Who’s Actually Corrupt? The Numbers Ukraine’s Critics Don’t Want You to See
Transparency International’s data shows the even during war, Ukraine was serious about tackling corruption, while the critics failed their own people.
DEAR READER: Please consider a basic support membership at $5 per month. As a journalist in Ukraine, I work every day (even during blackouts and drone attacks) to examine our world situation from where the fulcrum of the world’s hell pivots, and your help is vital. Today is my 1402th day in this 1448 of full-scale war (4374 since 2014), and Independent Journalism is not cheap to do, and I will keep making the posts available for all readers (even during nearly 24 hr daily blackouts), but good patrons are needed and I thank you for your time. - Chris Sampson, Kyiv, February 11, 2026
Numbers. For over a decade, “corruption” has been used as an excuse to abandon Ukraine. Every excuse to avoid doing the right thing was wrapped in this word. But the numbers don’t lie.
Not talking points. Not cable news monologues. Not the practiced outrage of politicians who cannot find Ukraine on a map. Numbers, from the most rigorous anti-corruption measurement on earth, updated every year since 1995.
They tell a story the critics don’t want told. So let’s tell it.
DEAR READER: Please consider a basic support membership at $5 per month. As a journalist in Ukraine, I work every day (even during blackouts and drone attacks) to examine our world situation from where the fulcrum of the world’s hell pivots, and your help is vital. Today is my 1402nd day in this 1448 of full-scale war (4374 since 2014), and Independent Journalism is not cheap to do, and I will keep making the posts available for all readers (even during nearly 24 hr daily blackouts), but good patrons are needed and I thank you for your time. - Chris Sampson, Kyiv, February 11, 2026
I. Why This Argument Keeps Getting Recycled
The script is predictable by now. A senator objects to an aid package. A pundit fills three minutes of airtime. A social media account with a Kremlin-adjacent follower count generates ten thousand shares. The argument varies in its packaging but never in its content: Ukraine is too corrupt to help. Why send American taxpayer money—or German tanks, or British artillery—into a system that will simply absorb it and steal it?
The argument is designed to end debate, not advance it. Raise the corruption question and the conversation dies. Who can argue against fiscal responsibility? Who wants to defend corruption? The rhetorical trap is elegant: make any defense of Ukraine sound like a defense of graft.
The people deploying it are not marginal figures. They hold Senate seats. They appear on prime-time broadcasts. They run the governments of EU member states. And they have been saying the same thing, in almost identical language, for three years.
Senator JD Vance put it bluntly in a 2023 speech at the Heritage Foundation: “They have the most corrupt leadership and corrupt government in Europe and maybe the most corrupt leadership anywhere in the world… where have the 130 billion dollars that we spend in Ukraine where have they gone… we don’t know it hasn’t been properly tracked.” The same year, on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Vance sharpened the image: “We’re getting easily half a trillion dollars in the hole for the Ukraine conflict… Why? So that one of Zelenskyy’s ministers can buy a bigger yacht?”
The yacht. Zelenskyy’s ministers. The implication is precise: aid doesn’t fund defense, it funds luxury. Corruption is not a solvable problem—it is the natural state of Ukrainian leadership. The argument is presented as fiscal skepticism. It functions as delegitimization.
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has been less subtle. At a March 2022 town hall in Paulding County, Georgia, asked whether she agreed that Zelenskyy was corrupt, she answered: “Yes and yes. That’s an easy one.” Two years later, on April 4, 2024, she posted on X: “There is NOTHING Ukraine offers our country or our people other than money being laundered through a foreign corrupt state.”
Laundering. Not “possible mismanagement.” Not “insufficient oversight.” Laundering—a specific legal term that implies deliberate criminal intent at the institutional level. The framing forecloses reform by design: you cannot anti-corrupt your way out of a laundering operation.
