By Olena Harmash and Anastasiia Malenko
KYIV (Reuters) -Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy promised a quick new plan on Wednesday to fight corruption, after a law curbing the independence of anti-graft agencies triggered the first street protests of the war and rare rebukes from European allies.
Opposition lawmakers and European officials called on Wednesday for Kyiv to reverse the law, which Zelenskiy signed overnight. It was rushed through parliament on Tuesday a day after the security services arrested two anti-corruption officials for suspected Russian ties.
In his nightly televised address, Zelenskiy said the corruption fighting agencies – an investigating agency known as NABU and a prosecutor’s office known as SAPO – would continue to function “but without any Russian influence”.
“It all must be cleansed,” he said.
In the morning, he met officials including the heads of NABU and SAPO and said he would unveil a new plan to fight corruption within two weeks.
“We hear society,” he wrote on Telegram. “We all have a common enemy – the Russian occupiers, and the protection of the Ukrainian state requires sufficient strength of the law enforcement and anti-corruption systems, and therefore a real sense of justice.”
STRONGEST CRITICISM OF THE WAR
The law prompted some of Kyiv’s European allies to deliver their strongest criticism of Zelenskiy’s government since Russia’s invasion in 2022. Several hundred people took to the streets in Kyiv and other large Ukrainian cities late on Tuesday to protest, the first such demonstrations of the war.
“This is complete nonsense from the President’s Office,” Solomiia Telishevska, 20, a student in Kyiv on holiday, told Reuters. “This contradicts what we are fighting for and what we are striving for, namely to (join) the European Union.”
The law’s critics say the government appears to be trying to curb the work of anti-corruption agencies to protect officials.
After decades when Ukraine was seen as one of the most corrupt countries in the world, cleaning up its government has been held up as the most important condition for Kyiv to join the European Union and integrate more broadly with the West.
The issue risks antagonising Kyiv’s most loyal allies at a particularly risky time, when it is trying to smooth over the relationship with Washington, where President Donald Trump has frequently criticised Zelenskiy.
“Ukraine’s anti-corruption institutions are vital to its reform path. Restricting them would be a significant setback,” Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp said in a post on X.
Benjamin Haddad, France’s European Affairs minister, said it was not too late to reverse the decision.
Yaroslav Zheleznyak, from Ukraine’s opposition Holos party, said that he and several other lawmakers would propose a bill “to overturn this big shame that was adopted and signed”, and also challenge the law in the Constitutional Court.
EUROPEAN DREAM
The law was passed a day after Kyiv’s SBU domestic security agency one NABU official on suspicion of spying for Moscow and another suspected of illegal Russian business ties. It also conducted sweeping searches and arrests of a number of agency employees on other grounds, including traffic accidents.
NABU said that even if Russian infiltration was a problem, the crackdown had gone too far, making it impossible to carry out its mission.
Corruption is consistently cited by investors and the general public as one of the key challenges facing Ukraine. Fighting it is a condition attached to billions in Western financial aid.
Ukrainian political analysts said the legislation risked undermining society’s trust in Zelenskiy during a critical stage of the war against Russia.
Fierce fighting rages along more than 1,000 kilometres of the frontline. Russian troops continue their grinding advance in the east and have stepped up near daily attacks on Ukrainian cities with hundreds of drones.
The public’s aspiration for a European future is vital to sustaining the war effort, said Valerii Pekar, a Kyiv-based analyst: “Only democracy and the European choice give us a chance to win,” he posted on Facebook.
(Reporting by Olena HarmashEditing by Peter Graff)
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