Key nuances of the Grand Chamber’s decisions

In the Burkhan case, the Grand Chamber noted that while information from covert-action records can be used in disciplinary proceedings, it cannot serve as a ready-made conclusion. The HCJ must carefully assess it first.

The Supreme Court also explained that what matters in a disciplinary case is not the type of evidence — including information from covert-action records — but a fair procedure for using such data. The HCJ must independently assess such materials and determine whether they confirm a specific disciplinary offense, even before the underlying criminal proceedings conclude.

At the same time, the ruling includes an important safeguard against wrongful disciplinary action based on such materials. The HCJ may discipline a judge before a criminal case concludes only if there are obvious, clear, and convincing signs of conduct incompatible with judicial status — and only if there is no arbitrariness, political persecution, or other improper motive, and the right to a defense has been respected. 

Acting on this basis, the HCJ dismissed DACK judge Bohdan Sanin on June 22 — one of the key figures in the DACK tapes case. Covert recordings captured him discussing court cases outside official proceedings, coordinating positions with others, and effectively allowing outside influence over judicial decisions. He was dismissed because this conduct is incompatible with judicial status.

However, if reasonable doubt remains, it must be resolved in the judge’s favor. In such cases, the HCJ must suspend disciplinary proceedings until a verdict is reached, or decline to impose liability.

How this will affect disciplinary proceedings against judges

After these rulings, the argument that covert-action materials cannot be used in disciplinary proceedings at all has far less chance of success. Judges challenging HCJ decisions will now have to prove specific procedural violations, rather than arguing that such materials are inherently inadmissible.

These rulings also give the HCJ clear guidance: beyond a general green light to use such materials, the Council must avoid citing them formally without proper assessment and justification.

In short, the Grand Chamber’s rulings stabilize HCJ practice in cases involving covert investigative action materials. They reduce the risk of a mass review of HCJ decisions already made — while still preserving real procedural safeguards for judges against the arbitrary use of criminal case materials and pressure against them.

Vitalina Harkava, Head of the Public Procurement Sector, Executive Committee of Boiarka City Council 

When the legal department asked her to review every contract with additional agreements signed since 2021, Vitalina knew right away this wouldn’t be easy. The task covered 300–400 contracts. Before the training, she had already used the analytics module for price monitoring and looking up procurement information, but by her own admission, her knowledge of the tool was fairly superficial. The legal department’s request pushed her to look for a new approach. Reviewing several hundred contracts by hand, finding every additional agreement, and analyzing the changes would have taken at least two to three weeks.

The solution came during the training itself. At one of the webinars, Vitalina described her task and asked whether BI Prozorro could handle it. The answer turned out to be surprisingly simple: yes.

“Iryna showed me in literally 10-15 minutes how to do it in BI Prozorro. Honestly, I was amazed. Work I’d mentally set aside two-three weeks for suddenly became so much simpler. All I had left to do was the analysis itself and writing up the results,” she recalls. 

That was the moment Vitalina truly grasped BI Prozorro’s practical value. 

Still, she admits it took some time to get comfortable with the tool. The filters gave her the most trouble — one wrong step and the data she needed would disappear. So she kept going back to the recorded sessions, working through each step again from the start. That’s how she gradually built up an understanding of how the module works.

But the biggest discovery for her wasn’t the time savings — it was the ability to see how other communities operate. That’s exactly what she chose to explore for her homework assignment: what other communities procure, how many contracts they sign, how often they amend them, and which procurements they cancel. 

“I learned a lot about how other communities work and the mistakes they’ve made. That’s useful, because it means I don’t have to repeat the same mistakes in my own work,” Vitalina says. 

Since then, she’s started looking at other communities’ procurement in a new light. She believes, procurement data can reveal more about a community than any report. All it takes is a look at where the money goes to understand its priorities — road repairs, infrastructure development, or other projects.

Vitalina also uses the tool to spot risk in procurement. With Ukraine’s State Audit Service and other oversight bodies conducting regular checks, she says contracting authorities need to work proactively — analyzing their own contracts and flagging anything that might raise questions during a monitoring review.

“We need to check ourselves before an external monitoring review comes to us. We have to see our own risks and fix them ahead of time,” Vitalina says.

Oksana Karakai, Chief Specialist, Accounting and Finance Department, Kamianske City Council

“I wouldn’t even have noticed that.” That thought crosses Oksana Karakai’s mind more often than she’d like when she reviews State Audit Service monitoring reports and reads through auditors’ findings on other contracting authorities’ procurement.

Working at Kamianske City Council, Oksana regularly tracks procurement not just for her own community but for other organizations as well. She’s especially drawn to monitoring reports — which procurements get flagged, what violations auditors find, and what catches their attention when they review documents. After the BI Prozorro training, Oksana started paying much closer attention to these reports. Now she treats many auditors’ findings as pointers for her own work — a chance to catch risks before they become problems. 

“When I see a comment or a question from an auditor, I immediately check whether something similar could happen in our case,” she says.

Just a few months ago, Oksana only had a passing familiarity with BI Prozorro. She first encountered the module at a training session on price analysis, where she only managed to get comfortable with one section — but it was enough to realize the system had far more to offer. That’s what led her to sign up for TI Ukraine’s training. She says the practical exercises helped the most; working through them was how she gradually got a handle on the interface and the logic behind the module.

Oksana felt the practical benefit almost immediately. She needed to put together a list of contracts for the year. In the past, that meant gathering the information by hand, cross-checking it against her own spreadsheets, and making sure nothing had been missed. In BI Prozorro, the task went far faster.

“It took a bit of figuring out at first, but once I understood how it worked, I had a ready-made table right away. It’s incredibly fast — I mean, super fast,” Oksana recalls.

She says the whole task took about twenty minutes. Previously, putting together a sample like that could easily take half a day.

“You had to gather everything, check it, and format it properly. Here, in a few clicks, I got a full summary of every contract for the entire year,” she says.

Oksana believes the ability to work with open data and analytical tools is becoming increasingly important for local governments. However, she’s noticed that not everyone is ready to pick up new tools and change familiar ways of working.

She sums up BI Prozorro’s main advantage simply: it’s a large body of information that’s already organized and gathered in one place. Instead of spending hours hunting for data by hand, you can find it — and analyze it — in the same tool, in a fraction of the time.

Not long ago, she used to search for procurement records on the Prozorro portal herself, scrolling through dozens of pages and losing a lot of time in the process. Today, most of those tasks get done much faster. That’s why Oksana’s advice to anyone just starting out with BI Prozorro is not to be afraid of investing time in learning it — it’s nothing compared to the time it will end up saving.

Nataliia Kostenko, Chief Specialist, Department of Digital Transformation, Information Policy and Transparency, Sheptytskyi City Council

For Nataliia Kostenko, the BI Prozorro training wasn’t an introduction from scratch. She’s worked with BI modules for a long time and regularly uses them to analyze her community’s work. Even so, the training gave her a fresh perspective on what the analytics could do. 

“The main benefit is that we see the whole picture at once,” Nataliia says. 

She explains that an authorized procurement officer typically looks at one procurement or tender at a time. BI Prozorro makes it possible to see procurement across the entire community — from the executive committee down to municipal enterprises. That kind of overview helps not just with analysis, but with spotting risks and making decisions based on them.

When Nataliia showed the BI tools to staff in Sheptytskyi City Council’s land department, their reaction was strikingly emotional. Within minutes, the system generated a data sample that used to take hours to prepare.

“They were amazed that we could pull a complete sample for any given period in a single minute,” Nataliia recalls. 

Since the training, Nataliia has been using the module more actively to analyze the community’s biggest suppliers. It gives her a quick view of which companies work most often with the municipal enterprises and the executive committee. 

“This way we can see the scale of procurement, the scale of company participation in it, and draw our own conclusions,” Nataliia explains.

In her view, the real value of analytical tools lies in helping communities work more transparently, make decisions faster, and use limited staff resources more effectively.

“We used to have to collect a lot of information manually. Now we can see the whole system at a glance and make decisions based on data,” Nataliia says. 

That’s why she’s convinced analytical tools have long stopped being a nice-to-have for communities. Today, they’re one of the key tools of local governance.

The three communities’ stories are different. For one, BI Prozorro became a faster way to work with contracts; for another, a tool for finding risk; for a third, a way to see the whole procurement system at once. But all the training participants agree on one thing: data analysis is no longer a nice extra skill — it’s steadily becoming an essential part of how local governments do their work.

For city council staff or other local government representatives looking to get started with BI Prozorro, we recommend beginning with the video lecture series How to Manage Procurement.

This material was made possible with the support of the MATRA program of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ukraine.

