Inside Ukraine’s foreign recruitment drive against corruption

In the winter of 2014, Ukraine faced a peculiar institutional trap. The Revolution of Dignity had swept away the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych, but left behind its law-enforcement apparatus. Public trust in government agencies had been low even before the protests: in 2013 only 15.5 per cent trusted the police, and around 22 per cent trusted the courts. In 2014, law enforcement agencies responded to peaceful demonstrations with detentions and criminal prosecutions. Later, the violence escalated and, by the time the protests ended, more than a hundred civilians had been killed, including by ‘Berkut’ special police forces. In November 2015, the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICC concluded that this violence was actively promoted by the Ukrainian authorities. After the Revolution, there was an urgent need to reform the system.

Kyiv came up with a rather unorthodox solution: bring in foreigners. Over the following years, Ukraine tested three distinct models of international expert engagement.

The first attempt to amplify the reforms was the direct appointment of international figures. In 2014, Eka Zguladze became Ukraine’s First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, bringing her experience of Georgia’s police reforms. In 2015, another Georgian politician, Khatia Dekanoidze, assumed the position of the Head of the National Police.

However, an attempt to conduct reforms of the police did not go as planned. Initially, by the end of 2016, 26 per cent of the police management was dismissed, and 14 per cent of regular officers failed the evaluation (5,257 people in total). But most of those who were dismissed challenged the decisions in courts and, by early 2019, about 90 per cent had been reinstated. Thus, reform turned out to be only as strong as the system supporting it: loopholes in the legislation made dismissals almost impossible to sustain in court, and the judiciary processing the appeals was itself unreformed. Both Dekanoidze and Zguladze resigned in 2016.

Similar patterns were visible across government: Aivaras Abromavičius (Minister of Economy and Trade) and Alexander Kvitashvili (Minister of Healthcare), both foreign appointees, resigned in early 2016, referring to the same systemic resistance.

It became clear that placing foreigners at the top of unreformed institutions would not in itself ensure proper transformation.

The second approach pursued by the Ukrainian government was inviting international experts to participate in selection commissions in an observational capacity. The difficulty was that observation without formal decision-making powers could result in questionable outcomes.

For example, the first head of the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), Nazar Kholodnitsky, was appointed in 2015 through a process in which international experts had no formal authority. He was later caught on recordings warning suspects of impending searches and pressuring prosecutors to block cases. Even the US Ambassador to Ukraine publicly called for his removal. He resigned only in 2020.

Meanwhile, the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI), established in 2015 and operational from 2018, succumbed to the same problems. From its creation, its leadership was accused of political dependence and, even after an attempt to ‘restart’ the agency in 2019, it still isn’t considered fully independent. This has the potential to delay Ukraine’s bid for European Union membership: the EU’s 2025 Enlargement Report explicitly requires Ukraine to introduce ‘transparent and merit-based selection procedures’ for the SBI’s management ‘with the meaningful involvement of independent experts nominated by international partners’.

Embedding international experts directly into selection commissions with formal voting powers was introduced during the creation of the High Anti-Corruption Court (HACC), which emerged as a direct response to a deep crisis of trust in the traditional judiciary. By 2017, only seven per cent of Ukrainians trusted the courts. Alongside the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and SAPO (both operational since 2015), it was designed to be the cornerstone of an entirely new anti-corruption architecture at every stage of the legal process, from investigation through prosecution to verdict. A new, transparent and trustworthy selection model was essential to avoid the newly established court being tainted before it heard a single case.

The resistance to this plan was considerable, slowing down its implementation. The idea emerged in the 2016 judiciary reform, but the dedicated legislation was only adopted in June 2018, and the court began operating in September 2019.

The HACC selection process, launched in August 2018, attracted 343 candidates for 39 positions. The debates during vetting were intense, but the Public Council of International Experts (PCIE) stood firm: of 49 candidates whose integrity was questioned, only seven were allowed to proceed.

For the selection of the next Head of SAPO, the model faced a harder test, including some sabotage attempts during the whole process, which reached their peak during the announcement of the final results. While the name of the winner was known by 21 December 2021, the selection commission only agreed to approve the final rating in July 2022, due to both the consistent position and resistance to extreme pressure by the international commission members, and the fact that the EU made it an explicit condition for granting Ukraine candidate status.

Public trust did not come immediately. In December 2020, 70 per cent of Ukrainians distrusted the HACC, figures broadly similar to those for the general court system at the time, where distrust stood at 77 per cent. The polling data from November 2025 covers only the general court system (66 per cent mistrust), still suggesting that the architecture as a whole is moving in a positive direction. Among anti-corruption specialists alone, the picture is clearer: a late 2025 OSCE-supported survey found that 57 per cent of experts rated HACC’s work as effective and 63 per cent considered it fully or predominantly independent.

The performance data reflect this shift. Before the HACC opened, Ukrainian courts delivered fewer than 10 high-level corruption convictions per year. By mid-2026, the HACC had delivered over 300 verdicts. In 2025 alone, the number of verdicts grew by 41 per cent. ABU and SAPO together have recovered Hryvnia 11.4 billion (£189 million) for the state as of December 2025.

The model has since expanded beyond HACC. Inter alia, international experts with formal voting rights have participated in the selection of members of the High Council of Justice. Both competing versions of Ukraine’s draft Anti-Corruption Strategy for 2026-30 retain a formal commitment to international expert involvement with a decisive vote in some future selections. What began as a response to a crisis of trust is now a principle Ukraine is committed to, even as the political will to implement it sometimes remains uneven.

Ukraine’s experience proves that, in institutional capacity building, the format of international participation must match the situation. Under current circumstances, that means actual decision-making power in vetting procedures. This should not, however, be considered a permanent arrangement. The real measure of success will be whether Ukraine can eventually build institutions and a system of checks and balances that are credible enough for the country to no longer need foreign legionnaires.