What were the results of the anti-corruption policies during the Poroshenko presidency?

When he came to power in the aftermath of the EuroMaidan Revolution, Poroshenko rightly saw corruption as one of the greatest social ills and a major cause of the revolution. In this, he had the strong support of Ukraine's increasingly vocal civil society and the country's Western partners.

The early years of his presidency saw some important breakthroughs in the fight against corruption. One was a public­private initiative to make state procurements—a major source of corruption in Ukraine—transparent by releasing full information on the Internet. Originally designed by an alliance of Ukrainian NGOs and international organizations, a system called ProZorro was then transferred to state ownership and became operational in 2015. (Prozoro is Ukrainian for “transparent,” but the spelling with a double "r" used in the system's name also references Zorro, the intrepid masked avenger.) Thanks to this open-source electronic system, the details of every new tender and government contract have become easily accessible to journalists and the public at large.

Another notable achievement of Poroshenko's early years in power was the creation of a state register of electronic declarations. The new anti-corruption law of October 2014 envisaged the obliga­tory electronic declaration of assets for mid- and upper-level state servants, as well as parliamentarians and police—including in all cases their immediate family members. The Ukrainian bureauc­racy and some groups in parliament did everything they could to derail this project. This included the last-minute refusal of a state information-security agency to certify the system, as well as false claims made by some politicians that their declarations had been compromised. Still, the European Union made the introduction of electronic reporting a precondition of visa-free travel to Europe, which had been Poroshenko's major political aim at the time.

The story of the state electronic register of declarations also re­vealed the limitations of Poroshenko's war on corruption. The law introduced these obligatory declarations in order to enable special state agencies to investigate the sources of unexplained riches or attempts to conceal them. But there were few dismissals from public service and even fewer prosecutions resulting from the filings. As a result of a media outcry in late 2016, Poroshenko's own party and its allies suffered just as much public embarrassment as the opposition. They remained, by and large, part of the old system, in which people went into politics to build or protect their business interests or those of their sponsors. The electronic register was rendered toothless in February 2019, when Ukraine's Constitutional Court conveniently annulled as unconstitutional the Criminal Code's article about illicit enrichment.

It is also telling that from the very beginning both Poroshenko and Ukraine's Western partners saw the solution to curbing corruption in the creation of dedicated investigative and judicial institutions— in essence acknowledging that the existing justice system was part of the problem. In 2015 the Ukrainian government established the National Anti-Corruption Bureau as a separate national investiga­tive agency, as well as the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, which could indict suspects. The latter was conceived as fully independent of the Prosecutor General's office in matters of oversight and appointment, but the Ukrainian parliament tried to amend the legislation by placing the anti-corruption prosecutors at all levels under the control of the Prosecutor General and chief prosecutors in the regions.

It took Ukraine's Western partners even longer to push through the third component of the proposed dedicated structure: the High Anti-Corruption Court of Ukraine. Although this court was envisaged as part of the judiciary reform of 2016, the Ukrainian parliament delayed the passage of the requisite bill until mid-2018, disregarding numerous warnings from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, among others. The judges and their immediate family members received around-the-clock security pro­tection, and the International Advisory Board was granted the right to veto the appointment of judges. The High Anti-Corruption Court finally started its work in September 2019, several months after Poroshenko's electoral defeat.

In the short run, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau maintained its independence thanks to support from the civil society and inter­national bodies, while the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office engaged in traditional politicking. In 2018 its head was re­corded coaching suspects on how to avoid corruption charges, but he refused to resign, as the US ambassador had suggested pub­licly. Ukrainian experts see the National Anti-Corruption Bureau as a promising institution, but the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office as blocking its work.⁶ Regardless of the tense re­lations between the two, in the absence of a specialized and truly independent court, few cases could be brought to trial.

When Poroshenko campaigned for re-election, he cited data from Transparency International as proof that under his watch Ukraine did make some progress in combating corruption: between 2013 and 2018, Ukraine rose from the 144th position to the 120th on the Corruption Perception index.⁷ But the 120th position out of 180 nations was still very far from where ordinary Ukrainians expected to be; the two countries immediately above and the three countries below Ukraine in the table were all located in sub-Saharan Africa, not exactly a beacon of political and economic transparency. As with other Poroshenko reforms, Ukrainian voters did not examine his actual record on fighting corruption but voted based on their gut feeling that things were still being run the same old way.