Key Points and Summary – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is facing the largest backlash since the 2022 invasion after signing a law that strips independence from the nation’s key anti-corruption agencies.
-The move, which critics call a blatant power grab, has sparked mass protests across Ukraine and drawn a sharp warning from the European Union that it could jeopardize Kyiv’s path to membership.
-This crisis comes amid growing concern over postponed elections and accusations that Zelenskyy is consolidating power, threatening the very democratic values Ukraine is fighting to defend against Russia.
How Zelenskyy Sparked Mass Protests At the Worst Possible Time
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has long presented himself to the West as a wartime leader defending democratic values against authoritarian aggression – and while that may be largely true, recent decisions by his administration are prompting fresh questions from allies and critics alike.
From cabinet reshuffles that reward insiders to canceled elections and a new controversial law that undermines Ukraine’s two key anti-corruption agencies, Zelenskyy is facing growing accusations of consolidating power under the cover of war.
The New Ukraine Crisis
Even before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine faced persistent criticism over endemic corruption.
Zelenskyy, who came to power as a reformer and outsider, had promised to root it out.
But progress has been inconsistent. Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index has consistently placed Ukraine near the bottom of European rankings, despite modest gains.
After the invasion, Zelenskyy enacted martial law, a decision widely seen as necessary under the circumstances. However, the decision carried political consequences.
With martial law in effect, Ukraine’s constitution prohibits holding national elections, effectively postponing the 2024 presidential election. While other democracies have suspended elections during wartime, critics argue that Zelenskyy’s continuation in office without a vote has eroded democratic norms. President Donald Trump even went as far as labeling Zelenskyy a “dictator” – a claim he later walked back – while major Ukrainian figures like Yulia Tymoshenko and Petro Poroshenko have called for a timeline to restore the nation’s electoral processes.
That growing discontent has been visible in domestic and international commentary alike, from outlets and spokespeople typically supportive of Kyiv. In September 2024, Zelenskyy initiated a long-anticipated cabinet reshuffle. But the shakeup, which was widely expected to bring in new expertise, failed to deliver.
“No fresh faces were added from industry, civil society or academia,” a senior Ukrainian official told Politico, adding that the government had long been advised to bring in new voices.
Around the same period, Ukrainian forces launched a dramatic cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. It was a move that grabbed headlines at the time, but which was soon undone after Russian forces regained the territory. Opposition lawmakers criticized the operation as a political stunt rather than a strategic necessity. Writing for Politico, Jamie Dettmer argued that the raid was meant to “lift flagging spirits amid declining personal opinion ratings and a fatigued nation more openly questioning [Zelenskyy’s] leadership.”
Zelenskyy Faces Biggest Backlash Yet
Already under domestic pressure, Zelenskyy’s latest move triggered the biggest backlash since the outbreak of the war.
On July 22, 2025, Ukraine’s parliament passed draft law No. 12414 – a measure that strips independence from the country’s two main anti-corruption bodies: the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO). Zelenskyy signed the bill into law the same day.
The legislation places both agencies under the control of the Prosecutor General – an official appointed by the president – effectively removing the independence of two watchdogs central to Ukraine’s democratic reforms. In response, mass protests broke out in Kyiv, Lviv, Dnipro, and Odesa. It marked the first time since Russia’s 2022 invasion that large-scale demonstrations had erupted across multiple cities. Protestors included not just anti-corruption activists, but also civilians, war veterans, and soldiers.
Zelenskyy has since defended the law as a necessary step to root out Russian infiltration within anti-corruption agencies, citing vague and contested claims that some agents had colluded with Moscow. But critics, domestic and foreign, widely see the move as a pretext for a power grab.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen personally called Zelenskyy, conveying her “strong concerns” and demanding an explanation for what Brussels views as a dismantling of essential democratic safeguards. Marta Kos, the EU’s Enlargement Commissioner, issued an unusually direct warning, stating that “the dismantling of key safeguards protecting NABU’s independence is a serious step back.”
She emphasized that independent bodies like NABU and SAPO are essential for Ukraine’s path towards EU membership.
Under pressure, Zelenskyy has promised to introduce a new anti-graft bill to restore some form of independence to the agencies, but the damage may already be done.
His government’s abrupt decision to centralize control over corruption investigations, and the backlash it sparks, could risk Ukraine’s moral authority overseas – right at a time when Kyiv desperately needs new military and financial aid.