Congressman Matt Gaetz, writing on X in December 2022: “Bathing historically corrupt countries in US weapons and cash typically doesn’t go well for America. (See Afghanistan).” And in October 2023, with even less ambiguity: “Ukraine is more corrupt than your leaders will admit.”
Tucker Carlson built an entire media architecture around the claim. In February 2025, he alleged that U.S. weapons sent to Ukraine were being resold on the black market—”to drug cartels.” No evidence was provided. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry formally denounced the allegation. The claim circulated regardless.
Here’s what none of them mention: there is actually a scorecard. It is published annually. It is peer-reviewed. It covers 180-plus countries. It has been measuring Ukraine, and Russia, and Hungary, and the United States, every year for more than two decades. And the people deploying the “Ukraine is corrupt” argument have conspicuously stopped citing it—because the numbers have stopped cooperating.
II. What the Corruption Perceptions Index Actually Measures (In Plain English)
Since 1995, Transparency International has published the Corruption Perceptions Index—the CPI. It is the most widely cited measurement of public sector corruption in the world, used by governments, corporations, investors, courts, and international institutions.
Understand what it measures, and what it doesn’t.
The CPI does not measure whether your local mayor took a bribe last Tuesday. It cannot. Corruption, by its nature, hides. What the CPI measures is the perception of public sector corruption among people who would know: business executives operating in the country, independent policy analysts, legal and financial risk consultants, and expert assessors from institutions including the World Bank, Freedom House, the World Economic Forum, and the World Justice Project. Thirteen separate data sources. Twelve institutions. Each country must appear in at least three to receive a score.
Think of it like a credit rating for institutional integrity. No single assessment tells the whole story. The composite score—from zero (catastrophically corrupt) to one hundred (exceptionally clean)—reflects the aggregate judgment of qualified observers watching governments operate in real time.
The score matters. But the trend matters more.
A country scoring 35 and rising is fundamentally different from a country scoring 35 and falling. One is fighting its way toward accountability. The other is sliding toward impunity. The CPI has been built, since 2012, to capture exactly that distinction. The methodology was revised that year to enable direct year-over-year comparison—meaning every number from 2012 onward can be set against every other number without methodological distortion.
One more thing the CPI does not measure: what Transparency International calls “transnational corruption.” The money laundered through London shell companies. The oligarch estates in Monaco. The kleptocratic wealth flowing through Western financial systems. Countries that score well domestically can still function as global money laundromats. That caveat matters. But for the purposes of this argument—whether Ukraine’s public institutions are too corrupt to receive and account for international support—the CPI is the relevant instrument.
III. Ukraine: A Measurable Pattern of Improvement
Start where the critics always start: 2012.
Ukraine scored 26 out of 100 that year. That is a bad score. Viktor Yanukovych was president, the head of a kleptocratic system that functioned less as a government than as a protection racket for oligarchs. Corruption was not a feature of his administration. It was the architecture. The judiciary answered to power. Procurement was a system of extraction. State assets were personal property.
In 2013, the score dropped to 25. Then Yanukovych made his final fatal calculation—rejecting the EU Association Agreement in favor of a Russian counter-offer—and the streets of Kyiv filled with people who had been living with the results of that system their entire lives. The Maidan wasn’t just about European integration. It was about a population that had watched its country looted for twenty years and decided it was finished watching.
Yanukovych fled to Russia in February 2014. The score that year: 26. The reform period had begun.
What followed was not dramatic. Reform never is. It is slow, contested, partial, and exhausting. But it moved in one direction.
2015: 27. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine—NABU—was established. For the first time, Ukraine had an independent prosecutorial body with a mandate to pursue high-level corruption without political interference.
2016: 29. The ProZorro electronic procurement system launched publicly. Every government contract above a threshold now ran through an open platform. Journalists, watchdogs, and the public could see who was bidding, who was winning, and for how much. The World Bank called it one of the most effective procurement transparency systems in the world.
