December 18th, 2024

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Ukraine has faced a long and difficult path to the European Union. Since 2014, the year of the EuroMaidan Revolution, the country has made massive reforms across sectors, improving its rule of law, state capacity, and democratic governance to court the European community. In recent years, geopolitics has hastened the process: When Ukraine applied for EU membership on the fourth day of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, candidate status was quickly granted. Brussels conditioned its offer to open negotiations on a set of reforms, which Ukraine managed to satisfy even while at war. In late 2023, the European Council greenlit accession talks, which began in June 2024. But the end of the journey remains out of sight. While negotiations are proceeding and both parties seem optimistic, one obstacle looms above all others: Ukraine’s reputation for rampant corruption.

Professor Popova further compares Ukraine to five of its neighbours on the metrics of political, regime, public sector and executive corruption, respectively. Findings reveal that Ukraine’s corruption problem is similar to those of Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania, both when they started accession negotiations and when they joined the European Union. At the start of negotiations, Romania was assessed as more corrupt than Ukraine, Bulgaria as less corrupt, and Croatia as roughly about as corrupt. After the seven to eight years of negotiations, Romania had slightly improved but was still more corrupt than Ukraine is today, Bulgaria had deteriorated but was still less corrupt than Ukraine is now, and Croatia had improved and become less corrupt than present-day Ukraine.

In sharp contrast, none of the last three new members of the EU had a well-developed anticorruption architecture at the outset of accession negotiations. The Council of Europe adopted a set of principles and best practices called the Group of States Against Corruption only in 1999. From 2000 to 2001, the Group noted that Bulgaria and Romania faced corruption problems and had weak institutional capacity to tackle them. By the time Croatia started EU-accession talks in 2005, international norms were better developed. Croatia had a set of anticorruption institutions in place to prevent and investigate misdealing, but their efficacy was questionable and there were no specialized institutions (such as Ukraine now has) to prosecute and adjudicate crimes and recover stolen assets.