Whoever controls Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation wields enormous influence over law enforcement, judges, and government officials. The EU wants Ukraine to reform it, and Ukraine’s government is likely to pass changes that satisfy monitoring requirements on paper while leaving the body effectively under the President’s Office’s control, the investigative outlet Texty reports.

The stakes are money and power at once. The State Bureau of Investigation, known by its Ukrainian initials DBR, investigates officials, judges, prosecutors, and soldiers. So choosing an independent director is one of the rule-of-law conditions the EU has tied to Ukraine’s 2026 and 2027 budget aid.

Yet the version the government may pass would change how the director is chosen only for the one after next, in 2032. Brussels wants the model used at the anti-corruption bureau NABU, where the chief cannot be confirmed without the votes of independent foreign experts.

Who picks the watchdog

Today a nine-member commission selects the director:

1. three named by the president
2. three by a parliament his party dominates
3. three proposed by the government on international partners’ suggestion.

That leaves the foreign experts without a decisive vote and the President’s Office effectively choosing the winner. Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy promised in January that a reform bill would reach parliament within a month.

It is now October, and there is none.

Director Oleksii Sukhachov’s term ends this year, so his successor will be picked under the old rules.

Sukhachov has publicly argued that overhauling the bureau during the war would threaten the state.

The deadline to adopt the reform was October. To carry it out, the end of 2026. Miss it, and Ukraine risks reputational damage and the European funding it needs amid a budget deficit, money the EU has frozen before when anti-corruption guarantees slipped.

A factory of “procedural nightmaring”

What makes the fight so bitter is that the bureau’s searches, seizures, and summonses are levers over individuals and whole institutions.

For example, NABU’s Operation Midas tapes, from the $100 million kickback case at the state nuclear company Energoatom, mention the bureau’s entire leadership. In March 2025, its investigators searched the commission that vets and appoints Ukraine’s judges, itself reformed with international experts, in what the commission called pressure that could stall the courts.

Cases against the bureau’s own officials, meanwhile, are handled by a unit inside the bureau. And its director sits under his own cloud: the outlet Slidstvo.Info reported that his brother bought 143 apartments cheaply from a developer. Nevertheless, a court banned publication, and eight newsrooms jointly ran the story.