Where things stand on the secondary legislation for ARMA’s work

The secondary instruments needed for the ARMA reform to function fully fall into the following categories: 

• institutional and organizational matters; 
• accountability and public oversight; 
• asset identification and intake into management; 
• selection of asset managers; 
• procurement of manager services; 
• asset management and oversight of it; asset disposal; 
• maintenance of the Unified State Register of Seized Assets (USRSA).

As of the second half of June 2026, nearly all the secondary legislation has been adopted; only the procedure for disposing of seized assets has yet to be updated.

The Methodology approved in June is one of the foundational elements of ARMA’s new regulatory architecture. This instrument governs the procedure for analyzing a seized asset to determine whether it can be managed effectively, and it also serves as an “entry filter” for the entire subsequent management process: without a positive conclusion from ARMA, an asset cannot be transferred into the Agency’s management.

How it used to be

Before the ARMA reform law took effect, there was no separate statutory rule on asset identification, nor any secondary instrument governing that procedure. Article 18-1 of the Law, which introduced the identification mechanism, is an entirely new provision. 

Before the reform, the practice was that the Agency issued written opinions on whether effective management of an asset could be ensured and its economic value preserved. However, the joint orders of the PGO and ARMA on the form of a request for such an opinion were never adopted, and the procedure for the Agency’s assessment of management feasibility was never regulated at the level of a Cabinet of Ministers resolution.

This produced several negative consequences: 

• ARMA took into management whatever it was given: an investigating judge’s ruling transferring an asset into management served as the sole and sufficient basis, and the Agency had no formal mechanism to assess in advance whether it could manage a particular asset effectively. As a result, assets accumulated at the Agency that it had no way of actually managing; neither the Law nor the secondary instruments required ARMA to conduct a mandatory site visit to inspect an asset before accepting it. 
•  Assets could therefore be transferred into management without proper documentation of their actual condition, which created risks of later disputes between the prosecutor and the Agency and made it impossible to plan management properly;
• the Law did not require ARMA to compare management and disposal options or assess an asset’s economic potential before deciding how to manage it;
•  interaction between prosecutors and ARMA at the stage preceding an asset’s transfer into management was ad hoc and unformalized. In practice, this led to assets being handed over with incomplete or contradictory information.

What the adopted Methodology sets out in detail 

The ARMA reform law introduced a fundamentally new model — a mandatory identification procedure as a precondition for accepting an asset into management — and the resolution adopted by the Cabinet of Ministers spells out that model at the secondary-legislation level. 

The key innovations are as follows: 

• Identification as a mandatory “entry filter.” ARMA manages only those seized assets for which a positive identification conclusion has been prepared (Article 18-1(1) of the Law). This is the first time the Agency’s right to assess management feasibility in advance has been enshrined in law;
• a standardized procedure for prosecutorial requests. The Methodology clearly defines the list of documents a prosecutor must attach to a request — title documents, a valuation report, technical specifications, photo and video materials — and sets the condition for submitting them: “where available and where doing so would not harm the criminal proceedings.” This balances ARMA’s need for information against the interests of the investigation;
• a mandatory physical inspection of the asset. The Methodology requires ARMA specialists to conduct an on-site visit to the asset’s actual location for inspection, documentation of its condition, and photo and video recording. The instruction to the relevant Interregional Territorial Department (ITD) of ARMA to accept an asset into management must be issued no later than the next business day after the request is received — a rule designed to keep the central office from stalling the start of the process;
• a comprehensive analysis of economic potential. The secondary legislation now requires ARMA to determine the optimal management approach through comparative analysis, weighing expected management income against the costs of storing and maintaining the asset. This provides the basis for a well-reasoned choice of strategy; 
• clear deadlines with a mechanism for extension. A baseline 10-day period is set for issuing a conclusion, extendable to 20 business days where grounds exist, provided a prosecutor is notified in writing within 5 business days. This removes the previous uncertainty over how long the procedure could take;
• a special regime for combat zones. The Methodology introduces a new exception — a moratorium on identifying assets located in temporarily occupied territories or areas where hostilities are underway. This resolves the previous uncertainty over such assets and ties the resumption of their identification to the official list maintained by the Ministry for Development of Communities and Territories.

What to watch for during implementation

Despite the clear progress this regulation represents, its practical implementation may reveal certain shortcomings that should be tracked and promptly corrected through amendments to the relevant instruments. Some questions, moreover, were already apparent when the amendments to the ARMA Law were first adopted. 

Inconsistency with the Criminal Procedure Code

One of the key systemic risks remains the mismatch between the new identification procedure introduced by the ARMA reform law and the current version of Ukraine’s Criminal Procedure Code (CPC). Article 100 of the CPC still does not require a positive ARMA conclusion as a precondition for a prosecutor to petition an investigating judge to transfer an asset into management. In practice, the CPC still allows a prosecutor to initiate an asset’s transfer to ARMA without going through identification at all, which conflicts with the logic of the amended Law.

Article 100(6) of the CPC also does not reflect the new grounds for asset disposal introduced by Law No. 4503-IX, and the existing mechanism for notifying ARMA (Article 100(7)) remains in a provision that would now logically belong in Article 175 of the CPC, as part of the enforcement of a seizure order. The CPC’s failure to establish corresponding prosecutorial obligations regarding deadlines for responding to an ARMA conclusion, or to a notice that an asset’s economic value cannot be preserved, creates a degree of legal conflict that, in practice, is likely to be resolved in favor of the special provisions of the ARMA Law.

No consequences defined for a negative ARMA conclusion

The Methodology sets out in detail the procedure for identifying an asset and preparing the Agency’s conclusion on whether it can be managed. It does not, however, define any legal consequences for cases where ARMA formally determines that effective management of a given asset is not possible.

What happens to the asset after that? Who is required to act, and within what timeframe? Can the prosecutor apply again? These questions remain unanswered, since ARMA cannot accept such an asset into management in these cases — and if an investigating judge nonetheless issues a ruling to that effect, it will not meet the requirements of the special provision, Article 18-1 of the ARMA Law.

Conclusions and recommendations

The resolution adopted by the government is an important step toward a systemic approach to determining whether ARMA can manage a given asset effectively. It closes one of the key gaps in the ARMA reform’s secondary legislation by formalizing a procedure for identification that previously either did not exist at all or existed only in fragmentary form.

To prevent problems in law enforcement practice, the following recommendations should be considered alongside ongoing systemic monitoring of how the secondary legislation is being implemented.

1. The Criminal Procedure Code needs to be brought into line with the new model of interaction between prosecutors and ARMA. This requires amending Articles 100 and 175 of the CPC, specifically:

• aligning the list of grounds in Article 100(6) for transferring physical evidence into ARMA’s management (and for its disposal) with the provisions of the ARMA Law;
• moving to Article 175 of the CPC the requirement that a prosecutor send ARMA a copy of the seizure ruling and a request on the feasibility of transferring the asset into management no later than the next business day after the ruling is issued — together with requirements for the content of the request and the list of documents to be attached;
• establishing in Article 175 an obligation for the prosecutor to petition the investigating judge (or court) to transfer property into ARMA’s management no later than three days after receiving a positive conclusion, provided the owner has not given written consent;
• establishing an obligation for the prosecutor to petition the investigating judge or court to change the management approach or take other measures, within no more than five business days of receiving information from ARMA about circumstances that make it impossible to preserve the asset’s economic value. 

2. Regulate the consequences of a negative ARMA conclusion. Either a separate instrument or amendments to existing regulation should define what a prosecutor is to do after receiving a negative conclusion, and whether a repeat request is possible once the grounds for refusal have been addressed.

3. ARMA should develop internal operating procedures (a standard operating procedure) for staff at its central office and Interregional Territorial Departments, setting out in chronological order all actions relating to seized assets, with references to the specific regulatory provisions involved. Such a document would remove operational uncertainty and minimize the risk of inconsistent interpretation of similar situations.

What happened: a timeline of events

At the center of events is a criminal proceeding against Olena Lukash, former Minister of Justice of Ukraine, charged with misappropriation of budget funds and official forgery. Here is how the HCJ decision regarding HACC Appeals Chamber judges came about.

2014 — Proceeding entered into the Unified Register of Pre-Trial Investigations; investigation conducted by the Prosecutor General’s Office. 

October 17, 2019 — Deputy Prosecutor General Chumak serves Lukash with a revised notice of suspicion.

October 21, 2019 — Prosecutor General Riaboshapka transfers the investigation to the NABU; the HACC was henceforth to exercise judicial oversight in the case.

March 2020 — Lukash’s defense counsel files a complaint against the notice of suspicion with the Pecherskyi District Court; the SAPO prosecutor requests the Supreme Court transfer the case to the HACC.

October 12, 2020 — The Supreme Court declines: because the notice was not signed by the SAPO prosecutor, the case supposedly falls outside the HACC’s jurisdiction; the investigating judge of the Pecherskyi District Court grants the defense counsel’s complaint and cancels the suspicion.

