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Russians strike ammo depot in Kyiv region again… Fedorov appointed to advisor on innovation to the Italian Minister of Defense… Gasoline production in Russia has fallen to 70% due to drone attacks… Russia’s casualties exceed its monthly recruitment of 6,000 officers and soldiers.
Editor’s note:
The Counteroffensive team was able to get an inside look into the bureau, providing a glimpse of the people who spend their days going after ‘the top 1%’ of Ukrainian corruption.
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OUR LEAD STORY:
Kyiv, Ukraine — Viktor Yarema has spent the past decade working out of an old Soviet building to eradicate all traces of one of the Soviet Union’s worst legacies: corruption.
Originally a regional prosecutor, he confesses it was actually his wife who pushed him to join the newly created anti-corruption bureau back in 2015.
“My wife pushed me to apply. ‘It’s your thing,’ she said. ‘Because you’re just,” Viktor recalled.
Situated in a former Soviet military appliance factory, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) plays a vital role in steering the country toward a more promising path of development and getting rid of corruption, which is the second-largest problem for Ukraine only after the war with Russia. The need for NABU is perhaps clearer now than ever, after the bureau’s work recently exposed corruption involving officials in President Zelensky’s office.
NABU grabbed headlines by publicizing that work, dubbed ‘Operation Forrest Gump.’ Among those incriminated were an official from the Office of the President, former and current Ukrainian MPs, and officials from the banking sector. That investigators are willing to tackle corruption even by high-level officials sends a clear signal to European countries that Kyiv has embraced societal reforms necessary for closer cooperation.
Created specifically to tackle corruption by top government officials, the bureau got to work right after its establishment in 2015, during Russia’s first phase of war against Ukraine, building cases against deputies, judges and other government officials, and exposing the scale of government corruption in the process. So far, the team’s efforts to root out government corruption have brought results, despite the perception of Ukraine as that of a corrupt country in the West. Since the bureau’s establishment, Ukraine gained several points on the Corruption Perception Index made by Transparency International.
Viktor, 36, has been working as a NABU detective for more than ten years. His area of expertise is land. His team was behind the case over an illegal land seizure on the territory of the ‘Stolychyi’ market in Kyiv, as well as other cases involving thousands of acres of Ukrainian land.
The NABU building has a history of its own. Originally a military factory producing equipment for Soviet nuclear submarines, it was repurposed for the agency’s needs, but still hasn’t been completely renovated, and thus still carries some of the old Soviet style inside. The operation inside is anything but Soviet, however, resembling more of a modern beehive.
Viktor’s workspace isn’t luxurious, but it is effective: every item on his desk and nearby has a purpose, especially if that purpose is to keep the detective caffeinated.
“It is impossible to imagine a detective without a cup of coffee,” Viktor said. A coffee machine sits on top of a safe decorated extensively with stickers.
Viktor also showed inside his safe, the contents of which hint at some kind of Hollywood thriller: licence plates, police equipment, and tons of case files and other secretive papers.
Although he does not spend all his time in the office. An average day for a NABU detective can be described using one word: ‘irregular.’ “My workday could begin at night, I could be somewhere at an illegal office, doing fieldwork or meeting informants,” Viktor said.
NABU’s work just happens to be especially challenging, as their suspects often hold high-level positions in the government. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that since the bureau’s inception in 2015, there have been numerous attempts to sabotage its efforts and put pressure on the detectives and people associated with cases.
“Due to the fact that most of the persons under bureau’s investigations are pretty influential people, they actively counteract, including systematic attacks in the media [on bureau],” Serhii Varenchuk said in a statement to The Counteroffensive.
Serhii Varenchuk is an anti-corruption expert and a Chairman of the Board for ‘ID Ukraine’, a non-government organization specializing in helping government institutions become more transparent. He also spent 8 years working as a NABU detective.
“I have two bosses, one had an illegal violent search conducted on his property, confiscating electronic devices, while another found audio surveillance devices in his apartment this year,” Viktor said.
However, the biggest attack on the bureau came in July of last year when Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada voted for a bill that would effectively mean the liquidation of anti-corruption institutions like NABU and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO).
“On the day of the vote for this bill, I said that I won’t be a detective by the end of the day, because we all will get arrested,” Viktor said.
But the public was against it. Massive protests erupted in Kyiv near President Zelensky’s office, with demonstrators calling for the bill to be pulled and the country’s anti-corruption institutions to be kept independent. The government scrapped the legislation and Ukraine saved its corruption-fighting agencies.
“It was very heartwarming. It motivated me to do my job better and I’m still running on that motivation today,” said Viktor.
Within the bureau, those protests were seen as the people’s support for independent anti-corruption institutions as a necessary concept. “What have we proved to everyone? That we are independent. And that’s how it’s supposed to be,” explained Viktor.
While NABU is a government agency, it occupies a unique position in that it is an independent institution that fights corruption, so NABU detectives must be held to a very high moral and ethical standard.
“My life has to be crystal clear. Everything that I possess is in the official declaration. We joke that [working at NABU] is similar to how monks live. I can’t afford to do drunken debauchery or be rude to someone,” Viktor said.
Cooperation between departments is part of a wider corporate culture in the bureau that favors teamwork, honesty, and diligence. “It is important to work as a team, because you are unlikely to get any results alone,” said Viktor.
For better cooperation, NABU workers have a running club that has been operating since 2018. The detective himself is an avid runner who also enjoys listening to music and painting. “I carry a sketchbook with me and sketch when I’m inspired or when I have free time,” said Viktor. It is a distraction for him, with the subjects being animals, nature and other things.
Still, chasing top-government corruption leaves almost no time to rest, with criminals only becoming more cunning as they devise new ways to try and evade investigators. “They [criminals] can engage in counter-surveillance activities; they employ former police officers who are familiar with these methods. Sometimes they have the latest equipment that we [at NABU] get jealous of,” said Viktor.
