Despite the country’s steady progress fighting corruption, even in wartime, skeptics warn it’s not enough. But this is just an excuse. Their real concern is how Putin’s Russia would respond.
By Maria Popova
December 2024
Ukraine has faced a long and difficult path to the European Union. Since 2014, the year of the EuroMaidan Revolution, the country has made massive reforms across sectors, improving its rule of law, state capacity, and democratic governance to court the European community. In recent years, geopolitics has hastened the process: When Ukraine applied for EU membership on the fourth day of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, candidate status was quickly granted. Brussels conditioned its offer to open negotiations on a set of reforms, which Ukraine managed to satisfy even while at war. In late 2023, the European Council greenlit accession talks, which began in June 2024. But the end of the journey remains out of sight. While negotiations are proceeding and both parties seem optimistic, one obstacle looms above all others: Ukraine’s reputation for rampant corruption.
The accusation appears often. “At the heart of European concerns about Ukraine — echoed by Washington — is whether the country can overhaul its governance and political culture to rein in the power of big tycoons and eradicate endemic corruption,” reported the Wall Street Journal in November 2023. Around the same time, former European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker lambasted the move to open accession negotiations with Ukraine: “This is a country that is corrupt at all levels of society. Despite its efforts, it is not ready for accession; it needs massive internal reform processes.”
Are these widely cited concerns valid? Is Ukraine simply too corrupt to join the EU?
The short answer is no. Ukraine’s expert-assessed corruption level today is similar to that of the last three EU entrants — Bulgaria, Croatia, and Romania — when they started the accession process in the 2000s. Among the current group of EU hopefuls, Ukraine’s corruption lies at the average. And if the scope of anticorruption reforms and institution-building is a benchmark of readiness, Ukraine is better prepared than the last three entrants. The three Balkan candidates had almost no specialized anticorruption institutions when they started accession negotiations in 2000 and 2005. In contrast, Ukraine had established the institutional architecture for preventing, investigating, and punishing corruption well before accession negotiations began in 2024. Despite the many claims to the contrary, which might stem from old stereotypes, tacit fears of provoking Vladimir Putin’s Russia, or effective propaganda from Moscow, Ukraine is hardly too corrupt to join the EU.
Ukraine’s Perceived Corruption
How corrupt is Ukraine? And how does it compare to other EU aspirants, past and present? Despite the limits of relying on the impressions of observers, expert-perception indices remain the best tools for tracking corruption across countries and over time. Here, I use the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset because of its wealth of variables that capture the many faces of corruption, from malfeasance in the commanding heights of government to low-level administrative graft. A comparison of scores on V-Dem’s indices of political corruption, regime corruption, public-sector corruption, and executive corruption reveals claims that Ukraine is exceptionally corrupt to be hyperbole. Ukraine’s perceived corruption level is average among the six countries that are currently pursuing accession. Of the other five — Albania, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia — only Moldova is perceived to be significantly less corrupt than Ukraine, while North Macedonia alone ranks noticeably higher.
Moreover, a comparison between Ukraine and the three newest EU members — Bulgaria, Croatia, and Romania — reveals that Ukraine’s corruption problem is similar to those of the three Balkan states, both when they started accession negotiations and when they joined the Union. At the start of negotiations, Romania was assessed as more corrupt than Ukraine, Bulgaria as less corrupt, and Croatia as roughly about as corrupt. After the seven to eight years of negotiations, Romania had slightly improved but was still more corrupt than Ukraine is today, Bulgaria had deteriorated but was still less corrupt than Ukraine is now, and Croatia had improved and become less corrupt than present-day Ukraine.
Finally, the V-Dem data show that in the decade prior to accession negotiations, Ukraine’s performance on all four indices steadily and significantly improved. By contrast, none of the comparative Balkan cases showed improvement during the pre-negotiation decade — only stagnation (in Bulgaria and Romania) or else brief improvement followed by deterioration (in Croatia).
All this demonstrates that Ukraine’s level of corruption on the eve of its accession talks compares favorably not only to its fellow EU hopefuls in the current enlargement round, but also to the last three countries that completed talks and joined. When skeptics warn that corruption in Ukraine runs too deep and that Brussels is doing something novel by opening negotiations, they ignore the past. The EU has begun negotiations under hard and less certain circumstances before, with positive results.
The Architecture of Anticorruption
Another way to assess Ukraine’s readiness to join the EU is with the yardstick of anticorruption reform. By this metric, Ukraine is much more prepared for EU accession than the three Balkan candidates were in the 2000s. Ukraine’s institutional creation, innovation, and civil society engagement in the anticorruption process started in 2014 and continues to this day despite the war. Today, Ukraine boasts an extensive architecture of institutions to counter corruption.
In the last decade, Ukraine has established dedicated institutions to prevent, investigate, and prosecute corruption, as well as to recover ill-gotten assets. In 2015, the Ukrainian government began using ProZorro, an e-procurement system that brings transparency to government contracts and has been widely hailed as a success. In 2016, Ukraine also created the National Agency for Corruption Prevention, which develops the executive’s corruption-prevention policy and collects and audits income declarations by state officials. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, created in March 2015, investigates high-level political corruption and brings cases to the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, which handles them in court. In addition, in 2016, Ukraine created the Asset Recovery and Management Agency to trace and recover corrupt and criminal spoils in cooperation with Europol.
Since their creation, these agencies have conducted investigations leading to the criminal indictment of mayors, judges, executive-agency heads, MPs, oligarchs, and even former president Poroshenko. Since 2020, such cases have been adjudicated by the specialized High Anti-Corruption Court and an anticorruption chamber in the Supreme Court. Between 2022 and 2023, despite the existential war as a potential argument against focusing on cleaning up corruption, the number of corruption prosecutions skyrocketed. Facing charges were high officials who included the head of the central bank, a Supreme Court judge, and the chief of a regional administration.
In sharp contrast, none of the last three new members of the EU had a well-developed anticorruption architecture at the outset of accession negotiations. The Council of Europe adopted a set of principles and best practices called the Group of States Against Corruption only in 1999. From 2000 to 2001, the Group noted that Bulgaria and Romania faced corruption problems and had weak institutional capacity to tackle them. By the time Croatia started EU-accession talks in 2005, international norms were better developed. Croatia had a set of anticorruption institutions in place to prevent and investigate misdealing, but their efficacy was questionable and there were no specialized institutions (such as Ukraine now has) to prosecute and adjudicate crimes and recover stolen assets.
It is time to stop exaggerating Ukraine’s corruption problem and using it as an excuse to slow or question the country’s EU integration process. Locked in an existential fight for its statehood and sovereignty, Ukraine is no ordinary EU aspirant. Opposition to its accession might in truth have little to do with corruption and more to do with fear of Putin’s Russia and the lengths it would go to prevent Ukraine from joining the EU. Whatever the causes for concern, however, corruption should not be chief among them. The EU has successfully welcomed similarly positioned countries in Bulgaria, Croatia, and Romania, and all three have been largely unproblematic member states that pose no threat to European solidarity and integration. Keeping Ukraine out of the EU due to concerns about corruption would allow Russia to maintain its hope of asserting political control over its neighbor. Europe cannot be secure with an uncontained Russia that continues to see revanchism and expansionism as viable foreign-policy goals.
Maria Popova is associate professor of political science at McGill University and the author (with Oxana Shevel) of Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States (2024).
Copyright © 2024 National Endowment for Democracy
Image credit: Thierry Monasse/Getty Images
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