Zelensky acknowledges ‘corruption’ in country, vows reforms in ‘post-war Ukraine’
Joel Gehrke
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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has undercut Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s anti-corruption initiatives, the wartime leader acknowledged.
“During the war, of course, corruption is always there because war is sometimes used as a source of illicit incomes, as you know,” Zelensky said Friday in a virtual address to the Munich Security Conference. “But, hopefully, this is going to end pretty much soon, and we’ll cope with corruption after that.”
That statement will not shock Western leaders and policymakers since Ukraine’s reputation for “endemic corruption,” as MSC Chairman Christoph Heusgen noted in his question to Zelensky, was well established before the war. But it points to a misgiving that could constrain U.S. aid and postpone Ukraine’s dream of full membership in the European Union.
“Post-war Ukraine: I’m sure that Ukraine will be able to cope with corruption because we are conducting a series of reforms and we have a special anti-corruption agency,” Zelensky said. “And I’m about to appoint a new leader — next month, in fact, this process will be completed.”
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Zelensky has ousted several officials in connection to corruption scandals in recent months, including two deputy defense ministers who face criminal prosecution.
“Even when the war is going on, people saw that officials are conducting ‘business as usual,’” Anti-Corruption Action Center attorney Tetiana Shevchuk told Politico Europe earlier this month. “They saw that corrupt schemes have not disappeared, and it made people really angry. Therefore, the president had to show he is on the side of fighting against corruption.”
Such graft puts pressure on Zelensky’s government to assure Western powers that aid for Ukraine is being used for its intended purpose.
“Now, what I like to say is, ‘Look, they need to know where the money’s gone,’” House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) told the Washington Examiner this week. “A third of it’s gone into replenishing our stockpile and modernizing our weapon systems, a third is going to our defense contractors to make new weapons, which we really need, and then a third’s going into Ukraine. If I can explain that to them, explain the accountability and the audits taking place, I think there’s a greater level of confidence in terms of what we’re doing.”
Even if Western powers remain confident in the integrity of the military aid process, the extant corruption anxiety threatens to delay Ukraine’s membership in the EU. French President Emmanuel Macron and other Western European leaders endorsed the conferral of EU “candidate” status on Ukraine, but they are not willing to scrap the various legal standards that the political bloc requires any aspirant state to meet.
“Everybody knows that this is the rule of the game,” French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna said during a Munich Security Conference panel discussion with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Polish and Ukrainian officials. “It is out of scope and out of reach to abandon a precondition. And Mr. Zelensky would support me in saying that reform is needed — whether it is the legal system, the judicial system, the fight against corruption, so many things.”
That attitude is not shared in Warsaw, as Poland is one of Ukraine’s most enthusiastic partners within NATO and the EU. “We cannot confront this, what is happening in Ukraine, with a normal or almost-normal process of accession,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said during his appearance alongside Colonna. “If you asked me if I was in favor of abandoning the normal route to accession, my answer is: Yes, of course, yes, because what is happening before our very eyes is something completely strategic and extraordinary.”
The strategic significance of Ukraine’s prospects for joining the EU derives in part from the legal standards that members must uphold, which has contributed for years to the friction between Russia, neighboring former Soviet vassal states such as Ukraine, and the European bloc.
“Deeper integration between the European Union and the ‘neighbors’ was expected to create new barriers to trade between the ‘neighbors’ and Russia,” as the University of California-Riverside’s Paul D’Anieri wrote in his history of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. “[T]he European Union had no intention of modifying the [EU laws] to suit Russia, and Russia had no intention of adopting European legal and economic norms.”
EU powers hope “to design some programs that could be accelerators” to Ukraine’s eventual membership, according to Colonna — a consolation prize that drew guarded optimism from their Ukrainian colleague on the panel.
“I think we’re in a very complicated situation because we are, in parallel, fighting on battlefields with Russia and trying to implement with very high speed all these reforms,” Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov said. “And I hope that relations this year will be positive, and we will open this process.”
Much of that debate centers on intra-European processes, but McConnell, with respect to the more immediate question of American military aid to Ukraine, expressed confidence that the U.S. was getting a good return on the investment.
“It’s not costing a single American soldier’s life, and what we’re doing is providing — listen to this, the money that we’ve sent to you so far is 0.02% of our GDP in order to give Ukraine a chance to live in freedom and to prevent the Russians from being emboldened by a successful outcome in Ukraine,” the Senate Republican leader told Kubrakov. “Which further emboldens the Chinese, which are an enormous threat to us and to all of you.”
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Zelensky, in his earlier address, suggested the war itself would enable a purge of the Ukrainians most susceptible to corrupt Russian influence.
“A lot of things, of course, have come up to surface with this war, against the backdrop of this war,” he said. “Some part of our people have stayed with the occupiers.”