By Hussain Awan
The concept of “strategic corruption”—defined by the U.S. government as “when a government weaponizes corrupt practices as a tenet of its foreign policy”—has recently gained prominence as an important way to understand Russian foreign policy in the former Soviet republics, and elsewhere. The country that has faced the most sustained and systematic Russian state-sponsored strategic corruption campaign is almost certainly Ukraine. For the two decades preceding Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Russia employed a wide variety of corrupt measures to influence Ukrainian politics, including the sale of vast quantities of discounted fossil fuels to bribe pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs and create a political class aligned with Kremlin interests (as exemplified by the “outrageously corrupt” tenure of President Viktor Yanukovych after his election in 2010); the cultivation of sympathetic media empires in the country; and money-driven attempts to discredit American officials perceived as obstacles to Russian influence.
Much has been written on Russia’s use of this sort of strategic corruption. But there’s another aspect of Russia’s strategy that has become especially prominent since the 2022 invasion: using propaganda and disinformation to spread and amplify the narrative that Ukraine is pervasively corrupt. Here lies a paradox: for two decades, Russia deliberately fostered corruption in Ukraine to keep its neighbor firmly under its influence, and now Russia is seeking to leverage Ukraine’s reputation for corrupt practices to undermine Ukraine’s ability to resist Russia’s invasion.
Since 2022, Russia’s narrative on graft in Ukraine has centered around a number of familiar talking points: that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is in the pocket of corrupt Ukrainian oligarchs; that Western aid for Ukraine is being stolen or misused by the country’s defense establishment; and that Ukrainian elites are engaging in rampant profiteering from the war and do not feel its deleterious effects in the same way that everyday citizens do. President Putin has been at the forefront of this messaging push, repeatedly describing the scale of Ukrainian graft as unmatched anywhere else in the world and “in full bloom”; insisting that Ukraine is now “unreformable” and that its citizens thus benefit from Russian intervention; declaring that all Ukrainian politicians (even the pro-Russian Ukrainian figures that Putin had previously propped up) are hopelessly corrupt and would “buy everything” to have their way; and accusing the United States of “directly control[ling]” all of Ukraine’s allegedly dysfunctional anticorruption agencies.
Russia’s strategic messaging campaign goes hand-in-hand with its famed disinformation capabilities, amplifying its demonstrably false narratives through extensive use of social media platforms like TikTok. A case in point is the social media firestorm that contributed to the 2023 dismissal of Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, an otherwise well-respected member of President Zelenskyy’s cabinet. Reznikov was targeted by what a BBC investigation has identified as a concerted misinformation campaign orchestrated by troll farms in Russia on TikTok and other platforms. On TikTok, it consisted of a series of viral videos implying that Reznikov was involved in the procurement fraud scandals that rocked his defense ministry. Other videos alleged that he and his family members were using the illicit gains made from his participation in various kinds of corruption to buy expensive luxury cars and properties across Western Europe, while everyday Ukrainians suffered the economic consequences of the war he was helping to oversee. While the scandals in the defense ministry were real and serious, investigations by Ukrainian anticorruption authorities did not find that Reznikov was involved. Yet the campaign against Reznikov eventually resulted in his dismissal anyway.
Of course, Ukraine still has a serious corruption problem, and not every corruption-related story or scandal pushed by Russia or its agents is false. But Russian propaganda consistently overstates the actual extent of Ukrainian graft and ignores the significant strides Ukraine has recently made in its fight against corruption. Even in wartime, Ukraine has established several new anticorruption agencies, has successfully carried out aggressive investigations into military fraud, and is bringing about a gradual improvement in its anticorruption metrics.
Russia’s propaganda campaign is meant to damage wartime morale, undermine Ukrainians’ trust in their political and military leadership, portray the country as a failed state in need of saving, and corrode the international community’s trust in Ukraine’s ability to continue withstanding the invasion. Recently, with the emergence of domestic polarization in the United States on support for Ukraine, conservative politicians and institutions in the U.S. have adopted the idea that Ukraine is endemically corrupt and likely to waste any aid it is given. And while the U.S. Congress did manage to pass a significant Ukrainian aid package recently, this only occurred after months of delay, and there are other signs that Western support for Ukraine may be beginning to falter.
Russia’s success in using corruption to erode international support for the Zelenskyy government serves as a powerful reminder of why strategic corruption is so dangerous and destabilizing. In this era of strategic corruption and mass disinformation, policymakers must engage vigorously in the development and enforcement of countermeasures that not only seek to put a stop to bribery, embezzlement, or money laundering, but also ensure that their anticorruption efforts are widely publicized, that their portrayals of the problem are accurate and not hyperbolic, and that their enforcement does not fall prey to false stories planted by media manipulation campaigns.
