On Wednesday, January 14, 2026, Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAP) informed long-time Ukrainian politicianYulia Tymoshenko, leader of the Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party, that she is suspected of running a system of regular, long-term payments to members of her party in exchange for voting for or against certain laws.

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As evidence, NABU released a recording in which Yulia Tymoshenko discussed with an unnamed Ukrainian MP from her party a system of payments for specific parliamentary votes. On January 12, one day ahead of the vote on the dismissal of Defense Minister Denys Shmyhal and First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital TransformationMykhailo Fedorov,Tymoshenko was heard on the recording saying:

‘We pay “ten” for two sessions, we pay after signing for two sessions.’

In the conversation, Tymoshenko emphasized:

‘We vote for dismissals, not for appointment.’

On the following day the January 13, the Ukrainian parliament approved the removal ofDenys Shmyhalfrom the position of Defense Minister and the dismissal of Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital TransformationMykhailo Fedorovfrom his position. Thus, the question arose: who was the ultimate client and payer for the votes of Batkivshchyna MPs, given that it was Volodymyr Zelenskyy who requested the parliament to dismiss these ministers. Neither NABU nor SAP addressed this question in their charges—either because they lacked recordings of conversations in which these votes were commissioned, or because they did not wish to target the Ukrainian president.

Image: Tymoshenko in 2025 (CC BY 2.0)

The logic of this question was so clear that it also raised the issue of where of from whom NABU and SAP obtained this recording and how many such recordings existed when they accused Yulia Tymoshenko of systematically bribing Batkivshchyna MPs. No evidence other than this one phone conversation was made public. Everything suggests that Ukraine’s political elite is just as riddled with corruption as it was during the rule ofpro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych.Let us recall that in the summer of 2025, the Ukrainian parliament, at the proposal ofVolodymyr Zelenskyy,passed a law by a majority vote that abolished the independence of anti-corruption bodies from state power. Let us also remember that the European Union, at the time, did not seek to remove President Zelenskyy from office following this his move. Nevertheless, the investigation into Yulia Tymoshenko’s corrupt practices did not lead to charges against Volodymyr Zelensky, allowing him to continue the war against Russia over territories that—according to pre-2014 opinion polls—never expressed a desire to join the European Union and even rebelled against becoming part of it: namely, Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions

Source: Global Research