Seven years of the High Anti-Corruption Court: the backlog of cases has decreased by a full 5 items, and bail is now laundered through 100 firms directly into the court’s account

The High Anticorruption Court celebrates its first seven years with a cautious optimism that more resembles an attempt to drain an ocean with a teaspoon. For the first time in its history, the mountain of unresolved cases did not grow but shrank by a record five; judges are trying to clear schemes on their own faster than MPs manage to hide corruption articles under statutes of limitations. Yet the festive mood is spoiled by a striking reality: top officials are massively buying indulgences through charitable donations under agreements, bail for former ministers is being laundered through hundreds of intermediary firms right under the nose of the Judiciary, and parliament, in its eighth year of the convocation, traditionally forgets to vote for reforms that could accidentally affect the deputies themselves, notes ZN.ua .

In September, seven years will pass since the start of the High Anti-Corruption Court’s work. And for the first time in this period, the number of unresolved cases at the HAC did not grow; it slightly decreased. The scale of the change is small for now, but the long-term dynamic has for the first time changed direction.

The court is gradually improving its work: there is a result of single-judge proceedings, staffing has been strengthened, and a more active use of agreements with the accused. However, it is too early to talk about a sustained trend.

The HAC’s progress could be undermined by problematic statutes of limitations, procedural abuses, lack of transparency of some agreements, and the origin of funds that are deposited as bail. Some of these problems the court cannot solve alone — needed are parliamentary decisions that have been delayed for years. Therefore it is important to understand not only what helped HAC gain momentum, but also what prevents turning the first positive results into a stable trend.

Where this positive in numbers came from

In my view, the most telling thing is not the impression of the numbers themselves, but what lies behind them. Since the HAC began work, hundreds of cases have come in, and for years the backlog of unresolved cases repeatedly grew—from 149 to 2019 in one year, to 327 in the 2025-th year. This not only indicated increased workload on the court but also gave grounds for skeptics of HAC to question whether it should exist at all.

But the court’s practice and its own work on mistakes changed the trend. Already in 2025, HAC considered a record 114 criminal cases, and in the first half of 2026-th year the indicator of cases heard (72) first surpassed the number of new cases that arrived at the court (71). Thus the years-long accumulation of unresolved proceedings finally stopped and even slightly decreased—from 327 to 322 cases.

As for verdicts, in the first half of 2026 year HAC issued 65 verdicts: 82 persons were convicted, and 8 acquitted. If we recall that in 2025 year the Anti-Corruption Court in total issued 109 verdicts, from current statistics we again see a trend toward noticeably higher productivity. At the same time, the court used asset confiscation against 10 persons — thereby confiscating almost 71,8 million UAH.

Over seven years the HAC handed down 431 verdicts regarding 601 individuals: 398 accusatory and 33 acquittals; 211 of the accusatory verdicts were based on agreements. Among the convicted are judges, prosecutors, heads of state-run enterprises, government officials, current and former MPs. Real terms were served, among others, by the sitting MP Anatoliy Hunko, former official of the General Prosecutor’s Office Dmytro Sus, former MP Ruslan Solvar, and former director of the Institute of Agroecology of the NAS of Ukraine Orest Furdychko.

Another HAC achievement is civil confiscation of unjustified assets: in 48, officials’ property totaling almost 230 million UAH was seized.

The data above only partially characterize HAC’s results. Looking at the broader picture, it is important to know how many accusatory verdicts have entered into legal force, how many convicted truly lost their liberty, and how many among them are top officials. Similarly, one should distinguish issued and actually enforced fines, confiscations, and repayment of damages caused to the state. The Roadmap for the Rule of Law should have implemented the corresponding measure by the end of 2026 year.

Voluntary payments under agreements, including contributions to the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, have social value but are not punishment; they are also hard to classify as recovery of resources lost by the state. Although they show how criminal justice tools are used to replenish the budget.

Where did this positive change come from? We can offer a few explanations.

First of all, it is worth recalling that the single-judge consideration, introduced by law in 2024 year, proved its effectiveness in practice: the share of cases decided by a single judge rose from 22% to 29% of the total number of proceedings at HAC.

The difference in durations is telling: cases in single-judge proceedings are completed on average in 11 months, while collegial proceedings last on average almost 3 years and 9 months. In some cases, single-judge proceedings proved even faster: the case concerning the acting director of one of the NASU institutions was heard by the court in only 5 months. Even longer proceedings in this format remain relatively modest — for example, the case concerning Anatoliy Khmylkivskyi, a deputy of the Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi Raion Council of Odesa Oblast, lasted exactly 1 year.