2017: 30. 2018: 32—the largest single-year jump in the post-Maidan period to that point. Progress was uneven. Judicial reform moved slowly. Asset declarations faced political resistance. But the infrastructure of accountability was being built, piece by piece, under sustained pressure from civil society, international partners, and Ukrainians themselves who had decided the old system was unacceptable.
Then 2019: 30. A two-point drop. Transparency International Ukraine documented the regression explicitly—noted weakening in anti-corruption institutions, political interference in prosecutorial independence. The score does not lie for anyone.
But here is what the critics never acknowledge: the system self-corrected. Civil society pushed back. International pressure held. By 2020, the score was 33. By 2022—the year Russia launched its full-scale invasion—it was 33 again. By 2023, it was 36. The largest three-point gain in the entire fourteen-year period, achieved while the country was fighting a ground war against the largest military force in Europe, while Kyiv was absorbing missile strikes, while frontline cities were being shelled to rubble.
2025: 36. Transparency International’s analysis, released on February 10th of this year, identified Ukraine as one of the countries whose improvement since 2012 stands among the most significant globally—alongside Estonia, South Korea, and a handful of others. In 2025, Ukraine was the only country in its immediate region to improve its score. Every neighbor—Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Moldova—declined or held flat. Ukraine improved.
Countries at war almost always backslide on corruption. Emergency powers concentrate authority. Procurement becomes opaque. Oversight institutions get sidelined. The historical pattern is clear and documented. Ukraine did not follow it. That is not a talking point. It is a trend line.
IV. The United States: Decline in Plain Sight
In 2012, the United States scored 73 on the CPI. Rank: 19th in the world. Unambiguously in the upper tier of democratic governance.
The number moved up slightly through 2015, peaking at 76, rank 16th. Then it started moving the other way.
2016: 74. The first meaningful drop in years.
2017: 75. A brief partial recovery.
2018: 71, rank 22nd. A four-point collapse in a single year. Transparency International noted it directly—the United States had dropped out of the top 20 for the first time since the modern CPI methodology was established. The report cited attacks on the rule of law and the erosion of checks and balances. Not Democratic talking points. Not Republican talking points. Institutional assessment from analysts whose job is to watch governments function.
2019: 69. 2020: 67. 2021: 67. 2022: 69. A brief partial recovery, then stability.
2024: 65. A record low for the period. Transparency International named the United States explicitly among the countries that scored their lowest-ever CPI that year. The 2025 global report—released this February, covering 2025 data—moved the number to 64, rank 30th. Thirteen points below the 2015 peak. Eleven rank positions lower than a decade ago.
It was against this backdrop—the United States at its lowest recorded institutional integrity score—that Donald Trump stood at Mar-a-Lago on February 18, 2025, and said: “I believe President Zelenskyy said last week that he doesn’t know where half of the money is that we gave him. Well, we gave them, I believe $350 billion, but let’s say it’s something less than that.… But where is all the money that’s been given? Where is it going? And I’ve never seen an accounting of it. We give hundreds of billions of dollars. I don’t see any accounting.”
Let’s be precise about what happened there. The President of the United States—leading a government whose own CPI score had just hit a thirteen-year low—stood before cameras and questioned Ukrainian accountability for funds that, by every independent audit conducted by the EU, the IMF, and the U.S. Government Accountability Office, have been tracked, reported, and documented. The claim that there is “no accounting” is not a policy critique. It is a fabrication deployed at the moment its speaker was most vulnerable to the same charge.
What does a thirteen-point drop represent in CPI terms? Consider the company the United States now keeps at that score range. A score of 64 places the U.S. well below where it was, by a measurable, documented, year-over-year trajectory. The causes are structural: politicization of prosecutorial functions, conflicts of interest normalized in executive leadership, erosion of independent oversight, money in politics, and the weakening of accountability mechanisms that were once considered foundational.
The United States is not Ukraine. But the direction is not reassuring. And the politicians deploying Ukraine’s corruption score as a disqualifying argument have, in many cases, presided over the years during which their own country’s score collapsed.
