No Contest for Prosecutor General: How the Government Is Rewriting the Anti-Corruption Strategy

In the coming weeks, the government is expected to approve the Anti-Corruption Strategy for 2026-2030 (hereafter, the Strategy) and send it to the parliament. The question is in what form: the version drafted by the NACP team together with expert groups across the 16 sectors most vulnerable to corruption—or a government-edited version that significantly weakens it.

The government committee preparing the Strategy for cabinet approval—led by Deputy Prime Minister for European Integration Taras Kachka and due to meet civil society on Tuesday—has become the latest battleground. According to our information, there were at least four key pressure points in the talks, where ministries mounted serious resistance: competitions for prosecutor general and for the heads of the SBI and the National Police, as well as provisions on tax policy, customs and the privatization of land in local communities. In other words, all the issues most politically sensitive for the Presidential Office.

And while in most of those areas a substantial part of the substance was preserved, that was not the case with competitions for the post of prosecutor general and chairmanship of the SBI and the National Police.

What is more, once the document reaches the parliament, debate is likely to extend beyond these already emblematic issues to others as well—particularly the reform of the legal profession and approaches to regulating construction, energy and national defense.

Why does this matter? Because this is no longer simply an anti-corruption policy document. In effect, it has become a development strategy for a country at war. A country whose government is operating not only without a strategy of its own, but even without so much as a program approved by the parliament.

The scattered European road maps and requirements, which until now had never been brought together into a single internal course of action, have here for the first time been assembled into a coherent logic—and it was inside the government that they took their first blow. Although Mr. Kachka managed to hold the line on the Strategy’s core provisions against opposition from the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Justice and several other state bodies, he was clearly not prepared to confront the president, who relies on unreformed law-enforcement agencies.

To understand how the battle may play out in the parliament, it is worth knowing exactly where the system is resisting—even while allowing key initiatives from the Strategy’s drafters to pass through.

The finance ministry’s tax offensive

In its official letter, the Ministry of Finance proposed deleting the entire subsection of the Strategy dealing with taxation. Why was that so critical for both the Strategy and the state? Because this section contains systemic initiatives. Above all, it seeks to narrow discretion, particularly in the procedure for suspending tax invoices. Formally, the procedure is set out as automatic, and anyone reading the regulation could easily conclude that there is no subjective element involved. But there is one exception—criterion No. 8, “available tax information”—which in practice changes the entire logic: if certain grounds exist, decisions can be made manually.

Statistics suggest that 93–94 percent of audit procedures take place precisely through the Ministry of Finance. ZN.UA has repeatedly written about this corruption loophole, while anti-corruption bodies investigating abuses in the regions have confirmed that “unblocking is the toughest vertical, and it leads to the center.” The names mentioned there are Davyd Arakhamia (head of the Servant of the People parliamentary faction), Danylo Hetmantsev (chair of the Verkhovna Rada’s Committee on Finance, Taxation and Customs Policy) and Yevhenii Sokur (acting deputy head of the State Tax Service of Ukraine). The anti-corruption strategy proposes clearly defining the grounds on which this norm can be applied.

Then there are documentary audits during VAT reimbursement—another zone ripe for abuse. There is a threshold, established back in 2010, of UAH 100,000. If a reimbursement claim exceeds that amount, the tax service has the right to audit whether it is justified. That threshold has not been revised in 16 years. Because of inflation and economic growth, its real value has fallen roughly tenfold. As a result, the scope for audits has expanded significantly, and the tax service has gained much broader room for intervention. The Strategy proposes raising the threshold and tying it to a macroeconomic indicator—either the minimum wage or the average wage. That way it would adjust automatically along with the economy, while preserving the logic behind how audits are allocated.

The same applies to the formation of the audit plan. At present, this is still done, in effect, manually. The drafting team’s proposal is to introduce a full-fledged risk-based system with a clear risk model and algorithms for processing those risks. In that case, risky transactions would automatically become subject to audit.

It is also important to note that the Ministry of Finance effectively cut out part of the Strategy’s initiatives, including those related to the anti-corruption infrastructure. It completely stripped out everything concerning salaries, positions and territorial subdivisions. And it did so not only for the Economic Security Bureau, whose reboot makes this especially critical, but for the entire anti-corruption architecture—NABU, SAPO, the High Anti-Corruption Court (HACC) and the NACP. According to our sources in the ministries that took part in a series of coordination meetings, the Strategy’s drafters were given a blunt choice: remove all these points, or the document goes no further.

But this is not merely a matter of wartime belt-tightening, tempting though that explanation may be. It reflects a particular view of the state’s role: to maximize revenue collection and minimize spending. Within that logic, everything connected with institutional capacity—salaries, personnel, infrastructure—is treated as secondary. And that, in fact, is part of the systemic problem: even in strategic documents, the state still cannot bring itself to state plainly that institutional capacity is not a cost, but a basic condition of effectiveness.

