One year after Ukrainian streets forced the reversal of the anti-NABU law, they did it again — bigger. In eight days of July 2026, cardboard signs brought down the Svyrydenko government's successor arrangement, restored nothing less than the principle that personnel decisions answer to the public, and handed the Corruption Risk Index its most consequential monthly update yet. Here is everything that moved.
Every index update tells you who went up and who went down. This one tells you something bigger: in Ukraine, for the second July in a row, the street proved stronger than the Presidential Office. The July 2026 Corruption Risk Index lands after a month in which a Prime Minister was dismissed, an entire cabinet was reconstituted, the country's most popular minister was fired and the backlash consumed the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. The CRI now scores 386 active figures on the 430–850 scale, with 43 Personae Non Gratae held above the ceiling.
The sequence began as routine political housekeeping and ended as the most serious military-civilian leadership crisis of the war. On July 14, the Verkhovna Rada dismissed Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko with 258 votes after a year in office. Two days later it confirmed Naftogaz CEO Serhii Koretskyi as her successor and approved a restructured cabinet — three deputy prime ministers instead of four, seventeen ministries instead of fifteen. So far, so orderly.
Then came the mistake. On July 15, Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov — the youngest and most popular minister in the government, the man who built Ukraine's drone and digital warfare capability — was dismissed after clashing with Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi over military reform. Fedorov went public: he accused Syrskyi of blocking reforms and issuing an ultimatum to the President. Within a day, the cardboard signs were back on Bankova Street.
"A commander has no right to remain silent about problems."
The parallel with July 2025 is exact, and the index treats it that way. Last summer, the streets forced the repeal of the anti-NABU law in nine days. This summer, they forced the removal of the Commander-in-Chief in six. Both times the demands were institutional, not personal: independence for anti-corruption bodies then, accountability in military leadership now. Both times the government yielded. For risk professionals, this is the single most important variable in Ukrainian governance: civil society retains a proven, repeatable veto over elite self-dealing — and it works faster each time.
The most consequential new name is at the very top. Oleksandr Bankov 840 · Critical, the Foreign Ministry's State Secretary from 2020 to 2024 and a former Ambassador to Romania, was charged on July 27 with embezzling UAH 37 million ($1.28M) in Western donations intended to support Ukraine during the invasion — redirected through a controlled NGO with the help of an active diplomat, a former minister's aide, and the NGO's own accountant. Stealing allied wartime aid through the diplomatic service is a category of betrayal the index prices at the ceiling.
Oleksandr Syrskyi 613 · Elevated takes a +60 adjustment on dismissal. The score reflects not battlefield performance — the CRI does not rate generalship — but the governance findings that surfaced around his removal: a Soviet-style command culture that suppressed internal reporting, the blocking of accountability reforms that Fedorov and Drapatyi both identified publicly, and an exit forced by mass protest rather than institutional process.
The single largest downward move belongs to the President. Volodymyr Zelenskyy 611 · Elevated drops out of the High band. The logic is the same one the index applied against him a year ago, now running in reverse: twice in two summers, when the street demanded reversal, he reversed. The anti-NABU law died in nine days in 2025; Syrskyi was gone in six in 2026, replaced by the protesters' own preferred candidate. A leader who yields to institutional accountability pressure — twice, at real political cost — carries measurably lower governance risk than one who doesn't. The Yermak-era machine around him is also simply gone: its architect is in pre-trial detention, and July removed its last cabinet remnants.
Mykhailo Fedorov 380 · Low exits the cabinet with the cleanest corruption profile of any senior official of the war period — his dismissal triggered protests in twelve cities on his behalf, which is its own kind of audit. Mykhailo Drapatyi 438 · Low enters the index as Commander-in-Chief with a reformist record and no adverse findings: he publicly backed accountability reforms while still a subordinate commander, which in the Ukrainian military hierarchy is the costliest form of integrity signal available.
The street has now removed a law and a commander. The index scores institutions that bend to accountability as safer — because they are.
The Personae Non Gratae register — figures held above the 850 ceiling as categorically untouchable — underwent its first structured review this month. Four figures returned to the scored index: Akhmetov (741), Umerov (731), Arakhamia (707), and Yulia Tymoshenko (693). The distinction the review drew is one American compliance officers will recognize: the PNG register is for figures who are outside the game entirely — fugitives, convicts, collaborators, detainees. Figures who remain inside Ukrainian institutional life, however compromised, belong on the scale, where their risk can be priced and tracked. All four re-enter at the top of the High band. The 43 who remain — from Kolomoisky and Mindich to Yanukovych and Medvedchuk — stay beyond the ceiling, where no due-diligence process should treat them as ordinary counterparties.
The cabinet reshuffle brings a wave of new entries, each scored at entry level pending track record: Deputy PM for European Integration Vsevolod Chentsov (453), Interior Minister Ivan Vyhivskyi (517), Infrastructure Minister Mykola Kalashnyk (521) — who inherits the reconstruction-adjacent portfolio the index treats as Ukraine's highest-risk procurement category — Digital Transformation Minister Oksana Ferchuk (449), Justice Minister Denys Maslov (461), Economy Minister Oleksandr Kravchenko (457), and Agrarian Policy Minister Taras Vysotskyi (463), who takes over a land-market portfolio still carrying the Solsky-era corruption legacy. Deputy minister appointments follow by decree in the coming weeks; the index will add them as they are published.
The business tier also expands with six new entries spanning the risk spectrum: Oleksandr Yaroslavsky (568), Andriy Verevskyi (563), Serhiy Tihipko (541), Vasyl Khmelnytsky (526), Andriy Stavnitser (472), and Tomas Fiala (447) — the Dragon Capital chief entering as the lowest-risk business figure in the index, a deliberate calibration point demonstrating that the scale rewards transparency, not size.
CRI v7 completes the scale recalibration begun in June: all active figures now occupy the 430–850 range (430 = lowest risk, 850 = highest), preserving proportional distances between figures while mirroring the American FICO intuition the index was built around. Scores draw on NABU, SAPO, HACC, NAZK, ESBU/BEB and ARMA records, US/EU sanctions lists, court proceedings, verified investigative reporting, and AI-assisted press analysis. A score is not a legal finding; no score implies guilt.