Another factor likely to strengthen this dynamic further is long-awaited staffing of the court. Two judges appointed after the HAC’s second competition already preside over a number of high-profile proceedings, significantly easing the court’s load. And since the President of Ukraine also appointed 17 more winners of the competition for HAC S judges and for the Appellate Chamber, the scale of staffing reinforcement will grow even more. At the same time, appointment of yet 5 judges is currently suspended.

Separately, it is worth looking at the structure of verdicts in the last 12 months—from 1 July 2025 year to 30 June 2026 of the following year. In this period, the number of verdicts based on agreements rose to 72 against 58 for the previous 12 months, though their share among all accusatory verdicts slightly declined—from 66% to 62%.

At the same time, for the first time there were cases where a person convicted under an agreement still serves a real though shorter sentence. Thus, after one of the loudest agreements of the past year, according to the sentence of former Supreme Court head Vsevolod Knyazev, he is still sentenced to 4 years’ imprisonment. The approach to transparency is also changing: for example, in the case of the head of the Poltava Region Agency of Local Roads Oleksii Basan, the court closed only part of the information from public access rather than the entire text of the verdict, as was usually done. This is an exception rather than a standard practice, but the mere fact that such an approach is used is important.

Meanwhile, increasing the number of agreements in itself does not yet indicate their effectiveness. In top corruption cases, their value lies not only in faster verdicts but also in incriminating testimony against other participants and organizers of schemes. Such information cannot always be made public immediately so as not to hinder subsequent investigations. However, later one should evaluate whether this testimony led to new verdicts. Currently, the SAP’s policy on entering into agreements and the criteria of “public interest” are not always clear, and some verdicts are fully closed. Therefore, SAP and HAC must not only use this instrument but also convincingly explain to society its purpose and results.

The quantitative data explain why society is wary of such agreements. Almost half of the accused pledged to transfer from 10 thousand to 20 million hryvnias to the needs of the Armed Forces, yet real, albeit mitigated, prison terms for the defendants were only in three cases. The parties also did not agree on large fines as additional punishment. According to TI Ukraine’s survey, 60% of Ukrainians consider the main criterion of effective fight against corruption to be real punishment — imprisonment or confiscation of property.

It is important to understand the nature of the progress described here. This is not about HAC having learned to work more effectively under unchanged conditions, but rather indicates that tools previously enacted by the legislature — often poorly drafted, with gaps and ambiguities — have finally begun to yield measurable results in practice.

For example, the same clearly progressive single-judge consideration still has no single approach to when the accused can demand that the case be heard by a panel of judges. And there are unwarranted exemptions from single-judge consideration for certain categories of officials (for example, cases of false declarations by MPs), which narrows the potential of this mechanism. But even in this imperfect form, single-judge consideration works and, as we see, yields a noticeable effect.

Why the trend toward increasing efficiency of HAC case consideration is still unstable

The reason is that the external problems, whose resolution primarily depends on the parliament, have been left without response for years. This means that the progress achieved can be overturned at any moment.

For example, ineffective regulation of statutes of limitations, which we have consistently recorded since 2023 year, has not merely remained unresolved but has worsened. Prolonged consideration of top corruption cases does not by itself interrupt the statute of limitations, so proceedings may end not with a guilty verdict but with an acquittal due to the lapse of time set by law. Interruption of the period would mean that after a legally defined event, its counting restarts rather than resumes from the point at which it was stopped. Over the last year the number of people who were released from responsibility due to statutes of limitations rose from 13 to 22, and from punishment—to from one to nine.

The lion’s share of such closures falls on articles 364 and 368 of the Criminal Code — those under which top corruption is qualified, among others. Under this basis, they were released from liability, including former Minister of Agricultural Policy Mykola Prysyazhniuk, who was suspected of ensuring illegal victory for private firms in the Agricultural Fund’s tenders for over 521 million UAH, and immediately four more defendants in the corruption case at the Odesa port with losses over 21 million UAH. On some problems that led to statutes of limitations expiring, and in general to track the peculiarities of such cases, see our platform “HAC decided.”

Pressure on the court and attempts to revise its institutional capacity — like what happened around the Vlasenko-Buzhansky Parliamentary Temporary Commission — also do not add stability. We studied the commission’s report and concluded that the document is built on a selective analysis and contains many illogical and manipulative conclusions.