November 2020 — The Kyiv Court of Appeal leaves the defense counsel’s complaint against the Pecherskyi District Court’s decision without granting it.

January 2021 — The HACC Appeals Chamber, following the SAPO prosecutor’s complaint, cancels the Pecherskyi District Court’s ruling and closes the proceeding on the complaint.

January 22 and 25, 2021 — Olena Lukash files complaints with the HCJ against the actions of the HACC Appeals Chamber judges. In her complaint, she argued that the HACC Appeals Chamber judges had no authority to review the case.

November 2025 — The Third Disciplinary Chamber of the HCJ refuses to hold the HACC Appeals Chamber judges liable.

May 2026 — The HCJ sitting in plenary session sets aside this decision and issues warnings to judges Kaluhina, Semennykov, and Mykhailenko.

The complaint against the disciplinary chamber’s decision was filed by attorney Ivashchenko—Lukash’s defense counsel, who is himself a defendant in the same criminal proceeding. It is also worth noting that the Supreme Court’s October 2020 decision, on which the HCJ relies, was based on a specific criterion—who signed the notice of suspicion—a criterion that does not actually appear in the Criminal Procedure Code’s provisions on HACC jurisdiction.

The “case dumping” scheme through the Pecherskyi District Court

From 2020 onward, subjects of NABU investigations began exploiting investigating judges, predominantly from the Pecherskyi District Court in Kyiv, as a tool to remove their cases from anti-corruption proceedings. 

The scheme is straightforward: a complaint is filed with the Pecherskyi District Court alleging inaction by the Prosecutor General’s Office concerning the Prosecutor General’s failure to review a defense motion within a NABU criminal proceeding—despite the fact that formally such a court lacks authority to review complaints in NABU cases. Yet the complainants argue that because the Prosecutor General’s Office is located within the territorial jurisdiction of the Pecherskyi District Court, that court is authorized to hear such complaints. The court then issues a ruling favorable to the suspect—for example, ordering the transfer of the case to another investigative body or canceling the suspicion. Subsequently, the Prosecutor General’s Office complies with this ruling, and the case is effectively removed from the system.

This is precisely what happened in the Ukrbud case, involving Oleh Tatarov, then Deputy Head of the Presidential Office. There, the Pecherskyi District Court unlawfully ordered the removal of the case from NABU’s investigative authority. The Prosecutor General’s Office complied, and later Office prosecutors blocked all efforts to return the proceeding to the Bureau by withdrawing an appeal filed with the HACC Appeals Chamber. Similar situations arose in the cases of Zlochevskyi, VAB Bank, and the Dubnevych thermal power plant—matters we will discuss further.

The response to this was as follows: SAPO prosecutors, and sometimes PGO prosecutors, filed appellate complaints with the HACC Appeals Chamber. That court repeatedly reviewed and cancelled rulings issued by the Pecherskyi and other district courts, consistently holding: appellate review of any decisions in cases falling within the HACC’s jurisdiction may be conducted exclusively by the HACC’s Appeal Chamber. 

Yet the Supreme Court, in several decisions concerning the Zlochevskyi case in March 2021 and August 2021, as well as in the case of DACK judges from August 2020, held that when a decision was formally issued by a court of general jurisdiction, it must be appealed to the appellate court of general jurisdiction, not the HACC Appeals Chamber. Interestingly, this position conflicted to some degree with other similar situations.

In light of this, the HACC Appeals Chamber was sometimes compelled to dismiss appeals of district court rulings. This occurred in the Zlochevskyi case and in the VAB Bank case.

The problem of jurisdiction over NABU cases in courts of general jurisdiction was so serious that it appeared in the National Anti-Corruption Strategy for 2023–2025 as a separate priority. This means that the state, at the level of a government document, acknowledged that judicial review of NABU cases by other courts represents a systemic problem that must be addressed. The state should therefore adopt specific legislation to prevent such practices. Yet by holding accountable the judges who resisted this practice, the HCJ is moving in the opposite direction.

Against this backdrop, the disciplinary case concerning three HACC Appeals Chamber judges developed—judges whom the High Council of Justice warned in May 2026.

Why HACC Appeals Chamber judges had grounds to act as they did

The January 12, 2021 ruling of the HACC Appeals Chamber in the case of Lukash’s complaint against the notice of suspicion contains detailed and coherent legal reasoning.

The judges proceeded from the premise that Article 33-1 of the Criminal Procedure Code establishes subject-matter jurisdiction of the HACC, which takes priority over territorial jurisdiction. This means: if a criminal proceeding, by its characteristics, falls within the HACC’s jurisdiction, no other court—neither at the trial level nor at the appellate level—may hear it. Jurisdiction is determined by the properties of the proceeding itself, not by which court actually issued a particular decision.

At the time of appellate review, investigative authority in this case had been assigned to the NABU, and the case materials had been transferred to that agency. Thus, the condition set out in Section 20-2 of the Transitional Provisions of Ukraine’s Criminal Procedure Code—that pre-trial investigation is conducted by NABU—was satisfied. Consequently, subject-matter jurisdiction of the HACC applied, meaning that appellate review fell within the competence of the HACC Appeals Chamber.

Regarding the Supreme Court’s October 12, 2020 ruling, which denied the prosecutor’s request to transfer the case from the Pecherskyi District Court to the HACC, the HACC Appeals Chamber judges offered a clear explanation: the Supreme Court was deciding only the question of transfer of the proceeding from one trial court to another—and only within the scope of arguments the prosecutor had raised in the motion. The Supreme Court neither decided nor could have decided the question of appellate jurisdiction for the prosecutor’s later filed appeal.

Beyond this, the HACC Appeals Chamber judges’ position on jurisdiction was neither novel nor isolated—it reflected established practice that had developed both before and after the January 12, 2021 ruling.

The HACC Appeals Chamber had repeatedly reviewed rulings of investigating judges of the Pecherskyi District Court in NABU cases, and the Supreme Court did not challenge this:

• In the VAB Bank case, the HACC Appeals Chamber in July 2020 cancelled a Pecherskyi District Court ruling and closed the proceeding on the complaint. The Cassation Criminal Court within the Supreme Court three times—in September, October, and November 2020—refused to open cassation proceedings on appeals challenging this HACC ruling, finding arguments about unlawful action by the anti-corruption court to be unsubstantiated.
•  In the Dubnevych thermal power plant case, in March 2021, the HACC Appeals Chamber cancelled a Pecherskyi District Court ruling, and the Supreme Court twice—in April and May 2021—refused cassation review, stating that the HACC ruling was not subject to appeal. 

Moreover, judges of the Kyiv Court of Appeal themselves directed appeals from district court decisions to the HACC Appeals Chamber:

• In the case of the former head of the Chernihiv RSA, in December 2020, the Kyiv Court of Appeal independently transferred an appeal to the HACC Appeals Chamber, determining that the anti-corruption court was the proper appellate court in proceedings falling within the HACC’s jurisdiction—regardless of which trial court issued the challenged decision.
• In the Dubnevych thermal power plant case mentioned above, the Kyiv Court of Appeal in March 2021 transferred the case for review by the HACC Appeals Chamber.

Furthermore, in September 2023, the Supreme Court confirmed the lawfulness of the HACC Appeals Chamber’s actions in another instructive episode: the head of the Pecherskyi District Court for more than two years ignored fourteen requests from the HACC Appeals Chamber for case materials relating to an appeal filed in the Zlochevskyi case, claiming that the anti-corruption court supposedly was not the proper appellate court. The HACC Appeals Chamber submitted a separate ruling to the HCJ concerning the head of court’s violation of Criminal Procedure Code requirements. In September 2023, the Supreme Court left the Pecherskyi District Court head’s cassation appeal without granting it, confirming that determining the question of jurisdiction does not fall within the authority of a trial court head and cannot serve as grounds for refusing to comply with lawful requests from an appellate court.

And in December 2024, the Supreme Court itself granted a motion and transferred an appeal from the Kyiv Court of Appeal to the HACC Appeals Chamber, citing a violation of jurisdictional rules.

Thus, the legal position for which the judges received a warning was not a departure from practice but part of it—consistently supported by both the Kyiv Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court itself, albeit with certain exceptions in specific proceedings.

What is wrong with the HCJ decision

In May 2026, the High Council of Justice characterized as “obvious” a violation of what, by July 2021, had already been established as settled practice.

The HACC Appeals Chamber had been reviewing Pecherskyi District Court rulings in NABU cases since 2020—and the Supreme Court did not recognize this as unlawful. Conversely, in refusing to open cassation proceedings, the Supreme Court effectively confirmed the lawfulness of the HACC’s actions. Under such circumstances, the HCJ’s assertion about the “obviousness” of the violation is at best unconvincing.

Moreover, the HCJ overlooked the fact that the Supreme Court in December 2024 did precisely what the judges did in 2021. 

