Ukraine’s universities are in survival mode – but corruption still thrives
The Time Higher Education
Published on April 23, 2026
Ukraine’s war with Russia may have entered its fifth year in February, but its war with corruption is far longer-running – and even harder to win.
The country is standing strong against the foreign aggressor thanks to the heroism of its defenders in the trenches. However, it is still failing to prevent many of its citizens from surrendering to their worst instincts when it comes to financial propriety.
Our political leadership continuously underestimates the threat corruption poses to Ukraine’s statehood as a whole, as well as to its different sectors, including higher education. The latter’s leaders are still busy collecting bribes and embezzling state money even as the missiles still threaten their campuses and the drones kill their alumni.
That said, official concerns about the number of ghost students – so-called dead souls – in Ukrainian universities resulted at the end of March in dozens of searches of the offices and residences of some top university administrators. These searches, conducted jointly by the police, prosecutors and state security services, marked the beginning of a higher education audit that is looking for an estimated £600 million in misused funds.