The Ukraine Corruption Risk Index publishes its May 2026 edition with two figures entering pre-trial detention, a new Critical-band score for a former Supreme Court Chairman, 25 regional mayors added, full parliamentary coverage, a tabbed interface, and a new intelligence layer: Ukrainian Telegram channels.
When we published the first edition of the Ukraine Corruption Risk Index, we made a promise that distinguished it from every other Ukrainian anti-corruption database: it would move. Not annually. Not when a donor organization needed a deliverable. Every month, scored from evidence, with a transparent change log — the way a credit bureau updates a borrower's file, not the way a government commissions a report.
The May 2026 edition is the most significant update since launch. Two new figures enter pre-trial detention. One former Supreme Court Chairman receives new criminal suspicion. The index crosses 400 entries for the first time. Twenty-five regional mayors are scored for the first time. The entire Verkhovna Rada is now represented. And we are announcing an expansion of our intelligence infrastructure that no Ukrainian anti-corruption tool has attempted before.
Some of the people on this index have noticed. We know this because they told us — or because their lawyers told others. That is not a problem. That is the index working exactly as intended.
May 2026 delivered the most consequential single month of anti-corruption enforcement in Ukraine since the Operation Midas arrests of late 2025. Three separate NABU/SAPO developments between May 11 and May 16 triggered score movements across the index.
The Yermak score movement is worth examining closely, because it illustrates the core logic of the index. Yermak first appeared in the High band — scored 788 — when we flagged his proximity to Operation Midas and his role in the July 2025 legislative attack on NABU. His lawyers were unhappy with this characterization at the time. Six months later, NABU searched his home. Two months after that, he resigned. Four months after that, he was charged and taken into detention. The score moved before the charges. That is the point.
"The score moved before the charges. That is the point."
This edition crosses 400 scored entries for the first time, nearly quadrupling the index since its initial publication. The expansion reflects sustained feedback from our readers — American congressional staff, European compliance teams, Ukrainian civil society, and investigative journalists — who made the same request in different ways: go deeper on local power.
The 25 regional mayors were researched individually — not assigned default scores. We reviewed NABU, HACC, and SAPO records; TI Ukraine's Transparent Cities rankings; NACP conflict-of-interest findings; and regional press for each city. The results are not uniform. Andriy Sadovyi of Lviv — the longest-serving mayor in Ukraine, in office since 2006 — is scored Elevated (598) after a reopened criminal case involving land misappropriation, bribery arrests among his subordinates, and three consecutive years in which Lviv ranked first nationally for recorded corruption offenses according to Opendatabot. Ihor Kolykhayev of Kherson is scored Moderate (452) — not for corruption, but because his capture by Russian forces in March 2022 and subsequent prisoner exchange make comprehensive assessment impossible. The nuance matters.
The parliamentary section now covers all active Rada factions: Servant of the People, Opposition Platform — For Life, Batkivshchyna, European Solidarity, Holos, and the various independent and splinter groupings. Figures already in the index on merit — Arakhamia (High, 662), Tymoshenko (High, 659), Levochkin (High, 745), Boiko (High, 679) — retain their individual scores. All other MPs are baselined at their faction's default risk level, with meaningful differentiators applied where adverse findings exist. MPs with NABU plea agreements (Trukhin, Horvat), NABU charges (Isaienko), or treason proceedings (Dubinsky) are scored accordingly.
The most consistent feedback we received after the April edition was simple: the list was too long to navigate. Readers at the State Department, at Kyiv-based law firms doing sanctions compliance work, and at Ukrainian investigative outlets all said the same thing in different words — they wanted to filter by role, not by band.
The May interface introduces eleven category tabs: Leadership, Presidential Office, Cabinet, Deputy Ministers, Parliament, Business, Law & Judiciary, Anti-Corruption Agencies, Military/Intelligence, and Regional. The "All Figures" tab now displays only Moderate, Elevated, High, and Critical entries — suppressing Low-band figures to keep the primary view focused on actionable intelligence. Low-scored figures remain fully accessible through category tabs and the search bar. Nothing is hidden; signal is separated from baseline noise.