The judges, both in their decision and during HCJ proceedings, consistently explained that the Supreme Court in October 2020 was addressing only the transfer of proceedings from one trial court to another. In our view, that same Supreme Court decision contained rather peculiar reasoning regarding the determination of jurisdiction based on who served the notice of suspicion—conditions for such a criterion do not exist in Ukraine’s Criminal Procedure Code.

The HCJ further contends that two conflicting appellate court decisions arose concerning the same ruling. This does not correspond to what actually occurred. The Kyiv Court of Appeal reviewed a complaint filed by the defense counsel of the suspected person, counsel who presented no substantive arguments about any illegality or lack of evidentiary basis for the ruling in their favor. The court emphasized this point in its decision. By contrast, the HACC Appeals Chamber reviewed a complaint filed by the prosecutor, who sought to set aside the same ruling and close the proceeding for substantive violations. Different appellants, different legal requests, different legal positions on review. The HACC Appeals Chamber did not review the Kyiv Court of Appeal’s decision and raised no challenge to it.

Furthermore, at HCJ proceedings, the HACC Appeals Chamber judges pointed out that the HCJ had already declined to open disciplinary proceedings in instances where a HACC Appeals Chamber judge had suspended execution of a Pecherskyi District Court ruling, and subsequently a panel of judges cancelled the corresponding district court ruling.

Under these circumstances, to speak of intentional violation means to contend that the judges acted unlawfully while possessing genuine legal grounds for their position. We found no basis for such a conclusion.

Conclusions and open questions

Following this analysis, several questions remain.

Will the legislature close this gap? The Criminal Procedure Code’s provisions governing jurisdiction over NABU cases in courts of general jurisdiction still contain no clear answer to a situation where a local court, contrary to law, issues a decision in a NABU case. 

What does this mean for NABU and SAPO cases in practice? The problem arose because, during a period when the SAPO leadership post was vacant, certain of its powers were exercised by the Prosecutor General. Attorneys, disregarding rules of subject-matter jurisdiction, challenged actions or inaction of the Prosecutor General before the Pecherskyi District Court. The judges of that court ruled on such complaints. If the term of the SAPO leadership ends and stable leadership of the specialized prosecution service is not ensured by then, the problems will return.

Why did the HCJ not notice contradictions in its own practice? During HCJ proceedings, the HACC Appeals Chamber judges pointed out that the HCJ had previously declined to open disciplinary cases in similar circumstances. How can the same actions in one case constitute no disciplinary breach, while in another they do? The HCJ decision offers no answer.

Fundamentals cluster: the main test on the road to the EU

Accession talks for every candidate country rest on 35 negotiating chapters. Thirty-three of them are grouped into six thematic clusters, while the other two are handled separately.

Andrii Borovyk calls “Fundamentals” the heart of the whole enlargement methodology, since it embodies the EU’s core values. It opens first and closes last, and without progress here, movement on other fronts can stall.

“When we talk about this cluster, the conversation centers on the rule of law and building a state governed by law, but it also has quite specific parts — the negotiating chapters where we need to keep showing progress. Of course, only if we want to,” the expert explains.

Each chapter has its own number and name, including:

• Chapter 23 (Judiciary and Fundamental Rights): court reform, judicial independence, and a real fight against top-level corruption.
• Chapter 24 (Justice, Freedom and Security): overhauling law enforcement, fighting organized crime, and bringing order to customs and borders.
• Chapter 5 (Public Procurement): moving all public and defense tenders onto strict European standards.
• Chapter 32 (Financial Control): protecting EU funds and auditing the budget (the work of the Accounting Chamber and the State Audit Service).
• Chapter 18 (Statistics): transparent, accurate economic and population data that meet Eurostat standards.

What benchmarks are, and how the EU will measure Ukraine’s progress

To avoid the mistakes of past enlargements, the EU has changed how it evaluates reforms. Andrii Borovyk recalls that several countries saw scandals over the rule of law or corruption after joining. In Romania, for example, specialized anti-corruption bodies were set up and went after a “big fish” — a former prime minister. Later, the authorities cut back these bodies’ independence, and people took to the streets. 

That’s why the EU adopted a new enlargement methodology. As a result, the Fundamentals cluster includes strict requirements on the rule of law and anti-corruption efforts, and these will be watched especially closely.

Progress will be measured through “benchmarks” — conditions Ukraine must meet. They come in two types: interim benchmarks, which apply only to the two most important chapters of the first cluster — 23, Judiciary and Fundamental Rights, and 24, Justice, Freedom and Security — and closing benchmarks for each chapter.

The European Commission will prepare intergovernmental reports assessing how well these conditions are met.

“There will be constant monitoring, and essentially any change in legislation, any event in Ukraine that touches these areas, will be under very close watch,” Andrii Borovyk stresses.

Passing laws is only the first step. What follows is tracking how they’re implemented and enforced.

“We may see in EU reports that Ukraine has made solid progress fighting corruption, backed by indicators such as the number of cases and court verdicts. The same goes for recovering criminal assets. The EU will ask: ‘You passed the legislation? Well done! Now show us how you’re applying it.’ So we’ll need to show how much was recovered in specific cases. It’s a massive, complex process, and without constant communication between all branches of government, making progress will be very, very hard,” the expert adds.

Each year, the European Commission also publishes an Enlargement Report on every candidate country, including Ukraine, scoring each negotiating chapter. Converted into numbers, the scale runs from 1 (no progress) to 5 (full alignment with EU standards). 

“According to last year’s Enlargement Report, Ukraine’s average score now stands at 2.4. But these results may not tell the whole story, since something is always improving somewhere while something else is slipping,” the Executive Director says.

Among the recent improvements, he points to the comprehensive public procurement law that the Verkhovna Rada passed in late May. Ukraine’s President signed it on June 24.

Ukraine is still waiting for the European Commission’s final assessment of this law, but Andrii Borovyk believes it clearly brings the country closer to EU standards, marking “moderate, maybe even good, progress” in this area.

In the anti-corruption field, the top priority is preserving anti-corruption institutions and expanding their powers. For instance, anti-corruption bodies need the ability to investigate cases involving members of parliament without waiting for the Prosecutor General’s permission. They should also gain access to independent, professional expertise.

Ukraine must also keep delivering strong results on corruption cases. Andrii Borovyk notes that this area is in better shape, since the number of verdicts and cases handled by the High Anti-Corruption Court keeps growing each year.

Why Ukraine’s EU integration has slowed down

Andrii Borovyk names several reasons the reform process has slowed over the past 12 months:

• Waning US attention to reforms after the presidential election, given its role as a key partner for Ukraine;
• The law the Verkhovna Rada passed in July 2025, which curbed the independence of the NABU and the SAPO;
• “Fatigue” among lawmakers.

“We keep hearing that a few dozen, maybe close to a hundred, MPs want out. I think all branches of government need an honest conversation to find common ground. Civil society is always ready to help, and it already does — its representatives step in as technical experts drafting documents or preparing independent assessments of the process itself,” the expert says. 

Beyond winning the war, he adds, Ukraine needs a second political goal to rally around: EU membership. 

“Ambitions need to wait, and everyone should work toward this goal, moving as one group. It sounds philosophical, but you can’t wave a magic wand like in Harry Potter to get this done. It’s all hard work,” Borovyk adds.

In the expert’s view, civil society’s attention may be the best defense against political pressure. During wartime, when elections are impossible and political accountability is hard to enforce, he urges Ukrainians not to lose their political memory.

“Unfortunately, our political memory isn’t always strong, so ‘old politicians’ often end up back in power anyway. But last July, when parliament passed something we — and the EU — completely disagreed with, we showed we could respond with peaceful protest. I wouldn’t want that to become routine, and I really hope parliament and the president don’t repeat such strange moves.”

Ukraine is the first country in the world fighting for survival while pursuing two paths at once — defending its independence and nationhood on the front line, and integrating into the EU.

“I don’t know of any other country that’s done this. I don’t know of any country that tried to carry out reforms during a war. We’re not always happy with them, and there have been far fewer over the past 12 months than at the start, but this is very hard, and without it, joining the EU will be difficult,” Borovyk concludes.

What reforms will actually mean for Ukrainians

The reforms Ukraine must carry out to join the EU directly affect every Ukrainian’s life. Meeting all the required criteria, Andrii Borovyk believes, will improve the justice system, the work of state bodies, and public administration overall.

“How will it affect people’s lives to have professional, honest courts with strong technical capacity? When you go to court without thinking, ‘Why bother, it’s all bought and paid for’ — that’s already a major impact,” the expert reflects.

The goal of these reforms is to build a regulated legal environment — for running a business, say, or protecting conservation areas from illegal construction.

