Ukraine’s anti-corruption activists building supply chain they hope will stretch from Polish border to front lines

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Until a week ago, Iryna Shyba and Polina Li thought the battle of their lives would be the one to rid Ukraine of endemic corruption. Today, as a real war consumes their country, they find themselves making strange alliances as they shift their efforts to a massive humanitarian operation that aims to bring food to Kyiv and other besieged cities.

Ms. Shyba and Ms. Li are just two of a group of Ukraine’s young reformers – many of them judicial specialists who were working on rule-of-law projects funded by the European Union – who are now building a supply chain they hope will stretch from the Polish border to the cities on the front line. It will deliver everything from bulletproof vests and walkie-talkies to McDonald’s hamburgers.

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They do so mostly out of a sense of civic responsibility, wanting to play a role in an impressive countrywide effort to resist the week-old Russian invasion. But they also do so knowing that people like them – young, Western-minded reformers who want to see their country join the European Union – could be targets should Russian President Vladimir Putin succeed in his campaign to subjugate Ukraine.

The activists work these days out of what is normally a trendy wine bar in the old city of Lviv. Instead of live music and European food, the Vinoteca Praha now produces 3,000 lunch bags a day, each stuffed with a meat or cheese sandwich, as well as an apple. The local McDonald’s contributes another 3,000 hamburgers per day to the effort.

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During the first few days of the war, the volunteers were making deliveries to the long lines of Ukrainians stranded at the Polish border waiting to flee the country. Now, as those lines on the Ukrainian side have eased, they are delivering meals to internally displaced persons from other parts of Ukraine who are now living in Lviv, as well as to the reservist soldiers who guard checkpoints around the city.

Plans are being developed to organize relief convoys that will bring food and other supplies to civilians and soldiers in cities on the front line in the days ahead.

“We are not in need of food here. The most important thing is to redirect all our humanitarian aid to Kyiv and the east,” said Ms. Li, an expert on judicial reform at Pravo Justice, a non-governmental organization funded by the European Union.

But while the activists say they are not suspending their efforts to clear out what they see as a corrupt old guard of judges in the country, they say the war effort is forging some surprising partnerships.

“A few days ago, I was doing reforms and fighting corruption in the judiciary. Now, we have judges who we perceived to be corrupt helping – calling and texting activists and saying they want to do something together, saying ‘let’s make a difference,’ ” said Ms. Shyba, the deputy head of the EU Anti-Corruption Initiative, another judicial reform NGO.

“Yesterday, we had a very famous and infamous Ukrainian politician here giving a lot of money to support us,” said Ms. Li, laughing as Ms. Shyba inadvertently let slip the name of a millionaire former presidential candidate. “He is providing a lot of food and he’s helping the army a lot because I think they realize that all their money that they received in maybe a corrupt way doesn’t matter if there is no Ukraine.”

The reformers say they are optimistic they and their country will somehow prevail. They compare the situation in Ukraine with late 2013 and early 2014, when the pro-Russian regime of Viktor Yanukovych was using violence against pro-EU protesters who had taken to the streets in Kyiv and other cities. There were dark days, they recall, before Ukraine’s pro-Western revolution eventually prevailed and Mr. Yanukovych was ousted.

“I see a very similar mood of people, gathering money, gathering food and so on. This is really the same as Maidan. Of course, the level of problems is much higher, and the number of people getting killed is much higher,” said Victor Kylymar, an anti-corruption expert with Ms. Shyba’s organization, who took part in the 2014 uprising.

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The personal risks for the reformers are also very real.

In a televised speech days before the beginning of the invasion, during which Mr. Putin recognized the independence of the southeastern Donbas region of Ukraine, the 69-year-old Russian leader laid out a long list of grievances with the West and Ukraine.

In the middle of his complaints about the eastward expansion of the NATO military alliance and the supposedly “Nazi” government of President Volodymyr Zelensky (who is Jewish), Mr. Putin launched into a surprisingly detailed diatribe about Ukraine’s fight against corruption and its efforts at judicial reform.

It’s a fight that has been supported by funding from Western governments, including Canada’s, leading Mr. Putin to the conclusion that “there is no independent judiciary in Ukraine” – a country he described as “a colony with a puppet regime.”

Mr. Putin raged about a specific point: “The Kyiv authorities, at the West’s demand, delegated the priority right to select members of the supreme judicial bodies, the [High] Council of Justice and the High Qualifications Commission of Judges, to international organizations,” he said. “Are the Ukrainian people aware that this is how their country is managed?”

Ms. Shyba believes the rant revealed one of the reasons that Mr. Putin decided to attack Ukraine. “He’s pissed off that Ukraine is becoming a democratic state where there is rule of law, and which could show an example to Russian citizens how it should be. It’s not only about NATO, it’s about Ukraine making some progress on anti-corruption and judicial reform.”

Oleksandr Sydielnikov is one of those whom Mr. Putin indirectly accuses of covertly taking over the judiciary. In fact, what he and his colleague Denys Zboroshenko do is vet judicial candidates for possible conflicts of interest, or suggestions of corruption. The effort included checks such as whether the property and lifestyle of a would-be judge corresponded with their official income.

“We were so happy that we made Putin furious,” Mr. Sydielnikov said with a laugh. But the 30-year-old – who was born one month after Ukraine gained its independence from the Soviet Union – acknowledged that it was also deeply worrying.

Mr. Sydielnikov said he and the other reformers are staying to help their country as long as they can. “Only in the worst-case scenario, only if we see the Russian army near Lviv, we probably should escape. Otherwise, we will fight, and we will support our army and our people because we are the first potential victims of his regime.”

He said his wife, Svetlana Maistriuk, a communications specialist for the National Agency on Corruption Prevention, who had previously worked for USAID, the U.S. government’s international development arm, had already decided it was unsafe to remain in Ukraine. “Now she’s in Poland, buying [bulletproof] vests” for the volunteers, Mr. Sydielnikov said.

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