Before he was appointed head of Ukraine's Anti-Monopoly Committee in 2023, Pavlo Kyrylenko served as the top official in the Donetsk regional administration, overseeing the Ukrainian-controlled parts of a region partially occupied by Russian forces.
During that time, his in-laws were also real estate investors, acquiring 21 properties including commercial office space, land plots, and apartments in the capital, Kyiv, and the western city of Uzhhorod. His wife, whose relatives' names appeared on the property ownership papers, also drove a luxury BMW X3 sports utility vehicle.
To make matters worse, there were major omissions on his legally required financial disclosure forms. Moreover, his wife did not appear to have any income that would legitimately explain how they acquired 70 million hryvnias (around $1.8 million) in assets.
Those revelations, first made by Schemes, RFE/RL's Ukrainian investigative unit, ultimately led to Kyrylenko being charged with "illegal enrichment" and "declaration of false information."
A victory for anti-corruption campaigners, Kyrylenko's charges were another reminder of the issue that Ukraine has been struggling with for a decade or more: endemic, prolific corruption, in the public and private sectors.
"Obviously, we still have a lot of work to do. That's correct, and of course there is still corruption in Ukraine," said Daria Kalenyuk, a respected activist and executive director of the Kyiv-based Anti-Corruption Action Center, which was founded in 2012. "However, I can compare today with what was here 13 years ago…and it's like the results are unbelievable."
Corruption Scandals
Three years into Russia's all-out invasion, Ukrainian society continues on a war footing, galvanized to support the armed forces in the fight against an external, existential threat -- while also rallying behind President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's wartime leadership.
But corruption remains a persistent internal threat, illustrated by a series of scandals in recent years involving the Defense Ministry, national prosecutors, and wealthy businessmen. The predecessor to the current defense minister lost his job due to a scandal involving inflated food prices.
"It's good that it is possible in Ukraine, during the [fourth] year of the large-scale invasion, to actually freely expose corruption, and that there are tools which allow [people] to do that," she told RFE/RL. "It's actually an indication that we have an open society and still a system of checks and balances, that we are a free country, free society."
The struggle to clean up the country's reputation as a swamp has been messy at times, said Andriy Borovyk, executive director of the corruption watchdog Transparency International Ukraine. But not every mess is necessarily a sign of corruption, he said.
"Should we talk about corruption during war? I think yes -- it's necessary," Borovyk told RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service. "But in Ukrainian society, there's a tendency to label any inefficiency or stupidity as corruption right away. That's just how things are perceived here."
"Yes, corruption must be exposed, but not every inefficiency should be immediately equated with corruption," he said.
Wartime Corruption Under Zelenskyy
Disgust with graft is often cited as one of the leading causes for the 2013-2014 Maidan demonstrations, where thousands of Ukrainians took to Kyiv's streets for months to protest.
After President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country in February 2014 and Russia launched a campaign of covert and overt military action in the eastern Donbas region, Ukraine's military struggled to mount an effective defense, in some cases lacking weaponry that had been contracted but never supplied.
The problem was largely attributed to graft.
For many, the nadir came with the post-Maidan discoveries at Yanukovych's Versailles-like complex called Mezhyhirya, where he built an opulent mansion along with guesthouses, lakes, a collection of classic luxury cars, and a dock with a mock 18th-century Spanish warship.
Zelenskyy's landslide election victory in 2019 was widely seen as another push to try to move society beyond old habits: away from bribery and kickbacks -- big and small -- and toward transparency and accountability.
Russia's war has made it more difficult.
During the invasion, defense planners have been raked over the coals for several eye-popping procurement scandals -- something that appears to resonate more deeply with Ukrainians eager to support the armed forces.
Military contracts had been classified following the 2022 invasion. However, that changed in January 2023, when investigative reporters found a military supplier who was charging the government nearly 2 1/2 times the retail price for eggs.
Schemes later found additional contracts with suppliers who were providing the armed forces with food items at above-market rates. Public pressure led to Zelenskyy sacking Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov in September 2023.
Under pressure from the United States and Western countries aiding Ukraine, the Zelenskyy government set up a specialized entity -- the Defense Procurement Agency -- to streamline how weaponry was contracted, purchased, and supplied.
On January 28, the Cabinet fired a deputy defense minister as part of a shakeup of the procurement operations. That same day, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau -- a dedicated graft-fighting law enforcement agency -- opened a criminal probe of Umerov for refusing to extend Bezrukova's contract.
But Reznikov's successor as defense minister, Rustem Umerov, criticized the Defense Procurement Agency for what he said was inefficiency and lax governance. Defenders of its director, Maryna Bezrukova, who took over in early 2024, said she helped clean up a murky but essential system.
"Unfortunately, monitoring defense expenditures remains a highly opaque process, and the public learns about irregularities only in isolated cases," said Serhiy Mytkalyk, who heads an NGO called Anti-Corruption Headquarters.
How Corrupt Is Ukraine?
Transparency International, whose corruption perception ratings are closely watched around the world, said Ukraine had improved markedly in recent years due to "reforms aimed at European integration and the fulfillment of international obligations."
However, the country slipped last year, the group said, due to reforms "being implemented only formally," or the implementation was "being deliberately stalled."
Overall, Ukraine rated in 105th place out of 180 countries in the organization's 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index -- ahead of Russia and Belarus but behind Moldova, Hungary, and Romania. The United States was in 28th place.
Last year, Dmytro Verbytskiy, a top official in the national Prosecutor-General's Office, was found to be living in a rented suburban townhouse that his nephew had bought at a grossly underpriced value, according to another Schemes investigation. Schemes also discovered evidence suggesting the nephew was in fact a straw-man buyer, secretly representing an Odesa businessman.
Experts said the arrangement might constitute tax evasion, though the deputy prosecutor denied wrongdoing.
Schemes later uncovered details about Verbytskiy's girlfriend, who in 2024 became the owner of a new Porsche automobile and a three-story cottage in the same tony subdivision where Verbytskiy was living -- even though her official income was substantially lower.
The National Anti-Corruption Bureau later launched a criminal investigation into Verbytskiy's assets. Weeks after the revelations and the subsequent investigation, Verbytskiy resigned his position -- and later from the prosecutor's office.
Anti-corruption activist Kalenyuk argued the fact that these scandals and investigations are in the public eye wasn't a sign of unremitting corruption; rather, she said, it was a healthy sign that Ukrainian public and civil society were reacting to the problem.
"It's like saying that there is no corruption in Belarus. Nobody is talking about corruption in Belarus, absolutely nobody. But it doesn't mean that there is no corruption," she said. "It just means that if you are talking about corruption in Belarus, you will be jailed, tortured, extorted, imprisoned, intimidated, killed, whatever."
As for Kyrylenko, who was charged with "illegal enrichment" for his shady property deals, prosecutors requested his detention but the court instead ordered him released on August 28, 2024, pending trial, with an electronic monitoring bracelet and bail of 30 million hryvnia ($730,000).
The bail, Schemes found, was paid not by Kyrylenko, however, but by a businessman that owns a company currently under investigation by a regional unit of the Anti-Monopoly Committee.