About the Author:
Jack Buckby is a British author, counter-extremism researcher, and journalist based in New York. Reporting on the U.K., Europe, and the U.S., he works to analyze and understand left-wing and right-wing radicalization, and reports on Western governments’ approaches to the pressing issues of today. His books and research papers explore these themes and propose pragmatic solutions to our increasingly polarized society. His latest book is The Truth Teller: RFK Jr. and the Case for a Post-Partisan Presidency.
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Swamplaw Yankee
July 25, 2025 at 12:16 am
The op-ed hack is a barometer. How and why: the reader can answer.
Again, an op-ed hack choses to keyboard whatever vacancy that his brain cells most visible advocate. The overall morphology of this re-start of a thousand year old cultural genocide against Ukrainians is ignored for some hacks choice of an insignificant triffle.
The USA POTUS Obama re-started this cultural genocide of Ukrainians in 2014 by his marxist inspired unilateral, greenlighting of the free, no-cost, giveaway of the WEST’s geopolitical advantage in owning the Ukrainian Crimean soil, its families and the Black/Azov Sea zones, to the prime, vile cold war enemy of the WEST: Putin.
After 11 years of blatant muscovite russian pedophile needs, what is the International Reponse, Intervention and Representation? After 11 years of “Lolita” sex trading who is generating significant and sustained public and political will for effective involvement with this deformed genetic russian gestault.
This is a re-start of a thousand year old cultural genocide that POTUS Obama’s Democrat Cabal unilaterally initiated and greenlighted. Who in the field of comparitive genocide studies has ever enumerated and complained about the 1616 Ukrainian Fathers who fought the international sex trade that the peasant russian tsarlings operated in 1616?
Did the Ukrainian fathers built their boat fleet with corrupted, biased bids and under age labour? Did the Ukrainian Fathers give the Black Sea SEX Trade Ottoman Fleet fair warning of an attack? Did the Ukrainian Fathers show muslim sex trade dungeon guards of the fort Caffe, a fair trial in 1616? The point was to free sexually degraded Christian children sold for Ottoiman gold into sex slavery.
Where is that point in 2025? The corrupt in the WEST decry some detail as if they were peasant russian tsarlings. Who in the WEST has demanded of Putin’s Cabal pre-payment of $10,000,000 in US gold bullion for each and every Ukrainian victim as immediate compensation and reparation?
That is this peer reviewers old time demand. There are many op-ed hacks keyboarding about their idea of perfection in Ukrainian society! They seem to self-ignore demanding of the ruskie ethnic tsarlings immediate gold bullion compensation for up to 12 years of human/sex trafficking of Ukrainians.
This writer claims that after Putin pre-pays compensation for just the first 30,000
victims, the muscovite tsarling elite will stop the cultural genocide war on the exact date that the first 30,000 gold bullion payments are received. -30-
Jim
July 25, 2025 at 12:48 pm
Are these protests the canary in the coalmine?
The first rumblings of a volcano ready to erupt with disgust at the mass slaughter, corruption, and lying about the situation at the front and in Kiev, itself?
Martial law outlaws protests against the war. Zelensky has jailed politicians who challenge his management of the war and criticize the war effort.
These mass protests are ostensibly about corruption which saps from the war effort… as ordinary citizens see it, but I suspect this is also an outlet for doing what is outlawed: protesting the war and protesting Zelensky who is known as personally corrupt and who’s popularity has dropped dramatically because of the failure of the war and the brutal impressment gangs literally kidnapping men off the street and from their hones & businesses. And there is no realistic ability to reverse the evident trends at the front.
And, the nightly raids which bring Kiev closer to the actual war which Kiev is losing, all the while sending men to their death with no prospects for victory.
While the population of Ukraine has been brainwashed by propaganda from the moment coup plotters took power after a bloody, violent overthrow of the democratically elected president, the, now, obvious failures may lead to a true popular uprising against the Kiev regime of Banderite hyper-chauvinists and their psychotic hatred of all things Russian, whether it makes sense or not.
We can see there are some real nut job Banderites and we see they’ll rail on and on against supposed wrongs, which nobody knows about except themselves in their own fevered & twisted minds.
When the killing & murdering of the Kiev regime is plain for all to see… even ordinary Ukrainians.
The chickens are coming home to roost.
And Zelensky may end upside down hanging by his boots or on an airplane with suitcases of money.
The beginning of the end for Zelensky and the Kiev regime is here.