The HAC’s effectiveness cannot be reduced to the ratio of expenditures for its maintenance and funds collected to the budget. The court’s main task is independent and fair justice in top corruption cases, and its social result is measured by inevitability of punishment and trust in court decisions.

At the same time, society has the right to know the financial result of HAC’s work: how much the state spends on its maintenance and what volume of confiscations, fines, and reimbursements have not only been designated but also actually executed. The absence of aggregated data does not render this issue manipulative; it shows the need for separate analysis.

It is also telling that HAC’s head Sergei Vlasenko publicly spoke of pressure and political persecution by NABU, SAP, and HAC even before the commission finished its work, which raises doubts about the impartiality of the final conclusions. Such episodes divert resources and attention from the court’s focused work.

Another detail worth reiterating clearly: HAC is an organ of justice, not part of the investigative-prosecutorial tandem. This means the court’s task is not to showcase results together with NABU and SAP, but primarily to independently verify the quality of their work. And that is why, in particular, the court must acquit defendants where the prosecution has failed to prove its position.

Meanwhile, NABU and SAP are only one side of the process, alongside defense lawyers and the accused. The fact that detectives and prosecutors undertake increasingly resonant investigations into top officials raises the stakes for the court but does not make HAC a continuation of the investigation. On the contrary, the resonance of these investigations underscores how critically important the institutional independence of the Anti-Court is.

And although most resonant cases, such as the “Midas” and “Dynasty” affairs, are still at the investigation stage, HAC, at the stage of selecting preventive measures for their defendants, has already shown its consistency and impartiality. Meanwhile the case against Yulia Tymoshenko moved rather quickly from the pre-trial investigation stage to court proceedings. In preparations for her trial, the defense argued that no judge could be impartial toward a politician given her fixed rhetoric. Now that there is a preparatory hearing underway.

What is needed for a hint of positive change to become a trend

Without legislative changes, the positive dynamic will remain fragile. It can unpredictably swing from case to case, from period to period, depending on which proceedings reach the year’s end.

To consolidate the trend, the parliament should:

Pass changes to Article 49 of the Criminal Code that truly interrupts, not just halts, the progress of statutes of limitations in top corruption cases.

Provide the court with effective tools against abusing procedural rights — in particular, the authority to impose financial penalties on lawyers.

Abolish automatic closing of cases due to formal expiration of pre-trial investigation.

Eliminate ambiguity in determining the moment of transition to collegial proceedings and remove unwarranted exemptions from single-judge consideration.

For years we have seen lawmakers fail to enact these changes — even though they were repeatedly discussed at various levels. Perhaps the reason was that more and more MPs themselves became subjects of corruption cases. Perhaps the reasons lie in the Rada’s own stagnation in its eighth year of this convocation. Yet these and other arguments can no longer serve as excuses for not implementing the necessary changes.

Meanwhile, new challenges have emerged not only related to the size of bail in top corruption cases but also to the origin of funds that third parties and companies contribute. A vivid example is the bail for former minister Herman Halushchenko, which the court reduced from 200 to 150 million UAH. According to the investigation, these funds were collected and laundered through dozens of enterprises and more than a hundred financial transactions, after which four companies transferred them to HAC’s special account. Among the individuals suspected by the investigation of organizing this scheme is former deputy head of the Presidential Office Iryna Mudra. At the same time, the court set bond for Mudrai at 20 million UAH.

These cases pose a broader question: who and at what stage should verify the legality of the origin of bail and whether the court should react if the money comes from companies with a dubious financial history? The same applies to compensation, restitution, and payments to the Armed Forces under agreements: are the origins of these funds and the payers themselves checked? Relevant legislative initiatives have already been registered in the Verkhovna Rada, but their consideration remains pending. We will discuss in separate materials possible mechanisms for such verification and the specifics of entering into agreements in top corruption cases.

How transparent and well-founded the bail decisions are will affect trust in preventive measures in top corruption cases. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of agreements should be evaluated by other criteria: fairness of punishment, usefulness of incriminating testimony, return of lost state resources, and a clear societal result.

After the holidays, the parliament did not consider any anti-corruption initiatives. The day’s agenda even removed the consideration of the Anti-Corruption Strategy project for the years 2026–2030, and timely adoption of this document by the end of September affects not only the comprehensive fight against corruption but also Ukraine’s financial support within the Ukraine Facility Plan. This is important for HAC as well: without a coherent state anti-corruption policy, necessary legislative changes will continue to be adopted situationally or postponed.

While the parliament postpones the necessary decisions, HAC’s progress will remain fragile.