“As a result, whatever field a Ukrainian works in will better align with the rule of law. People will know how to act and what to expect if a ruling turns out unfair — and that will still happen sometimes, since not every EU member state is perfect either. What matters is that everyone can expect a fair ruling in a dispute,” Andrii Borovyk adds. 

The next step in the negotiation process is the final approval of benchmarks for the first cluster. Ideally, negotiations on the remaining five clusters would open as soon as possible after that.

Then comes the long work of carrying out reforms, where Ukraine must not just change laws but prove they work.

Transparency International Ukraine, together with colleagues from other organizations, tracks this process by publishing annual “shadow reports” assessing Ukraine’s progress against its commitments. These reports cover the state of anti-corruption efforts, the rule of law, justice, and public procurement.

“These documents aren’t meant to criticize the authorities — they’re meant to show where we currently stand and which direction we should be heading on the path to EU integration. The reports don’t represent the European Commission’s position, though in our case, it helps fund and support their preparation. Some candidate countries don’t have anything like this, but how could Ukraine not have shadow reports, given how enormous and relentless civil society and journalist activity here is? We’re constantly held up as an example in many other countries,” Andrii Borovyk explains.

This publication has been produced with financial support from Norway. The contents of this publication are the sole responsibility of Transparency International Ukraine and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of the Government of Norway. 

The Prosecutor General’s Monopoly Over MP Cases

A parliamentarian should be protected from pressure for their political position, voting, statements, and general representative activities. Without such protection, an MP could become dependent on executive power. However, Article 482-2 of the Criminal Procedure Code “protects” MPs from a far broader range of situations. It applies not only to politically motivated prosecution for parliamentary activity but extends to corruption offenses that have nothing to do with protecting the parliamentary mandate.

As far back as 2017, GRECO (Group of States Against Corruption) recommended implementing clear and effective measures to ensure that the removal of immunity from parliamentarians would not prevent criminal prosecution of those suspected of committing corruption offenses. In particular, it proposed adopting clarifications on this matter with clear and objective criteria.

Interestingly, in 2020, after immunity was removed, GRECO concluded that this recommendation had been implemented only “satisfactory.” According to the Council of Europe’s monitoring body, this assessment was apparently linked to the fact that the new law can only be effectively implemented in the absence of abuses and political bias. And this is something Ukraine cannot yet hope for—even the Prosecutor General remains a politically interested party. He is appointed by the President of Ukraine with the consent of MPs, without formalized competitive procedures assessing competence and integrity.

From nearly the beginning, the expert community noted that such a construction effectively creates a modified form of immunity from criminal prosecution. Moreover, the Criminal Procedure Code does not provide analogous special procedures for initiating criminal proceedings against judges, who also enjoy certain immunity. 

During the discussion of the relevant draft laws themselves, some MPs emphasized that making investigations dependent on the will of a single person—the Prosecutor General—creates corruption risks and may result in the impossibility of prosecuting an MP criminally.

The practice already demonstrates the problem 

One of the first prominent examples involving an MP was the case of Oleksandr Yurchenko. In September 2020, the NABU publicly announced that it had submitted materials and a draft suspicion notice to Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova for registering proceedings and notifying the MP of suspicion. However, the Prosecutor General’s Office replied that it saw insufficient grounds for registering proceedings. 

The NABU was effectively forced to publicly call on the Prosecutor General to sign the suspicion notice. Eventually this did happen, but the episode itself demonstrated the key point: a corruption case against an MP can be stalled in this manner.

We observed numerous examples where journalists uncovered suspected corruption by MPs, yet the Prosecutor General refused to open proceedings. And the most recent and telling such case is the matter against Iryna Kormyshkina. In early 2025, she and her husband admitted guilt and, based on a plea agreement, received a sentence for illicit enrichment and money laundering. However, as far back as 2022, the Prosecutor General Andrii Kostin had stalled the initiation of the case, first refusing to register the crime report, before a court eventually ordered him to launch an investigation. 

These cases are not isolated, and from time to time they become a genuine obstacle to NABU and SAPO investigations of high-profile corruption within parliament.

Why comparison with other countries works against the Ukrainian model

In democratic states, parliamentary immunities typically follow a different logic, designed to protect the parliamentary function rather than create a blanket barrier to criminal process. The Venice Commission has drawn attention to this dangerous paradox: in young democracies, immunity can simultaneously protect MPs from state abuse and become an obstacle to fighting corruption.

This is deeply important for Ukraine. We are not an established democracy with a substantial legacy of political traditions and unconditional confidence in the prosecution service, law enforcement agencies, and political institutions—Ukrainian institutions are still earning such trust from society. For this very reason, a model in which corruption proceedings against an MP depend on one politically appointed official cannot be considered optimal.

Moreover, even developed democracies, while granting their parliamentarians immunity similar to what we abandoned in 2019, do not erect barriers to initiating pre-trial investigations. And certainly, do not afford protection to MPs from all categories of criminal offenses, including corruption—the Venice Commission considers this unacceptable.

In many European approaches, immunity often applies only to arrest, detention, or prosecution (formal suspicion)—as in Belgium, France, Italy, and Portugal. 

Several of these countries conducted constitutional reforms as far back as the 1990s, whereby opening an investigation against a parliamentarian requires no separate authorization. In France, for example, following constitutional reform, Chamber consent to opening criminal proceedings is not mandatory—it is required only for detention, arrest, and other judicial control measures. In Italy, Constitutional Law No. 3 of October 29, 1993 removed the requirement for prior Chamber consent to open proceedings against MPs.

The Ukrainian model moved in the opposite direction, placing even the submission of information to the Unified Register of Pre-Trial Investigations (URPI) under special control.

Why the SAPO head should receive such powers

Ukraine deliberately created a separate anti-corruption system in which the NABU investigates high-profile corruption, the SAPO provides prosecutorial supervision, and the HACC ensures judicial control and adjudication of such cases. This model was meant to reduce the dependence of investigations on any political influences. Yet the Criminal Procedure Code has long recognized the special role of the SAPO head regarding MPs, giving him the authority to independently sign notices of suspicion to them. 

However, that same Article 482-2 does not grant the SAPO head an analogous role regarding submission of information to the URPI or approval of key investigative applications during pre-trial investigation. This creates a contradiction: the head of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office can notify an MP of suspicion, but lacks direct authority to independently launch proceedings or approve a search or other investigative measure. And this is all the more significant because ultimate control over searches, arrests, interception of communications, and preventive measures must still be exercised by an investigating judge.

Furthermore, when addressing the legislative removal of parliamentary immunity, an alternative draft law had proposed authorizing the SAPO head to perform the same functions regarding prosecution of MPs as the Prosecutor General. In its explanatory memorandum, the authors specifically noted that concentrating powers solely in the Prosecutor General creates risks that material evidence and traces of crime could be destroyed, and that it may become impossible to conduct investigative measures swiftly.

Beyond this, granting such powers to the SAPO head benefits not only the efficiency of anti-corruption investigations, but the MPs themselves. In cases involving parliamentarians, there is always a risk that any decision by the Prosecutor General will be perceived as political pressure, especially when it concerns opposition cases. Involving the SAPO head in NABU cases reduces this risk by shifting decisions to a more specialized and institutionally removed plane—recall that our Prosecutor General is appointed by specific officials. 

For honest MPs, such powers in the SAPO head mean greater protection from selective political prosecution; for society, it means less reason to believe that anti-corruption cases are blocked or initiated based on political expediency.

***

The cancellation of parliamentary immunity in Ukraine was an important political decision, but it did not resolve the problem of MP privileges in criminal procedure. Ukraine should not have replaced old parliamentary immunity with new prosecutorial immunity.

As practice has shown, such an approach is especially dangerous in corruption cases against MPs, as it creates a risk that investigations may be delayed or blocked not through weakness of evidence, but through the lack of political will of a single official—the Prosecutor General.

Granting such powers to the SAPO head in proceedings within NABU’s investigative jurisdiction will strengthen guarantees for parliamentarians and make it impossible to use such cases as a hidden form of immunity. And this benefits both MPs and anti-corruption law enforcement agencies.

Goal 1. Criminal justice (2.5/20 — up 0.5)

• Government track: The draft law developed by the Ministry of Justice to deliver on elements of this point of the plan was sent back for revision following a meeting of the government committee. It is currently being refined together with the NABU and the NACP, but the document has still not been published for public consultation or registered in parliament.
• MP initiatives: Two draft laws have been registered in the Verkhovna Rada — No. 15333 (on improving the efficiency of proceedings after the expiry of pre-trial investigation deadlines) and No. 15334 (on improving investigative jurisdiction and international cooperation).

Goal 2. Ensure that NABU has effective access to impartial, timely and high-quality forensic examinations (2/10 — up 1.5)

Providing the NABU with effective access to impartial and timely examinations is still stalled by the lack of a shared vision among the agencies.