"Nothing is hidden. Signal is separated from baseline noise."
We can report, with confidence, that the May edition of the CRI has been read by staff at Transparency International, by members of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, and by staff of the Verkhovna Rada. We know this because they reached out — sometimes to offer corrections, sometimes to dispute scores, sometimes simply to register that they had seen it. We welcome all three.
Several of the figures on the index have, through intermediaries, expressed discomfort with their scores. We will not name them here. We will say only that discomfort is not the same as inaccuracy — and that the appropriate response to a score one believes is wrong is to provide documented evidence to the contrary, which we will review and, if warranted, act on. Our whistleblower and correction channel exists for exactly this purpose.
American investors, policy analysts, and opinion leaders have responded to the index differently. The characterization we hear most often — and which we find apt — is "the first real due diligence tool for Ukraine." A senior analyst at a Washington-based policy institution described the CRI as "the first resource that translates Ukrainian institutional risk into a framework American decision-makers can actually use without needing a PhD in post-Soviet political economy." A fund manager conducting reconstruction due diligence called it "what Moody's would build if Moody's cared about corruption rather than just credit." We are grateful for the recognition and clear-eyed about what it demands: that we continue to earn it every month.
"The first resource that translates Ukrainian institutional risk into a framework American decision-makers can actually use."
Ukraine's parliament is scheduled to receive a formal briefing on the index methodology from civil society partners in June 2026. Several Rada committee staff have already requested access to the underlying change log. We will publish the change log in full — as we do every month. Transparency is not a courtesy we extend. It is the operating condition without which the index means nothing.
The May 2026 edition introduces a new intelligence stream that no Ukrainian anti-corruption tool has formally integrated: systematic monitoring of Ukrainian Telegram channels.
Telegram has become Ukraine's dominant political and intelligence media environment — not because journalists chose it, but because the war made it so. At the front, commanders share operational updates via Telegram. In Kyiv, political insiders leak documents, intercepts, and compromising materials through anonymous channels with hundreds of thousands of followers. Business interests wage proxy wars through channels that post without bylines, disclaimers, or legal accountability. Rumor and verified intelligence flow through the same pipes. The volume is extraordinary. The signal-to-noise ratio, unfiltered, is brutal.
We will not pretend this is easy. Integrating Telegram intelligence responsibly requires distinguishing between channels that have genuine institutional access — leaking real documents from real sources — and channels that are paid disinformation operations, political proxy tools, or simply aggregators with no primary sourcing at all. Ukraine has all three categories, often indistinguishable at first glance. Our methodology: every Telegram-sourced claim that affects a CRI score must be independently corroborated by at least one additional evidence stream before it is incorporated. We will never move a score on the basis of a Telegram post alone.
What Telegram monitoring does is make the index faster. A NABU search that has not yet appeared in formal press — but has been photographed and shared in real time by three separate politically unaffiliated channels — is an event we can integrate in hours rather than days. In an environment where the news cycle moves at the speed of a war, that matters.
We said at launch that score velocity — the rate at which a score moves — is as informative as score level. A figure moving from 480 to 620 in a single month is a signal as important as where they land. The Yermak trajectory bears this out: High in April, Critical by May, in pre-trial detention by mid-May. The CRI did not cause this sequence. It mapped it — and gave every American journalist, congressional staffer, fund manager, and compliance professional who was paying attention the ability to see it coming before it arrived on the wire.
For June 2026, we commit to: continued score updates on all figures with active proceedings; the first Telegram Channel Reliability Index; expanded coverage of Ukraine's regional governance layer including oblast military administrations; and deeper integration of NAZK asset declaration analysis into individual scores. We are also in active development of an alert function — a subscription service that notifies users when a specific figure's score crosses a band threshold. This is what compliance integration looks like in practice.
The index is now read in Washington, Brussels, London, Kyiv, and — we are told — in several offices where the subjects would prefer it wasn't. We take that last data point as the most reliable indicator that the methodology is working.
"The index is now read in offices where the subjects would prefer it wasn't. We take that as the most reliable indicator that the methodology is working."