoe SUV donated by General Motors to humanitarian causes, and there were sightings of him driving a $100,000 Porsche Taycan that belonged to an acquaintance. Tymoshenko denies any wrongdoing.
Then, perhaps most perniciously of all, the Ministry of Defense was caught flat-footed when a Ukrainian newspaper reported that its procurement department had overpaid for soldiers’ rations, raising concerns about bribes.
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Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksiy Reznikov, responded to the reports by bringing in the intelligence services to investigate the leak, accusing his department’s critics of “attributing confidence in the defense ministry at a very crucial time” only to the deputy defense minister undermine , Vyacheslav Shapovalov, only to ask for his dismissal on Tuesday.
Novikov called Reznikov’s answer “not appropriate”. The anti-corruption agency discovered procurement problems at the ministry three months ago after documents were hidden from its agents, he reveals. Novikov had already issued an order for the Prime Minister of Ukraine to deal with it.
“I don’t understand why the minister hasn’t told the public that he’s working on all these issues right now and fixing them. [On Monday] We have ordered the minister to resign the head of department… I hope that the decision to make this public response has not been taken [Reznikov’s] decision, but it was a mistake by his communications team,” he says.
For Novikov, however, the spate of resignations is not a cause for concern but a sign that Ukraine is turning a new leaf, recent USAid polls show.
“Ukrainians became more intolerant of corruption during the war. If before the war only 40% of Ukrainians were ready to report corruption, today we have 84% of Ukrainians ready to report it. If before the war we had 44% of Ukrainians who did not tolerate any corruption, today it is 64%. So it is a request from Ukrainians to build a culture of integrity. And the President complied with that request.”
Zelenskyy, who campaigned to fight corruption in his election campaign, certainly has more to do, argues Novikov. “I think he’s totally on board, but the main things he’s working on are weapons and diplomatic support and financial support for Ukraine. After guns and financial support comes the fight against corruption. Yes, we think it’s three pillars that we need to achieve victory.”
There is resistance to change, he admits. “As we can see from the president’s decision and the government’s decision last week and today, not everyone in government and the president’s office agrees with the president.”
But Ukraine, with its application for EU membership, has the chance to change. “We have seen that if everyone agrees with all measures in a government corruption program, it is not a real government anti-corruption program.”
The expectation, says Novikov, is that Ukraine will soon climb Transparency International’s corruption index. “Corruption is the result of Russia’s decades-long attempts to make us its ‘province,'” he says. He struggles to chart a different course.