406. Fighting the War Within – Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Battle

406. Fighting the War Within – Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Battle

June 2, 2026 · 56 min

About this episode

The episode discusses Ukraine's internal battle against corruption amidst the ongoing conflict, featuring insights from Andrii Borovyk of Transparency International Ukraine.

As the brutal conflict continues, Ukraine is fighting a war on multiple fronts—not just in the trenches, but internally within the corridors of power against a long-standing weapon of Kremlin information warfare: the accusation of irredeemable corruption. In this episode, hosts Saul David and Julius Strauss sit down in Kyiv with Andrii Borovyk, the executive director of Transparency International Ukraine, for a brutally honest assessment of where the country stands today. Borovyk pulls back the curtain on the Global Corruption Perception Index, exploring how Ukraine remarkably managed to stabilize and even improve its score during wartime—a feat virtually unheard of for a nation in conflict. The conversation dives deep into the high-stakes friction between wartime efficiency and democratic transparency, covering: The Reality of the Index: Exactly where Ukraine sits globally, how its score compares to neighbours like Hungary and Slovakia, and why the metric is about external perception rather than a direct measurement of ground-level corruption. The High-Stakes U-Turn: The dramatic, late-night political maneuvering surrounding a controversial bill aimed at bringing anti-corruption…

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