That is not an abstraction. It is a data point.
V. Russia: Permanently Near the Bottom
Russia scored 28 in 2012. In 2025, Russia scored 22, ranked 157th out of 182 countries.
The range of movement over fourteen years: between 26 and 30. Russia has never broken 30 in the post-2012 period. It has spent most of those years trapped between 28 and 29.
This is not stagnation in the conventional sense. Russia is not a country trying to fight corruption and failing. Russia is a country where corruption is the system. It is the operating mechanism by which the Kremlin controls oligarchs, oligarchs control regional governors, regional governors control local officials, and local officials control everyone else. The arrangement is not a dysfunction. It is a feature. Loyalty is purchased, maintained, and enforced through selective prosecution of financial crimes—meaning corruption is permitted for allies and weaponized against opponents.
Transparency International Russia—the independent chapter that documented this year after year—was forced into exile by the Kremlin. They operate outside Russia now. Their analysis has not changed.
The full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 accelerated the existing trajectory. Military procurement became a black hole. Wartime secrecy provided legal cover for the elimination of whatever transparent contracting had previously existed. Defense contracts were awarded without competitive bidding, without civilian oversight, without publication. TI-Russia noted that the war had “turned military procurement into a powerful driver of corruption” at every level of the system.
Into this environment—documented, peer-reviewed, and freely available to any journalist with an internet connection—Tucker Carlson stepped in February 2025 to claim that U.S. weapons sent to Ukraine were being resold on the black market, diverted “to drug cartels.” The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry formally denied the allegation. No evidence was produced. The claim traveled regardless, shared by the same accounts that amplify Russian state media narratives. It is worth noting that the Kremlin’s own information warfare apparatus has made near-identical claims for three years. The convergence is not coincidental.
2023: 26. 2024: 22—the worst score in Russian CPI history, by TI-Russia’s own assessment. 2025: 22 again, with the rank worsening to 157th simply because more countries were added to the index.
The comparison that gets deployed—Ukraine is corrupt, Russia is corrupt, why choose sides—is analytically dishonest at the level of basic arithmetic. Ukraine in 2025: 36, improving, with active anti-corruption prosecutions, independent oversight bodies, and a civil society that shut down a flawed judicial appointment earlier this year by simply refusing to accept it. Russia in 2025: 22, declining, with its independent anti-corruption watchdog in exile and its military contractors operating in complete opacity.
These are not equivalent situations with equivalent scores. They are not even close.
VI. Hungary: The Hypocrisy Case Study
Viktor Orbán has blocked EU aid packages to Ukraine more times than most people can count. He has vetoed opening EU accession chapters for Ukraine. He has used Hungary’s EU membership—and the leverage that comes with it—to delay, dilute, and obstruct every significant European commitment to Ukrainian defense.
His stated concern, deployed repeatedly in Brussels and in domestic political theater, centers on corruption.
In an interview with the French weekly Le Point in December 2023, Orbán was unambiguous: “Ukraine is known as one of the most corrupt countries in the world. This is a joke!”
The casual dismissal—”This is a joke!”—is deliberate. It forecloses engagement. It doesn’t argue. It sneers. The implication is that any serious person knows Ukraine is irredeemably corrupt, and that supporting it is therefore absurd. It is the language of contempt, not policy analysis. And it comes from a man whose country was, at that precise moment, the most corrupt in the European Union.
Two years later, on December 5, 2025, Orbán was still running the same script. On X: “The EU is drowning in corruption.… Corruption in Ukraine should be called out by the EU, but once again it’s the same old story: Brussels and Kyiv shielding each other instead of confronting the truth.” And on November 22, 2025, referencing a Ukrainian corruption case: “Now a corruption scandal reveals vast sums evaporating into thin air. Yet some claim this is an argument for EU membership. Absurd.”
