Daria Kaleniuk and Olena Halushka
Ukrainians know how to make their voices heard—and to make their leaders listen. They will never accept capitulation to Russia, whether in the form of the surrender of Ukrainian land or the abandonment of Ukrainian citizens to Russian occupiers. President Volodymyr Zelensky knows this. It is why he avoided making unacceptable concessions to U.S. President Donald Trump in his latest visit to the White House.
Defending against Russia’s unlawful aggression is not the only way that Ukrainians fight for their future. Lately, Ukraine’s people have also had to pressure their government in matters of domestic politics. During two whirlwind weeks in July, Zelensky’s administration moved to strip two of the country’s key anticorruption institutions, the National Anticorruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), of their independence. On July 21, security services and the office of the prosecutor general conducted searches, all without court warrants, of more than 50 sites linked to NABU investigators, claiming these raids were “an operation to neutralize Russian influence in the agency,” but they presented little evidence of such influence to the public afterward. The next day, parliament adopted a law, which Zelensky immediately signed, granting the country’s politically appointed prosecutor general control over all NABU investigations—an authority that had been turned over to the independent SAPO in 2016. In effect, the moves set back Ukraine’s anticorruption reforms by a decade.
Ukrainians responded by taking to the streets. They perceived Zelensky’s swift attack on these institutions as an assault on the country’s anticorruption project and on the EU accession process, in which the formation of NABU and SAPO are important steps. On the same day that legislators voted to empower the prosecutor general, a large crowd of protesters, most of them in their teens and early 20s, gathered near the president’s office with handmade signs to demand that Zelensky veto the law. Their message was clear: Ukrainians would not allow backsliding on democratic, transparent governance, even—or especially—amid a brutal war.
No comments:
Post a Comment