A few days ago I called Oleksandr Abakumov, a senior detective at the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine. I wanted to ask him about his investigation into a kickback scheme in his country’s energy industry. While we were talking, I got interested in Abakumov himself. As he was explaining his motivations, I was struck by the surprising contrast between people like him—the Ukrainian civil servants and civil-society activists who have been demanding transparency from their leaders for two decades—and the American and Russian negotiators who met this week in Moscow, perhaps to decide Ukraine’s fate.

[Anne Applebaum: Why does Steve Witkoff keep taking Russia’s side?]

Ukraine is fighting for its survival. Drones and missiles hit Ukrainian cities most nights. Many Ukrainians nevertheless want, even now, to have a government that’s accountable to the public. Meanwhile, American and Russian kleptocrats are circling the country, looking for ways to do deals that benefit themselves.

Abakumov’s career was directly shaped by his country’s history. Until 2014, he was a police detective in the city of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine. At the beginning of that year, a series of mass protests in Kyiv persuaded Ukraine’s corrupt, authoritarian, pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych, to flee the country. Furious at the loss of their puppet, the Russians immediately invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine, including Luhansk. Ukrainian elections brought a new president to power. Popular demand for reform led to the creation of new institutions, including the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, or NABU, which has from the beginning intended to eliminate high-level state corruption.

Abakumov’s life changed too. He left occupied Luhansk and moved to Kyiv. In 2016, he went to work for NABU, taking a job that he considers to be a great honor. Certainly, NABU is popular: Last summer, after President Volodymyr Zelensky sought to shut the agency down, Ukrainians organized the largest mass protests the country has seen since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022. The president changed his mind, and the agency remained open. The job also appeals to Abakumov’s patriotism. He believes that if he can help eliminate high-level corruption, then he can help Ukraine preserve its sovereignty and its democracy. “Corruption equals Russia, and we are not Russia,” he told me.

In their investigation, dubbed “Operation Midas,” Abakumov and his colleagues have accused several people in the government of taking money from contracts involving the state nuclear-power company—a particularly sensitive charge at a moment when many Ukrainians live without electricity, thanks to Russian bombing campaigns.

Foreign coverage of “Operation Midas” often relies on the passive voice, as if the scandal has a will of its own (“Scandal Consumes Top Aide”). But people such as Abakumov, who is a part of the Ukrainian state, worked to make the scandal public. They have interrogated cabinet ministers, published surveillance recordings, searched apartments. The Ukrainian Parliament has dismissed two ministers. Tymur Mindich, a former business partner of Zelensky, has fled the country. Late last month, the president’s closest adviser, Andriy Yermak, resigned following a search of his apartment. All of this means that the political system is healthy, operating according to the law.

I should note that quite a few Ukrainians, and indeed many Europeans, believe that the investigation has somehow been assisted by the Trump administration, as a way of weakening Zelensky to force him to capitulate. Given that the Trump administration has stopped advocating for anti-corruption policies around the world and, following the closure of USAID, has dramatically decreased cooperation with Ukrainian law enforcement, this seems implausible.

[Anne Applebaum: The murky plan that ensures a future war]

Abakumov told me that he believes corruption, not transparency, weakens Ukraine. If Ukraine tolerates corruption, he said, “this is the way we lose, during the war, during negotiations, during rebuilding Ukraine.” Daria Kaleniuk, one of Ukraine’s most prominent anti-corruption activists, told me that with this investigation, “we have the chance to save the country and make it stronger.”

These beliefs are radically different from those held by Ukraine’s opponents. From the beginning of his career, Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, has sought to enrich himself and his entourage at the expense of ordinary Russians. Putin himself was a pioneer in the use of secret offshore accounts and shell companies to transfer state assets into his own pockets. He has also spent years seeking to prevent those ordinary Russians from finding out about his finances.

In January 2021, the anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny released a meticulously documented film, Putin’s Palace, which revealed a network of kickbacks and payments to the Russian president far larger, more far-reaching, and more baroque than the scandal under investigation in Ukraine. The result: Navalny, who had just been arrested at the Russian border, was sent to a Siberian prison, where he later died. Putin kept his palace, complete with its private hockey rink and hookah bar, and his money. He blocked all further investigations into his wealth, jailed protesters, drove real journalists out of the country, and launched an invasion of Ukraine.

The Americans taking part in the recent Moscow negotiations are not brutal dictators, but neither are they civil servants acting purely in the interests of transparency, accountability, and patriotism. Steve Witkoff, a real-estate developer, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and the owner of an investment company that received $2 billion from Saudi Arabia, are now conducting the main negotiations. Their Russian counterpart is Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign-wealth fund, which has strong ties with its Saudi counterpart. He is believed to have met Kushner while doing business in the Gulf.

[Franklin Foer: Why the Gulf monarchs shower Trump with gifts]

Last month, The Wall Street Journal revealed that these three businessmen met in Miami Beach in October to discuss not just Ukraine but also future Russian-American business deals. Russian businessmen who are known to be close to Putin have been “dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals” in front of American companies, the Journal explained, to “reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.” Some of the companies have connections with Donald Trump’s family.

[Anne Applebaum: The murky plan that ensures a future war]

Witkoff and Kushner are not taking kickbacks on government contracts, as some Ukrainian officials are now accused of doing. The corruption they represent is more profound: They are using the tools of the American state in a manner that happens to benefit their friends and business partners, even while they do terrible damage to American allies, American alliances, and America’s reputation. This is a conflict of interest on a grand scale, with no real precedent in modern American foreign policy.

In Ukraine, the state itself is investigating the government, the cabinet, even the president’s closest advisers. By contrast, it is impossible to imagine Kash Patel’s FBI investigating anyone in Trump’s White House. Any Russian who investigates Putin goes to jail. The word corruption has many nuances, and we aren’t using enough of them when we talk about Ukraine.