• The Ministry of Justice has begun work on amendments to the Law on Forensic Examination to strengthen safeguards for forensic examination activities.
• The NABU has submitted its comments, but significant disagreements remain between the ministry and the Bureau over the concept for establishing such an expert institution.

Goal 7. International experts in the HQCJ selection (1.5/10 — up 0.5)

The issue of expanding international experts’ participation in the Selection Commission for members of the High Qualification Commission of Judges (HQCJ) remains frozen.

• Draft Law No. 13382, intended to restore international experts’ participation in selecting HQCJ members, has been stalled in the Verkhovna Rada since June 2025.
• According to the Cabinet of Ministers, another legislative initiative has now been drafted and is undergoing consultations with the European Commission. This document has not yet been officially registered or published.

Goal 9. Adopt the Anti-Corruption Strategy and the SAP by the end of June 2026 (1.5/5 — up 1)

The plan required the Anti-Corruption Strategy and the State Anti-Corruption Program (SAP) to be adopted by Q2 2026, but the deadlines have already been missed.

• Blocked in parliament: Three competing draft laws are awaiting consideration in the relevant parliamentary committee. The most ambitious, and the one consistent with EU integration requirements, is Draft Law No. 15230 from the head of the Anti-Corruption Committee.
• SAP delay: The State Anti-Corruption Program was developed in parallel, but the NACP will release its draft for public consultation only after parliament finally votes on the Strategy.

Goal 10. Strengthen internal control and whistleblower protection (1/10 — up 0.5)

There are already initial practical steps in building up internal control and efforts to adapt the Ukrainian system to European standards, although the core legislative framework is still awaiting final approval. 

• The State Audit Service has stepped up its checks, Internal Audit Standards in line with the European GIAS requirements have entered into force, and a whistleblower portal is operating, though it still needs technical improvements.
• Several strategic goals have been incorporated into Draft Laws No. 15230, No. 15230-1, and No. 15230-2, On the Principles of State Anti-Corruption Policy for 2026–2030, which are currently awaiting consideration in the relevant committee.

Other goals of the plan: the overall picture according to experts

In the other reform areas reviewed, the situation also remains unsatisfactory:

• Selection of the Prosecutor General (0.5/10 — up 0.5): there has been virtually no progress in revising the competitive selection procedures, with only one MP draft law registered.
• Selection for senior positions in the prosecution service (0.5/10 — no change): transparent competitive appointments have still not been restored, and new government initiatives risk dragging out the process through lengthy consultations.
• SBI reform (1/10 — no change): the relevant draft laws have not been presented for broad discussion, creating the risk that new leadership will be selected under the old procedures.
• New CCU judges and HCJ members (1/5 — no change): the competitive procedures are continuing with delays, and key vacancies under certain quotas remain unfilled.
• Judicial integrity and enforcement proceedings (3.5/10 — up 1.5): the legislation adopted does not take into account the EU’s recommendations on checks of the integrity declarations of Supreme Court judges, although there is some positive movement on digitalizing enforcement procedures.

This baseline evaluation covers the “Kachka-Kos plan” — a set of equivalent reforms defined in December 2025. Alongside Transparency International Ukraine, which focused on key anti-corruption areas, the study involved the MEZHA Anti-Corruption Center, European Pravda, the ANTS National Interests Advocacy Network, DEJURE Foundation, New Europe Center, Centre of Policy and Legal Reform, and the Anti-Corruption Action Centre.

What was Kniaziev’s role in the case, and why does this agreement matter so much? 

For a time, Kniaziev was charged with creating an organized group, but in the indictment and the verdict his actions were classified as those of a principal — an official who had accepted an unlawful benefit for himself and others. According to investigators, the scheme was built by the intermediaries, Horetskyi and Horburov, while Kniaziev secured the outcome in court. 

A key condition of the agreement was incriminating testimony against the other participants in the scheme. On its basis, notices of suspicion were served on four Grand Chamber judges: Zhanna Yelenina, Iryna Hryhorieva, Ihor Zhelieznyi, and retired judge Oleksandr Prokopenko. Kniaziev confirmed that he had coordinated the payment of the “reward” between the intermediaries and the judges. In particular, after the ruling was adopted, he personally handed Prokopenko a black folder containing $50,000 — even though Prokopenko had prepared a dissenting opinion, ostensibly disagreeing with the decision. Kniaziev explained the money simply: “people are grateful to all the judges” who had delivered the result. 

As the verdict notes, a corruption crime committed by the chairman of the country’s highest judicial body undermined trust in the justice system and damaged Ukraine’s international standing. An important argument in favor of the agreement was the public interest in swift justice. Over the course of more than 50 hearings, the HACC had not even examined all of the prosecution’s evidence; the agreement made it possible to avoid a years-long trial. Kniaziev’s testimony opened an investigation into the other Grand Chamber judges — without his cooperation, proving their involvement would have been extremely difficult.

For international partners, the EU in particular, the verdict is a signal that the inevitability of punishment has worked even at the highest level of the judicial system. Five years of actual imprisonment with confiscation of property will, in the court’s view, also serve as a warning to others.

Kniaziev’s return to the bench: is it even possible, and if so, when?

Kniaziev had lost his judgeship even before the verdict, and not because of the criminal case. In 2023, he was found guilty of a corruption-related administrative offense: during a search, investigators found a lease for a four-room Kyiv apartment at a symbolic UAH 1,000. The UAH 906,000 by which the rent fell short of the market value was deemed by the court an unlawful gift and confiscated, and Kniaziev was additionally fined UAH 2,550. The NACP then applied to the High Council of Justice, which opened disciplinary proceedings and removed Kniaziev from office. The Grand Chamber of the Supreme Court subsequently upheld that decision.

Now comes the verdict in the criminal case. The three-year ban on holding positions in judicial and law enforcement bodies takes effect only after the principal sentence has been served. Taking into account time spent in custody, the actual term of imprisonment will be about 4.3 years. This means a return to the judicial system is impossible for at least seven years.

But even after that, the path back into the justice system is effectively closed. A criminal record for a particularly grave crime is expunged only eight years after the sentence has been served. And a conviction for a corruption crime, together with dismissal from judicial office, will remain weighty considerations in any judicial selection competition — the HQCJ and the Public Council of Integrity are unlikely to overlook this episode in his biography.

***

This case has become one of the most high-profile in the HACC’s practice — the first time in Ukraine that a sitting chairman of the Supreme Court was caught taking a bribe. And the verdict, with its actual imprisonment and confiscation, has become the subject of active debate. Although it may still be appealed within 30 days, the grounds for doing so are limited.

Like any convicted person, Kniaziev has the right to petition the President of Ukraine for a pardon, but here too there are very few grounds. And if he fails to comply with the agreement, the prosecutor may move to have the verdict overturned.

Detection and tracing: more requests, fewer assets found

In 2025, ARMA received 9,468 requests to detect and trace assets — a 20% increase over 2024 (7,865). 

The number of assets actually found, however, fell across several categories. ARMA located 29,049 land plots, down from 107,066 in 2024 — a figure we flagged at the time as an anomaly. Other categories rose: detected funds reached UAH 36.5 billion against UAH 8.3 billion, corporate rights UAH 58.5 billion against UAH 35.9 billion, and virtual assets stood out most of all — 1.29 million USDT against 2,400 USDT, a roughly 530-fold increase.

One section is genuinely new: ARMA publicly acknowledges the structural gap between assets traced and assets seized. Only 2% of the property ARMA traces is later seized. The report explains, among other things, that the information ARMA compiles on traced assets cannot be used as evidence in criminal proceedings.

The Agency separately notes that some tracing requests come in proceedings where confiscation — or even the option of special confiscation — is not envisaged at all. The information on traced assets is then used by the prosecution under Article 93 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine, which governs the rules for gathering evidence and nothing more. In other words, in certain cases ARMA functions as a property-records service for law enforcement.

ARMA also sent 639 international requests in 2025, against 383 in 2024 (up 66%). The numbers are striking, but they raise questions about the quality of each request and the effectiveness of the institution’s foreign track as a whole. The report does detail what was found abroad: 366 properties, 88 vehicles, $5.9 million, and corporate rights worth the equivalent of UAH 924.86 million. How much of this was seized, and which of these decisions foreign competent authorities recognized, remains unknown. 

Such decisions by foreign actors do not depend on ARMA alone, of course. But to analyze the state of asset recovery — a function the Agency does hold — the missing piece is information on whether those assets were actually seized abroad.

Asset management: more new agreements, but the revenue still comes from the old ones

Last year we noted that ARMA had concluded only 7 management agreements against 33 announced competitions. In 2025, there are already 40 management agreements under 38 rulings. On paper this is a breakthrough — yet 27 agreements carried over from previous years remain the main source of revenue for the state budget.

