Zelensky Signs Law Gutting Ukraine’s Top Anti-Corruption Agencies, Defying Protesters

President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a highly controversial bill into law on Tuesday that effectively strips the country’s top anti-corruption organizations of their power to investigate independently.

The Verkhovna Rada’s website confirmed that the president signed the bill on Tuesday, officially making it law.

The late-night signature came after thousands of demonstrators gathered for hours outside the presidential complex in Kyiv to protest the new law that many fear is a major blow to the country’s push to eliminate graft in government institutions. 

Bill No. 12414 effectively abolishes the independence of anti-corruption law enforcement bodies in conducting investigations – namely, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) – by granting the Prosecutor’s General Office the right to reassign corruption cases.

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The bill sped through its second reading in the Verkhovna Rada, proposed as amendments to seemingly unrelated laws in an apparent effort to avoid scrutiny. 

On Tuesday night, Kyiv Post reporters on the ground observed around 2,000 to 3,000 people – mostly young – rallying near the Ivan Franko Theater in central Kyiv, close to the presidential complex. 

The protest took place despite martial law, in effect since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, which officially bans public demonstrations.

The large demonstration – the first of its kind in wartime Kyiv – has stirred up memories of other times in Ukraine’s past when protesters changed the course of the country’s future. 

“They are shouting that they do not want to return to the times of [former President Viktor] Yanukovych,” Kyiv Post reporter Sergii Kostezh said. “They do not want to return to the times of pro-Russian governance in Ukraine.”

But Zelensky reportedly signed the bill into law shortly after it was passed by lawmakers in the afternoon, opposition lawmaker Yaroslav Zheleznyak wrote in his Telegram channel. 

“They don’t care about protests,” he wrote.