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Anger has boiled over after attempts by Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to overhaul agencies investigating claims that insiders skimmed military spending.
July 24, 2025, 9:08 a.m. ET
Thousands of people in Ukraine for a second night turned out to protest President Volodymyr Zelensky’s bid to control the country’s anticorruption agencies, even as he promised to walk back some of the policies that had touched off the street action.
The surge of anger, with protesters toting profanity-laced signs directed at Mr. Zelensky and his top advisers, underscores the pivotal role of those watchdog agencies in Ukraine’s politics and the sensitive issues they investigate. None are more fraught than alleged schemes to embezzle from military budgets.
Military spending in Ukraine is drawn from the country’s tax revenues and is not tied to the flow of weaponry donated by Western allies. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the anticorruption agencies have scrutinized such spending, Balazs Jarabik, a former European Union diplomat and founder of Minority Report, a political risk consultancy, said in an interview.
And over the more than three years of the war, criminal cases have sprung from those investigations, enraging Ukrainians.
On Tuesday, Mr. Zelensky signed into law a bill giving Ukraine’s prosecutor general — who is approved by Parliament, where Mr. Zelensky’s party holds a majority — new power over the two agencies, the National Anticorruption Bureau of Ukraine and the Specialized Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office.
