A poster held by a protester in Kyiv captured the anger and disbelief many Ukrainians are feeling after parliament passed a bill -– swiftly signed by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy -– that critics say will curb the independence of two key anti-corruption agencies and badly set back the country’s hard-won progress toward democracy and the rule of law.
"This is not the future my brother died for,” it read.
In just a few words, that message touched on at least a dozen years of Ukraine’s tumultuous recent history, from the Maidan protests that pushed Moscow-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych from power in 2014 to Russia’s war against Ukraine, which rages on 41 months after the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022.
As the country struggles to fend off the Russian invasion, which has killed tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians and uprooted millions of citizens, passage of the law restricting the autonomy of the anti-corruption agencies has, for many, raised a stark and simple question: What are we fighting for?
“We had two relatively independent institutions that at least created the appearance -- or even the reality -- of checks and balances. If we dismantle them, we’ll slide into a fully controlled state,” said Anton, a protester in the southeastern city of Dnipro, not far from the front. “I wouldn’t want to live in a country like that.”
A Major Setback?
The monthslong Maidan protests, which came to be known as the Revolution of Dignity, began as demonstrations of anger over government corruption, which has plagued Ukraine since independence in 1991 and was seen as getting worse.
They swelled to massive proportions after Yanukovych abruptly abandoned plans to sign a trade agreement with the European Union and tightened ties with Russia instead.
The Maidan protests and the defense against the Russian onslaught are just the most prominent examples of efforts by Ukrainians to safeguard independence –- due to Moscow’s aggression, still in peril almost 35 years after the Soviet collapse -– and to put as much distance as possible between Ukraine and both its Soviet legacy and the backward-looking, deeply unfree country Russia has become.
Defenders of the institutions affected by the new law –- the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAPO) –- say that a working system of independent anti-corruption bodies has been a crucial step in that direction for Ukraine, and that the legislation is a major setback.
“In essence, Ukraine is being dragged 10 years back in terms of the fight against corruption,” Dmytro Kozyatynskiy, a war veteran, said at the protest in Kyiv on July 22, where many of the demonstrators were young people like him.
“By stripping NABU of its autonomy, they are gradually dismantling everything that’s been built up over the years,” he said. “I’m in shock, my friends are in shock.”
The law “strips society of one of the greatest achievements since the Revolution of Dignity -- independent anti-corruption institutions,” Transparency International Ukraine said.
As the protests that erupted in several cities after its passage show, it also threatens the national unity that has been an indispensable ingredient in Ukraine’s defense against a country that Russian President Vladimir Putin –- and many in the West –- expected to come under Moscow’s thumb within weeks of the start of the full-scale invasion.
“Just a few days ago Ukrainians were assuring me that whatever complaints they had about Zelenskyy, they understood the need for a united front in wartime. Now it's unclear whether Zelenskyy can still count on national unity -- a scenario the Kremlin has long been hoping for,” Lucian Kim, senior Ukraine analyst at the International Crisis Group, wrote on Bluesky.
“It's a perilous moment for Ukraine, for democracy in Ukraine and for democracy everywhere,” Kim wrote.
'Government Arbitrariness'
Zelenskyy defended the legislation, which was submitted by his own party, in a nightly address on July 22 and at a meeting with security and anti-corruption agencies on July 23. He contended that it would improve anti-graft efforts and remove “Russian influence” from the fight against corruption.
Later on July 23, however, Zelenskyy said he would soon propose another bill, which he said would guard against Russian interference but would provide for "the independence of anti-corruption institutions." He did not say whether he would seek to undo the law he signed a day earlier.
Critics say the legislation plays into Putin’s hands in ways that could weaken Ukraine’s defense against the Russian onslaught, not strengthen it, by threatening to undermine unity among Ukrainians and sap support for Kyiv from the West at a crucial juncture.
If it ends up jeopardizing Zelenskyy’s position, that could also be welcomed by the Kremlin: One of the main initial goals of the invasion was to remove the president and replace him with a pro-Russian figure, and Putin has repeatedly sought to cast Zelenskyy as illegitimate.
It could also amplify concerns in Washington about Ukrainian corruption at a time when US President Donald Trump has begun to lay a large part of the blame for the lack of progress toward peace on Russia and promised to increase supplies of weapons to Kyiv via Europe.
Hitting the streets of cities that Russia has relentlessly targeting with increasingly intense drone and missile attacks, protesters voiced concern that Ukraine was now coming under attack from a new adversary: its own leaders.
“This is government arbitrariness. We don’t want to fight both Russia and our own government,” Suzanna, a protester in the western city of Lviv, told RFE/RL.
“Our country is already under massive external attack,” said Darya, also in Lviv. “We must not destroy it from within.”
