National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (Національне антикоропційне бюро України or НАБУ; Natsionalne antykoruptsiine biuro Ukrainy or NABU). A specialized anti-corruption agency charged with responsibility to investigate, gather evidence, and prepare for trial cases of crimes of political corruption against senior state officials. Created by laws adopted on 14 October 2014, it came into being alongside the National Agency on Corruption Prevention or (NAZK) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAP), Ukraine’s other two anti-corruption agencies. The three agencies were to be independent and work in a coordinated fashion together. This institutional innovation was introduced in the wake of the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution as a result of pressure on President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko exerted by the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, and Ukrainian civil society.
The NABU actually came to life on 16 April 2015 when President Poroshenko issued two decrees—one an enabling act, the other appointing Artem Sytnyk as director selected by competition from among 186 candidates. The agency was endowed with wide powers of search and seizure. It was to be overseen by a committee of the Supreme Council of Ukraine as well as a citizens’ council. In fulfilling its responsibilities the NABU was to cooperate with other anti-corruption and law enforcement bodies of which Ukraine has a plethora.
Launched into a crowded institutional field with no clear provision for the coordination of its activities with the existing crime-fighting bodies, the record of achievement by NABU in controlling political corruption was inevitably modest. Turf wars developed. Cases prepared and presented in the regular courts were stalled by reluctant or corrupt judges. A set of specialized anti-corruption courts was necessary to bypass the ordinary judiciary. NABU investigators appeared less than competent at the outset—as of January 2017, only 25 out of 100,000 electronic asset declarations (e-declarations) submitted by government officials to NAZK as required by law were being investigated by NABU for irregularities. Altogether, at this time its detectives were working on a total of 264 criminal cases, 50 cases had been sent to court, and 12 convictions had been obtained.
The agency was also hampered in its work by overt political interference from Prosecutor General of Ukraine Yurii Lutsenko, acting on behalf of President Petro Poroshenko. Poroshenko himself attempted to take control of NABU’s panel of auditors which would make it possible for him to dismiss the director. In the spring of 2017, he signed into law a requirement that anti-corruption activists within civil society would also submit e-declarations as required of government officials. This was a concession to pushback from the Supreme Council of Ukraine parliamentarians uncomfortable with the asset reporting requirement because it might disclose their own illegal enrichment. All of this was made moot early in 2019, when the Constitutional Court of Ukraine ruled the law on illegal enrichment unconstitutional thus closing down all cases related to the e-declaration system.
Under President Poroshenko NABU’s effectiveness improved, but modestly. The number of criminal cases prepared by the agency rose from 714 in 2017, to 767 in 2019; the percentage actually prosecuted in court went from 12.7 to 17.2. Of those charged with political corruption more than 4 in 5 never faced trial.
With the election of Volodymyr Zelensky as president of Ukraine, Ukraine was expected to renew its struggle against political corruption and improve its standing in the world. In 2019 Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) gave Ukraine a score of 30, placing it at number 126 out of 180 countries, in the company of Azerbaidjan, Djibouti, and Kazakhstan. Zelensky reconstituted the national anti-corruption council with himself as head and his own chief-of-staff, Andrii Yermak, as deputy head. Nothing was heard of that body thereafter. A new anti-corruption strategy for 2020–24 was launched, but remained unimplemented at its half-way point. By 2021 Ukraine’s CPI score had improved to 32, but four in five Ukrainians still felt Zelensky’s anti-corruption promises had not been fulfilled. Zelensky’s subsequent actions affirmed public sentiment.
When NABU charged Oleh Tatarov, the president’s deputy chief-of-staff, with bribery, President Volodymyr Zelensky had the case transferred out of its hands to the more politically pliable Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). He then tried to dismiss the NABU director, Artem Sytnyk. This was ruled unconstitutional. Under pressure from the International Monetary Fund, the Supreme Council of Ukraine in October 2021 passed a bill placing the NABU under the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine and the President of Ukraine, strengthening its independence of both Cabinet and President, and prescribing an open, competitive process for selecting its director. President Zelensky signed the bill into law on 8 November 2021, and the search for a new NABU director was initiated. But the president and his President’s Office then proceeded to sabotage the selection process, thereby also the restoration of NABU’s independence and effectiveness as an anti-corruption agency. Much like his predecessor, Zelensky was apparently not engaged seriously in fighting political corruption as he was fighting anti-corruption in a pattern familiar to post-1991 Ukrainian backroom politics.
In typical fashion, in March 2023 a new NABU director was appointed in the person of Semen Kryvonos. He had no experience of investigating political corruption and was an associate of the President’s chief-of-staff, Andrii Yermak.
The pattern of high-level political corruption coexisting with political interference to suppress its detection and prosecution continued in the rest of Volodymyr Zelensky’s term. In 2024 a former adviser to the president was arrested by NABU for embezzlement, and the President’s Office was expected to shield him from prosecution. In 2025 it was alleged that NABU had been infiltrated by a Russian spy. This was the pretext for the Supreme Council of Ukraine to pass a law giving the Prosecutor General’s Office powers to access any and all NABU cases, direct the actions of NABU detectives, transfer cases to other agencies in the event of their non-compliance, close down investigations or resolve them arbitrarily, and issue notices of suspicion against high-level officials. This would nullify NABU’s independence altogether. Once Zelensky signed the bill into law on 22 July, four high-profile cases were closed by NABU in one week. The Security Service of Ukraine operatives began investigating the work of NABU detectives. Following protests in the streets of Kyiv (the ‘cardboard revolution’) as well as from the EU, Zelensky reversed his decision, restored NABU’s independence, and the Supreme Council of Ukraine docilely passed the remedial legislation.
In September 2025 NABU Director Kryvonos announced that his agency was focusing its attention on corruption in the energy and defence sectors. A special, fifteen-months-long investigation into high-level corruption, money laundering, and illicit enrichment precisely in these sectors, Operation Midas, in November revealed kickbacks worth $100 million USD. The Minister of Justice, Herman Halushchenko, was forced to resign, as well as the Minister of Energy. Another major figure involved, Tymur Mindich, a friend and business associate of Volodymyr Zelensky, escaped abroad. Whether this explosive development was linked to the attempt by Zelensky or his President’s Office to muzzle NABU earlier in the year became the subject of unwelcome speculation. Certainly this scandal did not reflect well on Ukraine’s reputation in fighting political corruption, enhance its chances of admission into the EU, or reassure allies as to its worthiness of wartime support. Andrii Yermak, the President’s chief-of-staff, resigned as a consequence.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Harasymiw, B. ‘Civil Society as an Anti-Corruption Actor in Post-Euromaidan Ukraine,’ Canadian Slavonic Papers 61, no. 3 (September 2019)
Trepak, V. Protydiï koruptsiï v Ukraïni: Teoretyko-prykladni problemy (Lviv 2020)
Shandra, A. ‘Zelenskyy Tried to Kill NABU. Then It Exposed His Friend’s $100M Scheme,’ Euromaidan Press, 12 November 2025
Bohdan Harasymiw
[This article was written in 2026.]