With Midas, NABU and SAPO Have Raised the Stakes — but the “Game” Is Not Over Yet

A year ago, when the NABU announced Operation Midas, it looked like a risky bet for the Bureau. Only four months earlier, the agency had nearly lost its independence, and suddenly it was taking on a case targeting the president’s inner circle. Today, it can be said with confidence that the bet has paid off. 

On November 4, a few days before the case’s anniversary, the NABU and the SAPO announced that the pre-trial investigation had been completed. Over that time, the “Mindich tapes” grew from a single case, albeit a very large one, into a picture of a sprawling criminal scheme that reached many areas of how the state functions.

The trial is still ahead, and in cases of this scale, trials last for years. It is therefore too early to say that the NABU has already “won.” What we can assess is the investigation itself and its effect, not the outcome of the case as a whole.

Yet the most important thing about Midas is the domino effect it set off. Halushchenko’s bail led detectives to the Forrest Gump case. There, according to the investigation, the required UAH 150 million was raised by a group that included Iryna Mudra, Deputy Head of the Office of the President. In August, Mudra was dismissed, and the HACC remanded her in custody. The November 28 searches of Andrii Yermak’s premises cost him his post, and in May he was served with a notice of suspicion. That came in a different case, however: the laundering of UAH 460 million through the construction of the Dynasty cottages. Then, in September, the Carthage case came to light. It led to the resignation of the Prosecutor General and his first deputy and to the arrest of senior prosecutors. In its second episode, which became public last week, top officials of the SSU, the National Police, and the Office of the Prosecutor General were also served with notices of suspicion.

Just two years ago, a list of suspects like this seemed out of reach for the anti-corruption agencies. Now a former minister, a former head of the Presidential Office who was widely considered all-powerful, and his former deputy are all suspects. And being a member of parliament or an SSU general (as in the latest Carthage episode) no longer guarantees immunity.

How did this happen?

It is worth remembering that Midas cannot be understood without the events of July 2025. This investigation would never have happened without the “Cardboard Maidan.” The protests gave the Bureau something no law can provide: a real public mandate. Back then, skeptics joked that the protesters would not even be able to spell out the acronyms NABU and SAPO. Today, no trace of that doubt remains. Perhaps the best proof is that Midas, Mindich, and NABU searches have become firmly embedded in modern Ukrainian folklore, as memes and TikTok trends.

Ukrainian society has demanded justice for years, and in the NABU and the SAPO it saw a practical answer. That set off processes within the chain of power that ran far deeper than anyone expected last July or November.

After the first notices of suspicion to Mindich and Tsukerman, the “single voice in the president’s ear” model broke down. Kyrylo Budanov replaced Yermak as Head of the Office of the President, and the way the Office governs began to change gradually. Halushchenko and Hrynchuk left their government posts, and Energoatom got new leadership. 

More and more officials now understand that organizing or joining schemes is not worth the cost. The NABU and the SAPO have become so inconvenient that, on the tapes, Iryna Mudra and Maksym Mykytas plainly acknowledged in private conversation that there is no making deals with these anti-corruption agencies.

This does not mean institutional peace has arrived. The conflict between the anti-corruption institutions and the authorities has simply changed form: it has moved from legislation to personnel decisions and criminal cases. Any new notice of suspicion could inflame it again. 

In public, the authorities voice full support for the NABU and the SAPO. In practice, the opposite is happening. In a year, Parliament has not passed a single law from the Kachka-Kos plan, which was meant to substantially strengthen the anti-corruption institutions. Many relevant bills have been submitted to the Verkhovna Rada, but none of them has even reached the agenda, and most have stalled in the relevant committees. This is happening even though progress on European integration and financial support under the Ukraine Facility Plan depend directly on these laws.

Public trust is a more complicated picture, and that should be said plainly. The most comprehensive data, from the NACP’s annual survey, only partly cover the period after Midas, so it would be wrong to credit every shift solely to this operation. Still, the direction of change is telling.

For the fifth year running, citizens place the main responsibility for overcoming corruption on the president, his Office, Parliament, and the NABU. This time, however, expectations of the president and Parliament have fallen, while expectations of the NABU have risen. The public rated every agency’s anti-corruption performance higher, without exception, and businesses, as usual, gave their highest ratings to the NABU and the SAPO. Even these ratings are not enough, though: none of these institutions has yet scored even 2.5 out of 5.

The most compelling argument in the Bureau’s favor, however, came from Brussels last week. The European Commission’s report of November 4 cites Operation Midas as an example of strong performance by the anti-corruption institutions, both in investigations and in preventing corruption in procurement. The Commission stated explicitly that the investigation had uncovered alleged large-scale embezzlement of funds and high-level political influence over the award of defense contracts.

The report also records a rise in the number of indictments resulting from NABU and SAPO investigations and in the number of HACC verdicts. On that basis, the Commission raised its overall assessment of Ukraine’s level of preparation in the fight against corruption, concluding that the anti-corruption bodies operate independently and effectively.

The same report, however, identifies two negative factors that law enforcement has to work under. The first is pressure on the NABU and the SAPO: criminal proceedings against detectives, surveillance, and smear campaigns. The second is a passive approach to reform. Among other things, Brussels calls for expanding NABU’s investigative jurisdiction, strengthening the autonomy of the NABU and the SAPO in investigating cases involving MPs, and finally adopting the Anti-Corruption Strategy for 2026–2030. In other words, Ukraine is being asked to deliver on commitments it has made but is in no hurry to fulfill, because it does not want to strengthen the anti-corruption institutions any further.

The European Commission’s report has confirmed that our partners share civil society’s assessment of the agencies’ progress and its doubts about the political will for reform. There is momentum, but systemic political will to reform is still lacking.

In essence, over the past year Midas has made NABU’s independence one of the key conditions for European integration and has taken the fight against corruption to a new level in how state processes are understood. Any future attempt at a rollback will now carry a high price, both at home and in Ukraine’s foreign relations.

King Midas was given the gift of turning everything into gold, and he nearly starved to death. The scheme named after him followed a similar logic: it turned the wartime energy sector into cash until it devoured its own creators. The investigation has now passed the pre-trial stage, but the processes it set in motion are still unfolding.

In one year, the NABU has gained what matters most: the status of a player that both Bankova Street and Brussels have to reckon with. But both sides have raised the stakes. The Midas investigation is over. The next round will be decided not by searches and tapes but by the HACC verdicts in this case and in the others we have read and heard so much about over the past year.