A single agreement — with Ukrnafta over the assets of Ukrnaftoburinnia, signed back in June 2023 — brought UAH 1.074 billion to the budget out of UAH 1.54 billion from management agreements overall. That is roughly 70% of the year’s revenue from one asset. All 38 new agreements signed in 2025, by contrast, account for just 2.5% of revenue (UAH 38.7 million).

The figures on asset sales in 2025 are also contradictory. The Agency organized 184 auctions, of which only 41 succeeded (about 22%). Nearly four out of five auctions produced no result. This calls for a separate explanation — on how the lots were assembled, and on starting prices and the appeal of the assets. 

The key thing left out of the report: as of its publication, the new mechanisms for selecting managers through Prozorro still had not been launched, even though they were supposed to be operating by January 30, 2026. This means that, overall, the transfer of assets to managers under the new rules is significantly delayed.

Oversight of managers: more activity, but the quality questions remain

In 2024, ARMA carried out only 10 on-site inspections of managers — one of the key figures we criticized. In 2025, there are already 38 on-site inspections and 348 desk reviews, for 386 oversight actions in total. These produced 27 orders to managers and 5 established instances of mismanagement.

In terms of trend, this is a marked improvement. In absolute terms, though, 38 on-site inspections against the 34,062 assets ARMA has placed under management, worth UAH 10.7 billion, is still a modest figure. 

The report also fails to show how the inspection results were interpreted: how many orders led to an actual change in a manager’s conduct, and how many agreements were terminated for ineffectiveness. And the scandalous case of KAMparytet, which subleased shopping centers at prices three times higher than its declared income, is not mentioned in the report at all, even though the case was discussed separately at the parliamentary Anti-Corruption Committee, and in 2026 the Agency confirmed the violations and announced its intention to terminate the agreements with the company. 

Inventory: ARMA finally has a definitive count of the assets it manages 

The transitional provisions of the new ARMA law required the body to identify, within six months, all assets placed under its management before the law took effect. The Agency reports that, following a full inventory, its records now cover 60,274 assets, of which 20,753 have high management potential. This figure also includes assets being prepared for competitive procedures or already identified as attractive for management and sale.

Even so, the Agency still does not use the term “asset pool,” which would make it possible to see how many units of property actually form part of an operating business that can be grouped under that concept. In practice, this makes it quite hard to tell from the report how many economically attractive businesses lie behind the figure of 20,753 assets. 

In 2025, 1,703 assets were handed to managers under agreements, while across all years ARMA has transferred 34,062 assets in total. These 1,703 assets are valued at UAH 5,354.31 million, against UAH 10,737.53 million for all assets combined. So nearly 5% of the assets placed under management in 2025 account for roughly 50% of the total value. One hypothesis here is that in earlier years the assets transferred for management were largely low-value.

In all, the body of assets ARMA is empowered to act on amounts to 94,336 units. Of these, 34,062 have already been transferred to managers under agreements (1,703 in 2025), and 60,274 have not (20,753 of them with high management potential). 

Handling “complicated” assets proved a separate problem: of 100 appeals ARMA made to prosecutors about its inability to manage such assets effectively, only 32 received a reply, and just 5 of those were resolved favorably. In other words, 95% of the cases where ARMA has already deemed an asset problematic to manage remain unresolved once the prosecution is brought in. And this problem should be resolved by amending the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine, as we have stressed before.

***

Over the past year, the volume of activity inside ARMA has grown substantially. The Agency is drafting secondary legislation, running asset inventories, tracing assets, and shaping recovery policy. Not every task has been completed, but the progress is visible. 

Even so, in watching ARMA’s performance, we would like to see real results in the effectiveness of asset recovery. That can be traced, in particular, by comparing the outcomes of tracing, seizure, effective management, and confiscation. Beyond that, the data available in the report does not make clear how the new system for selecting managers actually works, since not a single auction of that kind has taken place since the law was adopted. And in any case, the management agreements covered in the report were all concluded under the old procedures. 

That is why we see the key task for ARMA today as changing the very logic of how it traces and manages property. In our opinion, the next report should demonstrate not just the volume of work done, but concrete achievements across the system as a whole. All the more so since invoking the old rules will no longer make any sense. 

How do things stand now?

Most articles in the CPC section devoted to international cooperation have not been amended since the Code was adopted in 2012. At that time, digitalization was not a global priority, and the practice of international cooperation had not become widespread enough to reveal the weaknesses in its legal regulation. 

As a result, the provisions currently in force lag in many respects behind technological progress and the new legal approaches to mutual legal assistance — particularly when it comes to confiscating assets located in foreign states and dealing with participants in criminal proceedings who are abroad.

The exchange of materials in international cooperation. Current legislation permits requests and case materials to be exchanged in paper form during international cooperation. This significantly slows down Ukraine’s interaction with partner states in the fight against crime, since it requires a considerable amount of time.

The protection of information in international cooperation. Information processed within such cooperation currently has no clear safeguards against disclosure — especially where the cooperation does not require opening criminal proceedings in Ukraine.

The international wanted list. The CPC does not expressly define the moment from which a person is considered to be on the international wanted list.

The enforcement of HACC judgments. Although the HACC hears high-level corruption cases as a specialized court, certain matters arising in the enforcement of its judgments — such as a convicted person’s parole or the replacement of the unserved part of a sentence with a more lenient one — still go before local courts under the rules of Article 539 of the CPC, rather than before the HACC.

The confiscation and special confiscation of property abroad. The CPC does not contain a sufficiently detailed mechanism for establishing the location abroad of property subject to confiscation or special confiscation. The engagement of ARMA to trace and seize property abroad when enforcing confiscation decisions is also currently unregulated.

Questioning from abroad. Witnesses or victims located abroad can be questioned only from the premises of a court at their place of residence, which means that a corresponding request must be sent each time to the competent authorities of the foreign state through mutual legal assistance. Only for the duration of martial law or a state of emergency has it become possible to question a witness or victim directly by videoconference from any location.

What does the draft law propose?

Draft Law No. 14292 proposes a fairly broad package of changes. Among the key positive updates:

• permission to make wider use of electronic communications for international cooperation requests;
• regulation of the protection of information and materials in international cooperation;
• a more detailed set of grounds for refusing or postponing mutual legal assistance requests, and of the procedure for executing them;
• improvement of the procedure for recognizing and enforcing judgments, as well as for confiscating property abroad;
• the introduction of the ability to question persons located abroad by videoconference or from the premises of a Ukrainian diplomatic mission, regardless of whether martial law or a state of emergency has been declared in the country.

Which provisions need refining?

Despite its generally positive thrust, the document contains a number of procedural gaps, legal ambiguities, and risks that could negate the intended effect in practice.

For the mechanisms it establishes to work smoothly, the document should be refined in the respects described below.

Confiscation of property abroad: the right direction, but a weak procedural design

The amendments to Articles 535 and 568 of the CPC are intended to ensure the enforcement of judgments insofar as they concern the confiscation or special confiscation of property located abroad. This is an important step, particularly in countering organized crime, and corruption in particular. There are two problematic points whose resolution could improve this process.

In the proposed wording of Article 535(7) of the CPC, the drafters would require the court to draw up a petition for the recognition and enforcement, in a foreign state, of a Ukrainian court’s conviction insofar as it concerns the confiscation or special confiscation of property. However, the drafters failed to take into account that special confiscation may be imposed not only by a court’s verdict but also, under Article 96-1(2) and (3) of the CC, by rulings on release from criminal liability, on the closure of criminal proceedings, on extended confiscation, on the imposition of coercive measures of a medical or educational nature, and on the imposition of criminal-law measures on a legal entity. The aforementioned provision of Article 535(7) of the CPC should therefore also include a reference to the rulings listed in Article 96-1(2) of the CC.

In addition, the draft law would require those enforcing the judgment (chiefly the State Enforcement Service) to notify the court of any property discovered abroad that is subject to confiscation or special confiscation.

This innovation is consistent with EU Directive 2024/1260, under which the tracing and identification of property subject to freezing and confiscation must be possible even after a final court decision. Yet, although the draft law offers such an option, the point at which criminal property — or property subject to confiscation — is discovered should not be deferred all the way until the court’s final decision. 

The reason is that state enforcement officers cannot match law enforcement agencies or ARMA in detecting and tracing property, especially abroad — they lack sufficient powers and resources for this. 

As noted earlier, it is law enforcement agencies during the pre-trial investigation, and ARMA, that have the most tools for tracing and identifying assets subject to confiscation. Even they, however, do so fairly rarely, and the reason is that Article 91 of the current CPC in no way requires the location of property subject to confiscation or special confiscation to be proved within criminal proceedings. Largely because of this, in most cases such property ultimately goes unnoticed by the enforcement service.