The reboot of customs

The same logic surfaced in customs as well. From the outset, customs entered the discussion alongside the Ministry of Finance. Even here, it is hard to say who was really driving the process—the Finance Ministry or customs. The former’s official letter, to which a letter from the State Customs Service was also attached, contained a long list of objections—83 pages in total. Their logic boiled down to one thing: strip out virtually everything. The system works, there are no problems, there is no corruption. Seriously?

As for changing the system itself, the draft Strategy contains a number of important initiatives. One of the key ones is the introduction of a system of clear indicators that would signal the quality of customs’ work—not only in terms of duties collected, but also with regard to the quality of decisions and business satisfaction.

“Of course, customs, like the tax service, will never be loved—that is normal. But it has to be predictable, apply the same rules to everyone and operate within the legal framework. Because business will always try to reduce the tax base or customs value—that is natural. The state’s task is not to ‘squeeze out the maximum at any price’, but to create understandable rules of the game,” says one of the experts involved in drafting the Strategy.

But that is the theory. The obvious question is: who is supposed to monitor these indicators? Is it the Ministry of Finance, which was itself blocking the Strategy? It is genuinely hard to believe that indicators will reduce corruption at customs, where the authorities themselves feed off contraband flows. But the people who build institutions and state systems do believe in it: “Because the main source of corruption is human participation and the existence of discretion. So the first step is to automate procedures as much as possible and remove the human element wherever that can be done.”

How was a compromise reached? The team that drafted this part of the Strategy took a different route. For each problem, it assembled a body of statistics and evidence. One KPI, for example, was the outcome of court appeals against customs decisions. In 2024 alone, around 6,000 customs decisions were challenged, and roughly 90 percent of them were overturned by the courts as unlawful.

So either all judges are corrupt, or the problem lies in the customs decisions themselves, or in the legislation. If the same rules are interpreted differently, then either someone is violating them, or they are so vague that they allow multiple readings. In that case, the state’s task is to change the rules so that those norms are applied uniformly.

The apparent calculation was that the NACP would not probe too deeply into how the system really operates. But the drafting team brought in people who had worked inside the system and knew all its hidden traps. As a result, about 80 percent of the substance was preserved at this stage.

There were compromises, but not on substance. Officials, for example, proposed removing the head’s KPI. That is critical. Though more broadly, it is an illusion to think that simply finding the “right head” is enough—we wrote about that too when former NABU detective Orest Mandzii won the competition to head customs. Without changing the system, it does not work. And conversely, the system itself cannot work without a values-driven leader. Customs is a large, sprawling structure. Replacing the head in Kyiv is not enough: that person has to build a team throughout the entire vertical, down to the level of individual customs offices. If a leader has neither the tools nor the people, nothing will change. It is always a combination: systemic change and people capable of carrying it out.

“By the way, Taras Kachka acted constructively: in both tax and customs matters, he was more inclined to support the logic of not letting the substance be hollowed out. The key points were preserved. But the parliament lies ahead,” a government source noted.

On the privatization of land

It seems the team that drafted this subsection of the Strategy was serious about cutting the ground from under local authorities’ feet. But the Ministry of Justice suddenly took the position that such an initiative would supposedly violate citizens’ rights and was unfair. And yet the logic of the Strategy—both the previous and the current one—is grounded in analysis. That analysis shows that, in real life, this institution of privatization scarcely functions as a mechanism of fair distribution. With the exception of a few narrow categories, land is in most cases distributed either to “insiders” or through corruption schemes.

As a result, people in effect buy that land—but not from the state or the local community, rather from intermediaries. And the billions end up not in public budgets, but in private pockets. Formally, this is “free privatization”; in reality, it is the closed distribution of a resource. NABU’s Operation Clean City, involving former Kyiv City Council deputy and businessman Denys Komarnytskyi’s “toilet schemes”—where nominal utility structures were used as a pretext for taking control of valuable land plots—confirms it.

There is another problem: almost no such resource remains—there is hardly any land left that can still be privatized. Which means all new initiatives—for example, those aimed at veterans—risk reproducing the same model: access will go not to everyone, but to those who can “enter” the system. In much the same way people did after 2014–2015, using Anti-Terrorist Operation participants.

So the proposal is simple: land should be sold through transparent auctions. That creates equal rules for everyone. And if the state wants to support certain categories, it should do so through direct instruments: compensation, concessional loans and targeted programs. In other words, it should provide a real resource, not a formal right that in practice turns into corruption.

In its legal opinion, the Ministry of Justice insists that the Strategy’s provisions supposedly violate the Constitution and that the proposed approach is unfair because it contains two exceptions. But it is important to stress that these are two entirely fair and objective exceptions. The first concerns people who already own property on that land. The second concerns those who received it for permanent use before 2002—that is, on the basis of official state decisions.

