Poll: Ukrainians more threatened by corruption than by Russia

An explosive new poll suggests that a majority of Ukrainians feel their future is more threatened by corruption in the government than by Russian military aggression.

Given that Ukraine’s anti-corruption watchdog just charged Andriy Yermak, former head of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office, with money laundering and corruption, the results of this survey are particularly salient.

The Kyiv International Institute of Sociology’s (KIIS) poll, conducted between April 20 and 27 and released on May 6, asked Ukrainians who lived in territory controlled by Ukraine what they “consider the biggest threat to Ukraine’s development.” They were given two choices: government corruption or Russia’s military aggression. Some 54% said they were more concerned with corruption; 39% identified the Russians.

Additional new polling conducted by KIIS suggests that not only concern with corruption is going up, but that trust in Zelensky is going in the wrong direction too — though the majority of those polled still trust the Ukrainian president rather than not, 58% to 36%. This represents a 4-point drop from the 62% who trusted him only a month earlier. Complaints such as the continuing war, unspecified “unfulfilled promises,” and corruption topped the list among those who lacked full faith in the Ukrainian president.

These criticisms are endemic and reflect a larger problem for Ukraine, say critics. Sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko of Freie Universität Berlin told Responsible Statecraft that the concern with corruption identified in the polling shows that “Ukrainians fundamentally distrust their state and the elite and this has not changed during the ‘existential’ war that was supposed to unite the country.”

Additionally, Ishchenko asserts that the “crisis of legitimacy” has harmed the war effort because as “the massive draft dodging and desertion” shows, Ukrainians “do not want to sacrifice themselves” for a state they do not trust.

A breakdown of the people who said they did not trust Zelensky found that 20% identified corruption as the cause. And, in that regard, things could be getting worse. Aside of Yermak's charges on Monday, new revelations about last year’s investigation into a $100 million kickback scheme could add to the damage.

In November 2025, Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) cooperated in “a major anti-corruption operation” that led to charges being laid against multiple high-level officials. Some of them inhabited Zelensky’s innermost circle. Some of them have now been suspended or fired or have resigned. Several more have been implicated.

Timur Mindich, a close friend of Zelensky and co-owner of his Kvartal 95 media production company, may have been the ringleader of the operation. According to NABU, Timur Mindich, “controlled the work of the so-called ‘laundry room,’ where criminally-obtained funds were laundered.”

As NABU describes it, the “high-level criminal organization” bribed energy contractors between 10 and 15 percent of their contracts’ value. But what really stung Ukrainians is that some of those contracts were for defensive fortifications to protect energy infrastructure that was being bombed by Russia. And while those strikes left many Ukrainians without power, tapes obtained by NABU seem to contain conversations about delaying these fortification projects to obtain maximum profit on kickbacks from more lucrative alternatives.

Now a new set of tapes has been released that brings the corruption scandal back into the attention of Ukrainians and could make concern with corruption and distrust in Zelensky even worse.

The just-released tapes appear to show people who are very close to Zelensky, including Mindich, influencing then-Defence Minister Rustem Umerov’s decisions on defense contracts. The tapes also appear to capture conversations about luxury estates that were financed by the corruption scheme, including one that is allegedly for Yermak.

Mykola Hladyshchenko, a high ranking official of a state-owned bank at the centre of the corruption scandal, temporarily suspended himself after the new tapes implicated his bank in the scandal. But the biggest official yet to be charged in the wake of the new tapes is Yermak.

Nevertheless, throughout the war, Ukrainians have proven their resilience and their optimism. Despite years of hardship, asked whether they saw their country as a “prosperous EU member” or a “ruined country” ten years from now, a full 63% still opted for the optimistic choice. That is down only 3% since the beginning of the year. But corruption does negatively impact Ukrainians domestically while harming their chances for European Union accession, Western integration, and European support. The worsening kick back corruption scandal will only reinforce this pattern of distrust and make Ukrainians’ fears for the future of their country worse.