Volodymyr Zelensky’s other war: Ukraine’s endless struggle with corruption

Stefan Wolff, Tetyana Malyarenko, University of Birmingham

Ukraine celebrated this year’s independence day on August 24 in the presence of key allies and amid the unfolding of another major corruption scandal.

It all started when Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s defence minister until his dismissal as part of a government reshuffle last month, posted a nine-minute video on August 19 that was widely seen as a direct challenge to the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. One part of the challenge was what amounted to a call for an election, despite the fact that the ballot would have to be held in wartime. This is something that both Zelensky and a majority of Ukrainians have repeatedly rejected.

The other part of Fedorov’s challenge was his diagnosis of a “systemic crisis of governance”. He is not wrong. Corruption in Ukraine is no longer simply about this scandal or that minister. It is a pattern of elite behaviour that has outlasted every Ukrainian government since independence. It survived revolutions in 2004 and 2014 fought explicitly in the name of ending it. And it’s now undermining a war for national survival.

The depth of this problem has become more obvious over the past year. In November 2025, a bribery scheme worth an estimated US$100 million (£73 million) in the energy sector reached into Zelensky’s inner circle, forcing out his justice and energy ministers. Both have denied any wrongdoing. As part of the fall-out from that scandal, Zelensky’s long-time chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, resigned the same month. Yermak’s legal counsel has denied any involvement in illegal activities.

In July 2026, Fedorov’s own removal from his post as defence minister came after a rift with the armed forces’ commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi. The rift was partly about strategy and partly about procurement reforms – allegedly threatening entrenched interests – that Fedorov had been keen to push through. Like a year earlier, large-scale public protests ensued.

On August 5, Olha Stefanishyna, the former deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration, former justice minister and former Ukrainian ambassador to the US, was formally charged with illicit enrichment and filing false asset declarations. She denies the allegations.

Meanwhile a separate investigation into her time overseeing Ukraine’s asset recovery and management agency — where contracts allegedly went to companies linked to her ex-husband — remains open but hasn’t yet led to formal charges.

And as if Fedorov’s point about systemic corruption needed any further proof, Iryna Mudra, the deputy head of Zelensky’s presidential office, who oversaw judicial reform and the special tribunal on Russian aggression, was dismissed by the president on August 19. His decision came after Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies launched a new investigation into allegations of money-laundering.

These are not just five unrelated crises. They are symptomatic of exactly the accusation that Fedorov made: that corruption has led to a systemic crisis of governance.

What Fedorov didn’t specifically mention was that none of this is new, or peculiar to Ukraine in wartime. The new country emerged from the Soviet collapse with an economy substantially captured by a small circle of oligarchs who controlled industry, media and – at various points – the presidency itself.

The Orange Revolution of 2004 and the Euromaidan revolution a decade later were explicitly in response to widespread anger at public perceptions of official corruption. Zelensky himself was elected in 2019 on a platform built largely on fighting corruption.

What the war has changed is not the underlying motivation of corruption – human greed, pure and simple – but where the opportunities are to realise it. The privatisation auctions of the 1990s and the gas-trading schemes of the 2000s created a class of oligarchs that have come to dominate Ukrainian politics for the past three decades. The procurement contracts and reconstruction funds of the 2020s are simply the new assets up for grabs that the same oligarchic networks are fighting over now.

Arguably, though, the damage they do is compounded by the war. A 2023 sham contract for undelivered mortar munitions worth some US$40 million left a critical gap in an already stretched defence budget, straining frontline capabilities. A US$100 million scheme in 2025 which syphoned off funds intended to protect Ukraine’s energy grid damaged both the economy and made ordinary Ukrainians’ lives more miserable during the winter.

The crisis now reaches deep into the Ukrainian parliament. On the day that Mudra was charged, the Ukraine’s parliamentary law enforcement committee blocked five bills intended to strengthen the country’s fight against corruption. These bills are a non-negotiable EU requirement for releasing over €2 billion (£1.71 billion) of aid to Ukraine before the end of the year and a key item on Kyiv’s to-do list for the accession negotiations.

Corrupt system ‘protects itself’

Fedorov’s video is both the statement of a deeply felt personal grievance and a diagnosis of a system that may be beyond the point of repair. Fedorov alleged that his own reforms of defence ministry procurement, worth billions of dollars a year, were what cost him his post.

“The old system,” he said, without naming Zelensky directly, “lives by its own rules too often. It protects itself. It is scared of change.” The asymmetry he is describing is stark: reformers get sacked while insiders with the kind of connections implicated in the November 2025 scandal seem able to avoid prosecution.

When Zelensky was elected in 2019, ending corrosive corruption looked mostly like a matter of political will But if Zelensky ever had this will, many of those around him clearly did not. More than four-and-a-half years of full-scale war later and corruption is now embedded in sectors – arms procurement, air-defence contracts, energy-grid protection – where failure costs soldiers’ lives and adds yet more misery to the plight of ordinary Ukrainians.

Ukraine’s survival as an independent state has always depended on not losing the war against Russia. But it depends just as much on winning the older, quieter war against a system that, in Federov’s words, is still “scared of change”. Fedorov’s solution of holding an election is unlikely to be a solution on its own – and western pressure has clear limitations.

But without a solution, the problem will continue to fester and lead to more alienation between state and society in Ukraine. Finding and implementing a workable solution will be impossible without a change of culture among Ukraine’s elite. This will determine how good a wartime leader Zelensky ultimately proves to be and how sincere his partners are in supporting not just him but the survival of a democratic Ukraine.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.