In the protocol reconciling positions, the NACP clearly explained that this was not about a ban, but about dismantling a corruption mechanism. At the same time, an ordinary citizen is likely to perceive the very idea of “abolishing free privatization” as the removal of a right. That is easy to exploit both in parliament and in society. In the end, a compromise was proposed: change not the substance, but the form—a phased replacement of the institution of free privatization with alternative support instruments, including for veterans. We will see what parliament makes of that.

On the competition for the post of Prosecutor General, head of the SBI and the National Police

What is really at stake here is whether the authorities will retain political control over the law-enforcement system. At Tuesday’s meeting with civil society, Taras Kachka said that removing the competition provisions from the Strategy had been his personal decision. Why? Because those provisions, he argued, are already in the “Kachka-Kos Plan,” and that is supposedly enough. In other words, the deputy prime minister has taken personal political responsibility for the decision.

Kachka promised to do everything necessary to ensure that the Prosecutor General’s Office, the SBI and the National Police are depoliticized through Ukraine’s European commitments. He also argued that leaving these provisions out of the Strategy would help secure the votes needed to pass everything else that had been preserved in the document. Be that as it may, the fact remains: the Strategy will go to the parliament without provisions that are central to any anti-corruption agenda.

It is worth dwelling on the issue of competitions separately. In the law-enforcement system, even properly run competitions will not work if the system itself remains unchanged. And that is the most serious challenge facing the state in the near future.

For the main problem lies “on the ground”: in local communities where, on the one hand, mayors and business strike deals with the police, prosecutors and judges, while on the other the authorities tighten the leash whenever they need to exert political pressure on those same mayors. No matter how many NABUs are built at the top, people below still see venality, corruption and the absence of justice. In other words, the National Police remains the most unreformed part of the system at the basic level, and without changing it, nothing else works.

“There is a logic to removing the National Police from under the Ministry of Internal Affairs in order to break that dependence, and only after that introducing separate competition models. Otherwise, once again, we are treating piecemeal what is in fact a systemic problem,” the experts say.

But even that is only part of the answer, because we are talking about a system of hundreds of thousands of people present in every local community. No single leader can change it alone. The key lies in changing the rules. “At first, the system always resists and tries to formalize the new rules, but over time, as people change, those rules begin to work. You can see this in the civil service: at first competitions were a formality, but gradually they began to produce results. So even if today people are trying to neutralize them, that does not mean the instrument itself does not work—the question is whether it is given time,” the experts insist.

One encouraging sign is that the Cabinet of Ministers did not touch the block dealing with the legal profession. Formally, it appears to have been agreed: at the drafting and coordination stage, the NACP secured the Justice Ministry’s support, and only technical amendments were made. But that is a “quiet zone” only on paper. The parliament comes next, and this may prove one of the most difficult blocks—not easier than the issue of the prosecutor general.

Pressure is already mounting on the Justice Ministry leadership—from part of the legal community and from MPs. And the problem here is not only one of positions, but of the ability to retain agency. The attempt to dilute responsibility through a working group under the Justice Ministry had the opposite effect. It was initially created as a reform-minded body, but under pressure its composition was expanded, including by bringing in representatives of the Ukrainian National Bar Association (UNBA). According to available information, former deputy head of the Presidential Office Andrii Yermak has his eye on Izovitova’s place in the UNBA and is clearly uninterested in any reform in this sphere.

Conclusions

First, despite the removal from the Strategy of competitions for prosecutor general and for the heads of the SBI and the National Police, the government has preserved its backbone.

Second, the NACP missed the deadline for submitting the document to parliament, which means the Verkhovna Rada will now have less time—and MPs will bear greater responsibility.

Third, the Strategy still contains a number of objectively sharp conflict points. One of them is expert review for NABU: the document does not provide for the creation of a separate independent institution, instead vaguely stating the need to create conditions for independent anti-corruption expert review. It is obvious that no Justice Ministry will create such conditions, and this point is likely to be “killed” as early as the stage of the Rada’s anti-corruption committee led by Anastasiia Radina.

In addition, the part dealing with the Security Service of Ukraine—which requires systemic reform if it is to stop serving as the authorities’ political whip—effectively fell out during the drafting of the document.

And the key question remains: what is the point of a new Strategy if the old one was implemented by only 50 percent?

“We need to understand how politics works: there is always only a limited number of issues in focus—say 10 to 15 points on which the authorities concentrate attention and resources. But the system is much broader. And there is a large mass of areas where there is no direct political interest, and it is precisely there that change is possible—through changes in rules and procedures that will gradually squeeze corruption out across the board. So this is not only about political will,” NACP deputy head Dmytro Kalmykov, who oversaw the drafting of both the current and the new anti-corruption strategy, has repeatedly said at various public events.

But the parliament will show whether this Strategy becomes an instrument of change—or merely marks the limits of the political will of President Zelenskyy, who has concentrated the full extent of power in the country in his hands. All the more so against the backdrop of corruption investigations involving his closest circle and the parliament itself.