Note the mechanism. A corruption scandal in Ukraine is cited as proof that Ukraine cannot be trusted. A corruption scandal involving Hungary—and there are many—is reframed as Brussels overreach, political targeting, or Western imperialism. The standard applied to Ukraine does not apply at home. It never does.
Transparency International Hungary would like a word.
Hungary’s CPI score in 2012: 55, ranked 46th in the world. At the time, Hungary was a functioning EU member state with institutional integrity concerns but nothing that placed it outside the European mainstream.
In 2025, Hungary scored 40, ranked 84th. A fifteen-point collapse over thirteen years. For three consecutive years, Hungary has finished last among all 27 EU member states on the CPI. TI Hungary has documented the mechanisms in precise detail: media ownership concentrated in Orbán-allied hands, judicial appointments politicized, procurement directed toward government-connected companies, EU funds used as instruments of patronage, and an independent anti-corruption body—TI Hungary itself—targeted by state investigation under a “sovereignty protection” law that grants the government sweeping authority to investigate “anyone” for “anything.”
Orbán’s counterpart in Slovakia, Prime Minister Robert Fico, has been running the same argument in EU closed-door sessions. According to diplomatic briefings reported by Reuters from an October 2023 EU summit, Fico cited “endemic corruption” in Ukraine as a reason to oppose the 50 billion euro aid package under discussion. Endemic. Meaning native to the environment, inherent to the organism. Not a problem to be solved—a characteristic to be managed around, preferably by withholding support.
In 2024, the EU took the unprecedented step of permanently revoking more than one billion euros in cohesion policy funding from Hungary due to rule-of-law failures. Not suspended. Not conditioned. Permanently revoked.
The 2025 TI global report named Hungary explicitly among countries showing “long-term, structural erosion of integrity systems driven by democratic backsliding, institutional weakening, and entrenched patronage networks.”
Let that sit for a moment. The man blocking Ukraine’s path to European institutions on corruption grounds leads a country that Transparency International has placed in the same analytical category as Venezuela and Syria when describing the structural drivers of its decline.
Orbán’s corruption argument against Ukraine is not a policy position. It is a deflection. It is a man standing in a burning house telling his neighbors their smoke alarm is too loud.
VII. The Big Lie, Confronted
Here is the comparison the critics refuse to make.
CountryCPI Score 2012CPI Score 2025ChangeDirectionUkraine2636+10ImprovingUnited States7364-9DecliningRussia2822-6DecliningHungary5540-15Collapsing
Ukraine started the period with the worst score of any country in this table. It ends the period as the only country in this table moving in the right direction.
The United States, which has been the primary source of the “too corrupt” criticism in American political discourse, has shed nine points in thirteen years. The senators who stood on the floor of the chamber and questioned whether Ukraine deserved support were doing so in a country that just recorded its lowest CPI score since the modern measurement methodology was established.
Senator Vance’s formulation—that Ukraine has “the most corrupt leadership anywhere in the world”—was stated in the same year that the United States dropped to rank 24th globally on the very scale he declined to cite. It was stated on a Heritage Foundation stage, to an audience that understands what institutional integrity measurements are, by a man who chose not to use them.
Congresswoman Greene’s assertion that the entire U.S.-Ukraine relationship consists of “money being laundered through a foreign corrupt state” was posted to X in April 2024—the same month that Ukraine’s ProZorro procurement system was processing billions in transparent, publicly audited government contracts, and two months before the EU certified Ukraine’s progress on anti-corruption benchmarks as sufficient to open formal accession negotiations.
Tucker Carlson, writing on X in November 2025, made perhaps the most specific claim of the cycle: “For months, the Wall Street Journal has held a story detailing the personal corruption of Andrii Yermak, the second most powerful man in Ukraine. Yermak has skimmed hundreds of millions in American tax dollars meant for Ukraine aid.” The Wall Street Journal had, in fact, published no such story. The claim was, in the most literal sense, invented. It appeared at a moment when Carlson was openly positioning himself as an opponent of any peace settlement that did not reflect Russian terms—framing the corruption allegation not as a reform demand but as a reason to terminate support entirely.
