Ukraine Has a Self-Inflicted Handicap in Its War for Survival

It is never a good sign when governments accused of corruption raid the agencies and activists trying to hold them to account. This happens routinely in repressive dictatorships including, notoriously, Russia, but now also in Ukraine, which is neither. It’s something the country cannot afford, just as it asks taxpayers across Europe to pump tens of billions of additional euros into its defense.

On Tuesday, Ukraine’s parliament approved a law that — if signed by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy — would strip anticorruption agencies of their independence and subordinate them to his office. Opposition legislators cried “shame” as the vote was taken. They were right.

This is, tragically for Ukraine, part of an emerging pattern. Only on Monday, authoritiesraided the offices of Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, NABU, detaining at least 15 of its investigators. Two were held on suspicion of working with Russia, but according to the bureau, most were accused of infringements unrelated to their work, such as traffic violations. Separately, security services also inspected the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, known as SAPO.

On July 11, armed officers from the State Bureau of Investigations also raided the Kyiv home of activist Vitaliy Shabunin, who heads the Anti-Corruption Action Center, the nation’s most prominent nonprofit fighting graft. Shabunin, who said in a Telegram post that Zelenskiy was “taking the first but confident steps towards corrupt authoritarianism,” is a controversial figure with a sharp tongue. But that shouldn’t matter. His arrest was, despite government denials, politically driven. So were Monday’s raids and the new draft law. They symbolize a wider problem that could soon have direct, corrosive effects on the nation’s war effort.