Zelenskyy’s Anti-Corruption Climbdown: What It Means For Ukraine

The stunning turnaround took less than 72 hours: On July 22, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed a bill that protesters across Ukraine and crucial backers of Kyiv in the West said stripped two key anti-corruption agencies of their autonomy, threatening to reverse years of progress on justice and the rule of law.

On July 24, Zelenskyy submitted new legislation that he said would guarantee the independence of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAPO).

The agencies praised the new bill and urged parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, to pass it as soon as possible, while protesters said they would keep up the pressure until they are certain the threat has dissipated. A vote could come late next week.

Kyiv Protesters Aim To Keep Up Pressure Over Law On Anti-Corruption Agencies

Here’s what the climbdown could mean for Ukraine, its people, and its president.

A Sign of Strength…

The reason the initial bill sparked such a swift and angry reaction is that NABU and SAPO were seen as both symbols and actual, operating examples of democratic progress in Ukraine since independence in 1991 and, in particular, since the Maidan protests pushed a Moscow-friendly president whose rule was marred by corruption from power in 2014.

Formed in 2015, NABU investigates corruption among state institutions, and some of its probes have embarrassed senior officials. The loss of that function would be a major setback, and opponents of the bill saw it as a major step toward tighter state control and authoritarianism under Zelenskyy and his powerful chief of staff, Andriy Yermak.

Zelenskyy defended the bill by saying it was needed to remove Russian influence from anti-corruption efforts, raising concern that he was using Moscow’s war against Ukraine, now in its fourth year since the full-scale invasion, as a pretext to consolidate power in the hands of his administration and the state – and, ironically, handing the Kremlin a gift.

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Protests over the bill marked a substantial break in the wartime unity that has helped Ukraine resist a Russian assault which, in the absence of such a strong, collective response, could have led to Kyiv’s defeat. To some, Zelenskyy’s turnaround is evidence of democratic processes at work -- a sign of strength.

Or Weakness?

To others, it may be a sign of weakness or a lack of resolve. The fast flip-flop raises questions about why Zelenskyy and his Servant of the People party proposed the initial bill in the first place.

Wartime unity has been a boon for Zelenskyy, keeping Ukraine’s sometimes raucous politics at bay, for the most part, as the imperative of resistance against Russia tamps down divisions. The demonstrations against the bill were the most widespread protests on a political issue since the start of the full-scale invasion.

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But Zelenskyy's move to patch up the damage done by the initial bill is far from a guarantee against future steps that could stoke worries of authoritarianism. And even if the newer bill succeeds in quashing the protests and easing concerns in the West, the crack in that unity could bring political tussles further out into the open and embolden opponents of Zelenskyy.

‘Ukraine Is Not Russia’

One of the false narratives underpinning Moscow’s war is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s baseless assertion that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people.” But Zelenskyy’s reversal is stark evidence of a fact that former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma made the title of a book: Ukraine is not Russia.

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The very existence of anti-corruption bodies with the autonomy and wherewithal to investigate state officials is a marker of the different paths Ukraine and Russia have taken since Putin came to power in 2000 and set about tightening Kremlin control over politics and society – a domestic clampdown that went into overdrive with the invasion of Ukraine.

And the phenomenon that has been played out in Ukraine this week – the government making a major shift in direction under pressure from protesters – is one that Putin has gone to great lengths to try to ensure could not happen in Russia, where top-down pressure is the norm and the Kremlin uses an array of levers, from restrictive legislation to police violence, to quash protests, curb civilian society, and silence dissent.

A Wary West?

Given Kyiv’s need for massive Western military and monetary support for its fight against the Russian invasion, it seems certain that admonitions from European nations and from some quarters in Washington played a big part in Zelenskyy’s decision to submit the new bill on July 24.

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Ukraine’s Western backers will breathe a sigh of relief if the crisis blows over. But the strongly worded criticism from several leaders in Europe suggests that Kyiv’s supporters abroad have been rattled by the developments and may be on guard for future signs of backsliding that throw further hurdles across its already slow path to EU membership.

Young Generation

The protests that emerged swiftly when the Rada passed the bill on July 22 and continued after Zelenskyy submitted the new legislation on July 24 skewed youthful. Many of the Ukrainian who hit the streets in Kyiv and other cities such as Lviv in the west and Dnipro, not far from the front line, would have been children or teens at the time of the Maidan.

Their activism and initiative seems to show that the even under the Russian onslaught, many younger Ukrainians see the progress Ukraine has made since then, and since independence in 1991, is something like the status quo -- a right that they consider worth defending when they see the state seeking to reverse those gains.

With reporting by RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service