The bureau is very active on social media, constantly reporting on operations and even releasing highlights and visual surveillance, letting the Ukrainian public hear and see the people responsible for stealing.
“In most cases, our defendants are Russian speakers. If you watch our investigations, for example the latest ‘Forrest Gump,’ there isn’t a single word in Ukrainian there. It seems that we are fighting corruption somewhere in Rostov [a city in Russia where Ukraine’s former President Yanukovych flew during Euromaidan in 2013]. I have no idea why it is this way, maybe just a coincidence,” Viktor quipped.
Of course, just as with other government institutions, the question of corruption and independence of the bureau is a frequent topic of discussion in Ukraine. The bureau has a civil council that oversees the team’s work, and every candidate has to apply for a contest, including detectives already working at the bureau. “We joke a bit that our whole professional life is in contests. We constantly go through them,” Viktor said.
While other executive bodies of the Ukrainian government have thousands of personnel, NABU only has 270 detectives. That’s why they’re prioritizing their operations, concentrating forces on systemic corruption of the top government officials.
The work of anti-corruption investigators is especially crucial in countering the widespread perception of Ukraine as inherently corrupt, a narrative that Russians have long exploited in their propaganda to justify the war. “We are a very serious factor that a top government official has to take into consideration when choosing whether to engage in corruption. It is said that we are everywhere, it’s not far from the truth, actually, ” Viktor said.
“It is a paradox, but because of successful cases in fighting corruption, more people gained knowledge about it,” Serhii Yaremchuk said in a statement to The Counteroffensive.
As Viktor sees it, no country is truly free from corruption. But corruption in Ukraine is very public, whereas anti-corruption officials in the U.S. tend to be reluctant to publicize their work out of fear of reputational damage to the country.
“In the United States, the question of lobbying is not fully explained, how it combines with corruption,” said Viktor.
After more than a decade chasing corruption in high places, Viktor is still dreaming about a day when he will no longer be needed.
“I hope that at some point [the bureau] will be closed because we just won’t have anymore work.”
Interested in more stories of how special services work? Explore these:
Betray Ukraine, or lose your son by Mariana Stadnyk
Peter Strzok on Kash Patel’s “ill-advised” trip to Russia by Mariana Lastovyria and Tim Mak.
Ukrainian sabotage groups operating behind Russian lines by Mariana Lastovyria
Editor’s Note:
The Counteroffensive team was able to get an inside look into the bureau, providing a glimpse of the people who spend their days going after ‘the top 1%’ of Ukrainian corruption.
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THE LATEST NEWS AT THIS HOUR:
By Myroslava Tanska-Vikulova
Good morning to readers; Kyiv remains in Ukrainian hands.
RUSSIANS STRIKE AMMO DEPOT IN KYIV REGION AGAIN: Russia struck an ammunition depot near Kyiv with a drone, causing large-scale explosions to follow. As of 2pm on August 29, 37 people are known to have been killed, and dozens wounded. The attack caused a massive fire to break out, while heavy smoke blanketed the capital and forced the closure of a strategic highway leading from the capital to western Ukraine. Evacuations have begun in the Myla village, where the attack on the ammunition depot happened.
A few months ago, a similar explosion at a depot near a residential area occurred in Vyshneve, in the Kyiv region. Prime Minister Serhiy Koretskyi called the repetition of such mistakes in the fifth year of full-scale war “criminal negligence.” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also strongly condemned the storage of ammunition near civilian facilities and stated that the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and the National Police had opened criminal investigations into official negligence on the part of officials.
FEDOROV APPOINTED TO ADVISOR ON INNOVATION TO THE ITALIAN MINISTER OF DEFENSE: Former Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov has taken up the position of advisor on military technology at the Italian Ministry of Defense. The head of the ministry, Guido Crozetto, described him as a key driver of military innovation.
The 35-year-old Fedorov received the offer from Italy after he was dismissed from his post as defense minister in July. His dismissal prompted massive protests which lasted for weeks. Initially Fedorov said he would refuse any position which was not reinstating him to his position as the defense minister.
GASOLINE PRODUCTION IN RUSSIA HAS FALLEN TO 70% DUE TO DRONE ATTACKS: Attack drones have shut down major oil refineries in Perm, Nizhny Novgorod, and Yaroslavl, reducing Russia’s gasoline output to 70% of market demand by the end of August, according to Reuters.
Due to shortages, Russia has reintroduced rationing and quota systems, and the Kremlin is forced to urgently increase fuel imports from Belarus and Asian countries.
RUSSIA’S CASUALTIES EXCEED ITS MONTHLY RECRUITMENT OF 6,000 OFFICERS AND SOLDIERS: According to Western government officials who spoke to The Guardian, Russia is losing 6,000 more troops in Ukraine than it is able to recruit each month, despite recruiting about 1,000 people per day.
As announcing a new mobilization would be politically risky, Putin is compensating for the manpower shortage with intensified strikes on Ukraine’s civilian and energy infrastructure, one Western official said.
CAT OF CONFLICT:
“The best package is a kitten,” said Ally, who spotted this cutie in Kyiv.
Stay safe out there!
Best,
Petro
I feel like the Ukrainian anti-corruption unit could be a model for the US if we have the opportunity to undo all of the damage of the last few years. Putting their successes out there on social media is part of the transparency that is needed to win back public trust.
I absolutely love the cat of war this week.....
Outstanding post!
This is the kind of journalism in which The Counteroffensive excels. NABU and SAPO are integral agencies to attack corruption in Ukraine. An inside look at one of the independent investigators gives us insights on how the operation looks. Much appreciated.