Therefore, to adapt the provisions of EU Directive 2024/1260 to Ukrainian realities, it would be sensible, first, to supplement Article 91 of the CPC with provisions requiring the prosecution to prove the location of assets subject to confiscation or special confiscation. Second, to establish that, when enforcing court decisions on confiscation for the laundering of criminal property or for corruption, ARMA may be engaged to identify property that may be confiscated. Article 535(7) of the CPC should also include a reference to the rulings listed in Article 96-1(2) of the CC.

2. The international wanted list, the digitalization of summonses, and the removal of procedural obstacles for persons abroad

One of the draft law’s provisions concerns placing a suspect on the international wanted list. In Article 291 of the CPC, the drafters propose to draw a clear distinction between a domestic search within Ukraine and an international one, and to establish that a suspect is deemed wanted precisely from the moment the investigator or prosecutor issues a decision to that effect.

This will help settle long-standing debates about the moment from which a person is considered placed on the international wanted list and will allow courts to follow a single line of application. 

At the same time, the amendments to this article will not resolve another, more acute problem. It concerns cases where suspects or the defendants are abroad and the defense, invoking Article 135(7) of the CPC, argues that they may be reached solely through the diplomatic-channel procedure. Currently, under this provision, a summons for a person residing abroad is served through international cooperation mechanisms.

HACC case law reasonably explains that a person’s mere presence abroad does not require summoning them through diplomatic channels, since such channels should be used only if the person has formally arranged permanent residence, registered with a consulate, deregistered their residence, and the like. If no such facts are established during the criminal proceedings, the person is summoned in the ordinary manner.

 Even so, the debate over this issue continues, owing to lawyers’ inconsistent reading of the said Article 135(7) of the CPC. This is precisely why the measure under the State Anti-Corruption Program to simplify the procedure for summoning, in criminal proceedings, persons who reside abroad and are citizens of Ukraine has not yet been implemented.

It would therefore be best to specify clearly in Article 135(7) of the CPC that a person located abroad may also be summoned through electronic means of communication — official email addresses, messengers, and social media (provided that the person’s use of them is documented).

3. Matters concerning the enforcement of HACC judgments should remain within that court’s jurisdiction 

The draft law also proposes amendments to Article 539 of the CPC. In this article, the drafters seek to clarify that the question of parole, or of replacing the unserved part of the sentence of a convicted person who has been transferred to serve their sentence abroad, is decided by the Ukrainian court that delivered the verdict. 

This provision carries no risks; however, while amending this article of the CPC, the legislator could also resolve the problem of matters relating to the enforcement of HACC judgments being decided by courts other than the HACC. Thus, by amending Article 539 of the CPC, the legislator could solve two problems at once.

The HACC has special subject-matter jurisdiction over corruption-related criminal proceedings. Yet most matters relating to the enforcement of its judgments are decided by local courts — in particular, at the person’s place of serving the sentence or place of residence. 

Local courts are entitled to grant parole to persons convicted by HACC judgments, to substitute their punishment, and to release them from it altogether. Such situations are not uncommon. For example, in 2024 the Shevchenkivskyi District Court of Kyiv granted parole to a person convicted by the HACC — an accomplice in the bribery case involving the director of the Rzhyshchiv Military Forestry State Enterprise — so that he could serve in the military. And in 2025 the Voznesensk City-District Court released from punishment the head of a private company who had been convicted of misappropriating UAH 787 million of an NBU loan and of participating in the Yanukovych–Kurchenko criminal organization.

Matters relating to the enforcement of HACC judgments should be decided by that very court, since they can substantially affect the actual extent of the punishment imposed on those convicted of corruption-related criminal offenses — and therefore its deterrent, punitive, and rehabilitative effect.

Article 539 of the CPC should therefore be supplemented with a separate clause under which matters relating to the enforcement of a HACC judgment will be decided by the HACC alone. 

4. Eliminating the risks associated with the extradition procedure 

The draft law’s amendments also touch on extradition. The drafters spell out the procedure for submitting extradition requests, the handling of situations where several states request a person’s extradition, the application of preventive measures to such persons, and so on. Some of the proposed innovations require clarification.

The draft law adds to Article 575 of the CPC a mechanism for confirming that an extradition request remains valid. Under it, the court must respond to the Ministry of Justice on whether the request remains valid, and a failure to provide such a response becomes grounds for withdrawing it. Yet the drafters set no deadline at all for providing this response.

This creates a risk that, because the response deadline is undefined, the Ministry of Justice may mistakenly treat such an extradition request as withdrawn — even though the court has provided no response at all.

It is therefore important to add to the new Article 575(7) and (8) of the CPC clear deadlines for the court’s response, and to provide that it is a negative response from the court — not the absence of one — that constitutes grounds for withdrawing such a request.

In addition, to align the rules on simultaneous requests for a person’s surrender, the new clause 5-2 of Article 589(1) of the CPC should be supplemented with a further ground for refusing extradition: the surrender of the extradited person to one of the requesting states.

Thus it is necessary, first, to add to the proposed Article 575(7) and (8) of the CPC clear deadlines for courts to respond to the Ministry of Justice, and to provide that it is a negative response from the courts — not the absence of one — that constitutes grounds for withdrawing an extradition request. Second, the new clause 5-2 of Article 589(1) of the CPC should be supplemented with the following ground for refusing extradition: the surrender of the extradited person to one of the requesting states.

Conclusions

Transparency International Ukraine recommends adopting Draft Law No. 14292 in the first reading as a basis, with refinement ahead of the second reading, since adopting it in its current wording would leave gaps that would diminish the effect of the changes made.

In our view, the following recommendations should be taken into account during this refinement:

• Supplement Article 91 of the CPC with provisions requiring the prosecution to prove the location of assets subject to confiscation or special confiscation. 
• Establish that state enforcement officers may engage ARMA to identify property that may be confiscated when enforcing judgments or rulings for the laundering of criminal property (Article 209 of the CC) or for corruption (Note 1 to Article 45 of the CC). 
• Add to Article 535(7) of the CPC a reference to the rulings listed in Article 96-1(2) of the CC.
• Specify clearly in Article 135(7) of the CPC that a person located abroad may also be summoned through electronic means of communication — official email addresses, messengers, and social media (provided that the person’s use of them is documented).
• Add to Article 539 of the CPC a separate clause under which matters relating to the enforcement of a HACC judgment will be decided by the HACC alone. 
• Add to the proposed Article 575(7) and (8) of the CPC clear deadlines for courts to respond to the Ministry of Justice, and provide that it is a negative response from the courts — not the absence of one — that will constitute grounds for withdrawing an extradition request. 
• Supplement the new clause 5-2 of Article 589(1) of the CPC with the following ground for refusing extradition: the surrender of the extradited person to one of the requesting states.

Where is Ukraine stalling on reforms?

We can identify five critical points in the fight against corruption that need to be fixed right now:

1. Case-hearing timelines at the HACC. The hearing of cases at the High Anti-Corruption Court sometimes reaches a record 1,885 days (five years and two months). The reason: the Rada has still not passed a law that would stop lawyers and defendants from deliberately dragging out proceedings.
2. NACP verification of asset declarations. The automated check launched in late 2023 has effectively exempted senior officials from thorough manual review. The IMF requires this to be fixed by the end of June 2026, but there has been no movement. In addition, the NACP does not publish its logical and arithmetic control (LAC) rules, and the mandatory external audit of the agency has not been carried out for more than four years.
3. Limited autonomy of the SAPO. The head of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office still cannot independently open cases against MPs or fully initiate extraditions — that is the exclusive prerogative of the Prosecutor General. The government even removed the first of these provisions from the draft Anti-Corruption Strategy.
4. Crisis at the Accounting Chamber. The country’s principal audit body is operating at half capacity: 6 of its 11 positions are vacant. Parliament missed the deadline (April 2026) for forming the Advisory Group of Experts for the selection competition. As a result, Ukraine risks not receiving part of its tranches from the EU and the IMF this year.
5. Procurement and public-private partnership. The law on public-private partnership (PPP) has still not been aligned with EU rules. And by the end of 2026, Ukraine must develop a concept for reforming defense procurement — EU funding also depends on this.

What comes next?

The authorities must eliminate all these risks as quickly as possible, because what is at stake is financial stability and the speed of our accession to the EU.

Andrii Borovyk, Executive Director of TI Ukraine: “We are already seeing that some commitments are being met late. And some — particularly those concerning the autonomy of the SAPO and the Accounting Chamber — show signs of systemic stalling rather than technical delays. By opening this cluster, our European partners are telling us: your EU membership is in your hands — take it.”

The European Commission will deliver its first official verdict on how Ukraine is handling the new conditions in late autumn 2026, in its annual Enlargement Report. Transparency International Ukraine continues to monitor the situation and will set out the results of this analysis in its third Shadow Report for the European Commission.

This publication has been produced with financial support from Norway. The contents of this publication are the sole responsibility of [grant recipient’s name] and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of the Government of Norway.