Tetyana Shevchuk: ‘Corruption is a weapon of Russia, Europe uses frozen funds to fight it’
Tetyana Shevchuk is a bright young lawyer, but above all, she is a board member and head of international relations of theAnticorruption Action Center, the largest Ukrainian organisation that has been fighting corruption for more than ten years, which has to its credit the participation in most of the major national transparency regulations, but which also maintains close relations with European institutions, especially in the area of sanctions against Russia.
I meet her in the office that the organisation runs in the centre of Kyiv, clarifying my interest in the recent street protests unleashed across the country as a result of the Verkhovna Rada’s approval of the anti-corruption agency reform, then hastily corrected precisely because of the demonstrations. An affair that aroused surprise and attention around the world.
Actually,’ Shevchuk is keen to explain, ‘there is nothing new in the attention that people in Ukraine pay to the issue of corruption.
The 2014 Revolution of Dignity was also intended to put an end to the kleptocratic regime of the time, and since then, according to all polls, the issue of combating the thievery of politicians and officials has been at the top of people’s priorities, right after the problems related to the Russian occupation first and the war now. The same political programme with which the current president Zelensky stood for election in 2019 includes the fight against corruption.
On the other hand, war and transparency are closely related issues for three reasons. First, corruption erodes democratic governance and makes government institutions vulnerable to Russian influence. Second, the money the government can invest in the war effort risks being misspent. In a corrupt system, we can buy less ammunition, build less fortifications and, of course, of poor quality. We had several scandals in the beginning related to the quality of fortifications and corruption during their construction. The third aspect is justice. Because people demand justice, and in a context of war, where injustice is generalised and at many levels, this topic becomes particularly sensitive. What was perhaps not expected was that people would be ready to take to the streets, to demand justice in the streets and publicly, breaking a kind of tacit inter-social agreement whereby public political rallies are not held during martial law, for security and national unity issues. But as I said, the people felt that the government had somewhat violated this agreement, so they chose to protest.
Anti-corruption reforms and Ukrainian sovereignty
The retreat of the executive and parliament following the protests is certainly positive, according to the AntAC representative, but the threshold of attention must remain high, because, she explains, ‘the people who make decisions are the same and some of them have their own reasons for not liking independent bodies’.
Among the arguments used to launch the reform that affected the independence of the two anti-corruption agencies NABU and SAPO was the way in which their members were appointed, with the involvement of foreign entities, with the risk that the appointment process would become detrimental to Ukraine’s sovereignty and potentially exposed to Russian interference, fears that Shevchuk says he does not share.
“Those members are actually appointed by the Ukrainian authorities. We involve international experts in the appointment process, but only to ensure the independence of the process, to have external people with an impeccable reputation, but no political ties in the country, to help us with the selection. The people selected are Ukrainian citizens, have the necessary experience and are appointed by the Ukrainian authorities. These mechanisms have been carefully worked out, firstly to ensure the transparency and independence of the selection of these people, and secondly precisely so as not to violate issues of Ukrainian constitutionality or sovereignty’.
The young lawyer also recounts the great work done by the organisation in recent years.
“AntAC is now part of an ecosystem together with the agencies, the public prosecutor’s office and the anti-corruption tribunal, and together with these bodies enormous progress has been made, especially in the area of public procurement control, which remains the one to which we too naturally pay most attention, albeit with all the understandable limitations and problems arising from the need, for example, not to make certain details related to defence procurement completely public for reasons of national security. There are no nations in the world that are immune to corruption, but the very fact that there is so much talk about it is in itself a success because here the press is free to publish any news and expose scandals, and civil society, as I said, even takes to the streets in protest. If you go to Google and do a search using the words ‘Ukraine’ and ‘corruption’, hundreds of results come up. If you do it with Russia, you find very few. And this is not because Russia is not corrupt, but only because it is forbidden to talk about it there’.
Many of the activities, he adds, are also related to the need to fulfil the requirements for EU accession, although, he says regretfully , ‘the negotiations have not yet started because of Hungary’s opposition, so at the moment we don’t really have a to-do list. What is certain is that when this happens we will be a long way ahead. Several current members of the Union had not implemented the same system of controls as us when they joined’.
But the country must also prepare itself in time for reconstruction, she says.
“We trust that a lot of funds will arrive to get our nation back on its feet, but we also know that by the time that money arrives it will be too late to establish rules, which is why we are already working with institutions now to strengthen a system that will ensure that every penny is spent correctly. And we are well on our way, considering how we manage to monitor the funds that have been coming in since the beginning of the war, which are about half of the total state budget.
Sanctions and international support
Shevchuk finally turns particular attention to the issue of sanctions, which, he says, ‘do not work on their own. Especially individual ones. We can put 140 million Russians on the sanctions list and the war would probably not stop. Sanctions must be economically targeted, they must be designed so that they really stop Russian efforts. And sometimes I think the Western decision-making process forgets that sanctions are also a ‘moving target’. I mean it is not enough to sanction in 2022 a company so that it cannot import weapons components and then forget about it. Because in three and a half years that company will have built a system to circumvent sanctions. A constant process must be organised to prevent the Russians, first of all, from buying components for weapons. With China on their side, it is very difficult, but it must be done. And secondly, stop feeding the war machine. The EU is doing a good job. But it has stopped. I mean, Hungary and Slovakia are still buying Russian oil. On the positive side, everyone else has adapted very quickly and Europe is not paying for Russian gas. But we know that there are alternative routes, including the Baltic Sea, to transport oil. The other part we are focusing on is the Russian sovereign assets blocked in the EU. This is about EUR 200 billion of which the EU currently only pays us the proceeds. It is imperative that this money can be at least partially released and given to Ukraine to continue the fight to buy weapons and defend ourselves against the Russians. Everyone sees that the war costs billions every day. There are not many more resources to invest and the US is no longer a donor. The EU right now has 200 billion dollars in hand that it is not using, but that could be used not only to defend our cities, but also to show the Russians that they will pay for that defence. Some people in Europe believed at first that the threat of withholding those assets would convince Moscow to sit down at the table. It has clearly not worked, so it is time to change strategy. We must use that money against them. After all, the damage caused by the war is far greater than the amount seized, which Russia will have to pay sooner or later anyway. The point is,’ he concludes, ‘that having it now could make a difference in ensuring air defence, protecting cities and energy infrastructure, and continuing to protect our freedoms’.