The Yermak allegation deserves a precise accounting—because precision is exactly what its amplifiers refused to apply.
There were investigative actions connected to broader anti-corruption probes involving figures in Yermak’s orbit. Searches were conducted. Documents were reviewed. Anti-corruption investigators did their jobs. That is the factual record, and it is also, when reported accurately, a demonstration of Ukraine’s anti-corruption architecture functioning—not failing. Independent investigative bodies operating under wartime conditions, pursuing leads, executing legal process. That is what accountability looks like in practice.
Here is what did not happen. Yermak was not formally charged. He was not served with a notice of suspicion—the specific procedural step under Ukrainian law that designates someone an official suspect. No court made any finding of wrongdoing against him. No indictment was filed. The investigative activity that occurred was real; the conclusions drawn from it in certain Western media ecosystems were not.
The inflation happened fast and followed a recognizable pattern. Searches become a raid. A raid becomes an exposure. An exposure becomes a bust. A bust becomes proof. By the time the amplification cycle completed, Carlson and allied commentators were presenting investigative procedural activity as confirmed criminal guilt—and using that fabricated conclusion to argue that Ukraine’s leadership was irredeemably corrupt and that any peace terms favoring Kyiv were therefore unearned.
This is how information warfare works at the operational level. It does not require a lie from the first sentence. It requires a real event—investigators conducting searches—stripped of its legal context, projected through a narrative frame, and repeated until the distorted version crowds out the accurate one. The procedural distinction between a search and a charge, between a probe and a conviction, between investigative activity and proven guilt, is not a technicality. It is the entire difference between a functioning justice system and a corrupt one. Countries with functioning anti-corruption institutions conduct searches. Countries without them don’t bother.
Subsequent reporting clarified that there was no formal case against Yermak, no notice of suspicion issued, no charges pending. That correction traveled considerably less far than the original allegation. It always does. The goal was never accuracy. The goal was to attach a name, a dollar figure, and a verdict to a target—and to do it at a moment when U.S. political support for Ukraine was being actively renegotiated. The Yermak narrative was not journalism. It was positioning.
Russia, the country that invaded Ukraine and occupies approximately one-fifth of its territory, sits fourteen points below Ukraine on the same scale—and is declining. The suggestion that Ukraine’s corruption is a legitimate reason to abandon it to Russian occupation is an argument that the comparison data obliterates. You do not hand a country to a state that scores twenty-two out of a hundred because you have concerns about its thirty-six.
Hungary, which has weaponized the corruption argument inside EU institutions more effectively than any other government, has dropped fifteen points in thirteen years. It is now the most corrupt country in the European Union, by the same measurement it claims to be applying to Ukraine.
The argument is not principled. It is opportunistic. It reaches for a legitimate concept—anti-corruption standards—and uses it as a rhetorical bludgeon in service of outcomes that have nothing to do with institutional integrity.
The honest framing is this:
Ukraine is reforming under fire—building independent oversight institutions, maintaining open procurement systems, prosecuting senior officials, and improving its score every time the pressure eases even slightly, including during the largest land war in Europe since 1945.
The United States is backsliding in peacetime—losing nine points over a decade while its politicians lecture other nations about institutional standards.
Russia is structurally predatory—corruption is not a problem to be solved but a system to be maintained, and every year of full-scale war has made it more entrenched, more opaque, and more dangerous.
Hungary is a case study in deliberate democratic dismantlement—deploying the language of anti-corruption to shield a system that Transparency International has documented as one of the EU’s most serious governance failures.
These are the facts. They are measured, published, and available to anyone who looks.
