Ukraine is accelerating its drive to wash up its politics and can meet all of the EU’s anti-corruption necessities inside months, in what can be a serious enhance to its bid to affix the 27-member bloc, the nation’s prime prosecutor advised POLITICO.
“I’m absolutely positive that every one the weather of the anti-corruption and regulation enforcement reforms [required by the EU] can be accomplished in coming months,” Andrii Kostyn mentioned in an interview at Ukraine’s mission to the EU in Brussels. “I’m completely positive.”
However the prosecutor additionally warned that high-profile circumstances such because the detention of Ukraine’s former Supreme Court docket chief had been being utilized by some who need to cease the nation becoming a member of the EU.
Earlier this month, former European Fee president Jean-Claude Juncker mentioned in an interview that Ukraine was “completely corrupt.”
Along with Juncker’s feedback, a leaked report from the U.S. State Division, obtained by POLITICO, confirmed that Washington was extra involved about corruption in Ukraine than officers admit in public.
“It’s not that we have now extra corruption than earlier than, however we have now extra concrete and visual outcomes of our struggle in opposition to corruption,” Kostyn mentioned. “And there are folks making an attempt to make use of this visibility in opposition to us.”
He blamed Russian affect for a number of the backlash. “The nearer we’re to the Fee’s report on enlargement anticipated in early November, the extra lively Russia and its fifth column and brokers of affect are attending to discredit Ukraine’s progress on its suggestions, together with on anti-corruption,” he mentioned.
Tackling corruption is a key demand from Brussels, which has listed seven areas the place Ukraine should make progress earlier than it could open formal negotiations on becoming a member of the bloc.
Kyiv’s anti-corruption drive, which incorporates naming a particular prosecutor and imposing a brand new regulation that equates corruption with treason, is a key facet of its EU accession bid.
The EU’s govt arm is finalizing a progress report on reforms in Ukraine and different candidate international locations, due out in November, with an eye fixed to beginning formal talks as early as December.
Among the many nation’s high-profile circumstances, Ukraine eliminated the previous head of its Supreme Court docket, Vsevolod Knyazev, after he was accused of accepting $2.7 million in bribes. Former Protection Minister Oleksii Reznikov, in the meantime, resigned following a sequence of corruption scandals that hit senior officers in his ministry.
Kostyn, who was named Ukraine’s prosecutor normal in July 2022, didn’t deny that corruption exists in Ukraine, whose GDP per capita is on par with that of Algeria and Vietnam.
Taking bribes
“We acknowledge the necessity to step up the struggle in opposition to corruption in any respect ranges — confronting not solely high-level corruption but additionally the so-called petty corruption,” he mentioned. “We’re additionally cleansing the prosecution system of corruption: Final month, two prosecutors had been uncovered for taking bribes.”
However he pushed again in opposition to depictions of Ukraine as being irretrievably corrupt, in addition to criticism of the nation’s new anti-corruption regulation, which duties the safety providers with supervising the clean-hands drive.
The transfer prompted warnings that Ukraine’s anti-corruption efforts could possibly be topic to political affect, because the safety providers report back to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Kostyn brushed that objection apart, quoting former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in advocating the hardest measures.
“President Zelenskyy just isn’t the one world chief to give you equating corruption to treason,” he mentioned. “Golda Meir as soon as mentioned: ‘If you wish to construct a rustic to the place its little children will return, equate corruption with treason, and corrupt officers with traitors as much as the seventh technology.’”
As stress builds on Kyiv to reform, the anti-corruption agenda has overshadowed Kostyn’s principal job — which is to doc, prosecute and, finally, punish these responsible of committing battle crimes in Ukraine. He mentioned his workplace was investigating greater than 100,000 suspected battle crimes dedicated by invading Russian forces, together with newly-defined “environmental crimes.”
Kostyn was in Brussels to fulfill senior EU officers, together with Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders, for the launch of the Atrocity Crimes Advisory Group, a physique financed by the EU, U.S. and U.Okay. that financially helps and gives specialists for Kyiv’s battle crimes investigations.
“This isn’t just for Ukrainians,” he mentioned. “It’s additionally serving to the world to revive regulation and order on the worldwide stage.”
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