Mat Whatley is a former army officer who was part of the Kosovo verification mission and has held senior positions in the EU monitoring mission to Georgia and the OSCE special monitoring mission in Ukraine. He is the managing director at Okapi Train.
On Tuesday, Volodymyr Zelenskyy approved a law to gut Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies. On Thursday he backtracked, and said he would put forward new legislation to restore their independence. The original legislation would have stripped both the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (Nabu) and the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (Sapo) of their independence, bringing them under direct executive control.
A decades-long failure to take Vladimir Putin’s warnings at face value has proven dangerously counterproductive. Putin has made it clear that Nato’s eastward expansion is perceived as an existential threat to Russia, using it as justification for his invasion of Ukraine. Despite this, Keir Starmer persists in advocating for Nato peacekeepers in Ukraine – a