VIII. Why This Matters Now
The aid debates are not over. The alliance debates are not over. The argument that Ukraine does not deserve Western support because it is irredeemably corrupt will be made again—in Washington, in Budapest, in conservative media ecosystems from Bratislava to San Francisco—every time a funding vote approaches, every time a weapons package is debated, every time the political will to sustain support requires a fresh test.
The quotes assembled in this piece are not outliers. They represent a coordinated rhetorical posture—consistent in its framing, consistent in its targets, consistent in its strategic purpose. Missing funds. Yacht-buying ministers. Money laundered through a corrupt state. Weapons to drug cartels. Hundreds of millions skimmed. Each claim is designed to do the same thing: make the corruption of Ukraine’s leadership feel self-evident, permanent, and disqualifying. None of the people making these claims have cited the CPI. None have cited the IMF’s Ukraine aid tracking reports. None have cited the EU’s certification of Ukraine’s anti-corruption progress. They have cited each other.
The CPI data matters because it forecloses a specific form of dishonesty. It establishes that corruption is not a fixed cultural condition but a measurable, year-over-year institutional phenomenon. It establishes that Ukraine’s trajectory is one of sustained improvement. It establishes that the critics deploying the corruption argument are, in most cases, representing countries whose own scores have moved in the opposite direction during the same period.
There is a deeper issue here as well. Democratic accountability—the principle that governments answer to citizens and that institutions exist to constrain power rather than concentrate it—is not an abstraction. It is the thing being measured. The countries that score well on the CPI share a common feature: their citizens have real mechanisms to challenge power, expose abuse, and demand accountability. The countries that score poorly share the opposite: power is uncontestable, transparency is punished, and institutions serve the powerful rather than constrain them.
Ukraine has been building those mechanisms in the middle of a war. That is not a small thing. It is, in fact, the entire argument—not just for aid, but for the principle that sovereignty and democratic development matter, and that the international community should have a stake in whether they survive.
Alliance credibility depends on the argument being made honestly. If the West says it stands for democratic accountability, the corruption scorecard has to be applied consistently. Applied consistently, it does not support abandoning Ukraine. It supports the opposite conclusion.
Key Takeaways
Ukraine’s CPI score has improved by 10 points since 2012—from 26 to 36—including during full-scale war, when most countries under military pressure backslide on corruption.
The United States has declined by 9 points in the same period, recording its lowest-ever CPI score in 2024. The politicians most aggressively deploying the “Ukraine is corrupt” argument represent a country whose own institutional integrity score has collapsed.
Russia sits at 22 out of 100—14 points below Ukraine—and is declining. It represents the structural floor of what corruption as governance looks like.
Hungary, Ukraine’s most persistent critic inside EU institutions on corruption grounds, has lost 15 points since 2012 and is currently the most corrupt country in the European Union.
Transparency International named Ukraine among the countries showing the most significant long-term improvement globally since 2012.
Countries at war almost always register CPI declines. Ukraine has not. That is a documented anomaly that demands honest acknowledgment.
The corruption argument against supporting Ukraine is not principled. It is selective, inconsistent, and contradicted by the only rigorous annual measurement of the phenomenon that exists.
Every public figure cited in this piece who has deployed the “Ukraine is corrupt” framing has done so without citing the Corruption Perceptions Index, without citing independent audit reports on aid disbursement, and without applying the same standard to their own governments. That is not an oversight. It is the strategy.
Corruption is not a slogan. It is a trend line.
Ukraine’s line goes up.
The people telling you otherwise are hoping you won’t check.
Chris Sampson is an independent journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Kyiv, Ukraine, where he has lived continuously since January 2022. He is the author of “Hacking ISIS” and Editor-in-Chief of NatSecMedia. Data in this article is drawn from Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index reports, 2012–2025.
Source data: Transparency International, Corruption Perceptions Index, transparency.org. CPI scores are comparable year-over-year from 2012 onward following the methodology revision establishing the fixed 0–100 scale. Primary source links for all quotes cited are available upon request.