Digital government can remove the official who demands a bribe, but never the ministers who dismantle the watchdogs that might catch them.
On March 19 Kyrylo Kryvolap and his colleagues at Civitta, a consultancy, published a study that had taken most of a year to complete. Commissioned by Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation, it worked out that Diia, the country’s flagship state app, had generated 184 billion hryvnia (around 3.6 billion euros) in savings and anti-corruption effect since 2020, roughly one hundred times what it cost to build. Some of the arithmetic was mundane. Registering a car dropped from 5,398 hryvnia to 1,369 hryvnia once the process moved online. Filing an annual tax declaration fell from 467 hryvnia to 182.
Mykhailo Fedorov has made that sort of saving his life’s work. In 2021 he stood before Ukraine’s construction lobby and reported that digitising the country’s notoriously graft-ridden building permits had already yielded 1.5 billion hryvnia in anti-corruption effect that year alone. “This is money that people did not bring to corrupt offices,” he said. Six years running the digital ministry proved credential enough that in January President Volodymyr Zelensky handed him something rather larger: the defence ministry, then struggling with desertion and stalled drone output. Oleksandr Borniakov, his deputy and the architect of the Diia.City tax regime, now runs digital transformation in his place.
Zoom out and Ukraine’s story sits inside a bleaker regional picture. Lidija Prokic, a regional adviser at Transparency International, published her assessment on February 10, the day her organisation’s Corruption Perceptions Index went live. Eastern Europe and Central Asia scored an average of 34 out of 100, among the region’s worst showings in years, with six of nineteen countries sliding backwards. Kazakhstan and Armenia moved the other way, gaining ten and eleven points respectively to reach 38 and 46, the sharpest improvements anywhere in the bloc.
The watchdog problem
Kassym-Jomart Tokayev gave 2026 its own name, declaring it Kazakhstan’s Year of Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence. His prime minister, Olzhas Bektenov, told a cabinet meeting in January that “every citizen must feel the practical effect of this work.” Days earlier Zhaslan Madiyev, the deputy prime minister running the brief, had ordered every ministry onto a single platform called QazTech, banning new information systems built outside it. eGov Mobile handled 54 million transactions in 2025.
On June 30 a presidential decree abolished Kazakhstan’s Anti-Corruption Agency as an independent institution, folding its functions into the National Security Committee. The committee’s ordinary remit covers counter-intelligence and border security. It reported recovering 16.1 billion tenge (around 29.7 million euros) in corruption cases in 2025. The agency that used to do this work answered to its own charter. The committee that replaced it answers to the president.
Shalva Papuashvili, the speaker of Georgia’s parliament, signed what he called the “law on transparency of foreign influence” in June 2024, requiring any NGO or media outlet receiving a fifth of its funding from abroad to register as an agent of foreign influence or face fines. Delia Ferreira Rubio, the chair of Transparency International, had already warned that the bill would “derail future progress … including anti-corruption.” Parliament passed it anyway, and among the organisations now required to register is Transparency International’s own Georgian chapter, the body that supplies the corruption data used to judge the government in the first place. Georgia’s score held at 50 regardless; its citizens can still renew a passport or register a business online without any trouble at all.
Volodymyr Zelensky signed a law on July 2025 stripping NABU and SAPO, Ukraine’s anti-corruption bureau and prosecutor’s office, of their independence, handing the prosecutor-general power to reassign or close their cases. Protesters filled the streets of Kyiv, Lviv and Dnipro, the first demonstrations against the government since the war began. Nine days later Zelensky signed a second law reversing the first. Diia kept issuing car registrations and tax declarations the entire time. The fight over who could investigate a minister never touched it: proof, perhaps, that a government can run flawless digital services while a completely separate, much more political fight goes on over who gets to hold it to account.
Photo: Dreamstime.