With a war to fight and a country to rebuild, few would expect specialist training in financial investigations to be high on Ukraine’s list of priorities. Yet practitioners at the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) and the High Anti-Corruption Court (HACC) have continued to pursue complex cases under wartime conditions – and to invest in the skills needed to do so.

Strong capacity in financial investigations and asset recovery is essential to uncovering and prosecuting corruption and related financial crimes, and to recovering public funds that Ukraine urgently needs.

To make that capacity last, Ukrainian institutions needed to move beyond one-off external training events. They needed a way to embed advanced investigative techniques, such as standalone money laundering charges and “source and application” financial analysis, and to deliver high-quality, practitioner-led training themselves.

The Basel Institute’s International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR) partnered with NABU, SAPO and HACC on a two-year train-the-trainer programme (TTT) on financial investigations and asset recovery.

The support combined in-depth technical training with mentoring of selected future trainers:

• Advanced technical curriculum: Covered essential financial investigation methods, including standalone money laundering charges, asset tracing and “source and application” analysis to identify unexplained wealth.
• Practitioner-led certification: Selected five experienced practitioners (investigators, prosecutors and judges) to undergo rigorous training and mentoring. They are now Certified ICAR Trainers, able to independently apply the ICAR training methodology.
• Cascaded capacity building: Supported the newly certified national trainers as they began delivering training to their peers across national agencies.

The most important results are what Ukrainian practitioners have done with these skills: passing them on to colleagues and applying them in their own work.

Ukrainian trainers leading the way

By late 2025, the certified Ukrainian trainers were independently leading complex multi-agency training sessions for their peers. Because training is now delivered from within the institutions themselves, specialist knowledge relies less on external expertise and is more resilient to staff turnover and wartime pressures. Rostyslav Batig, SAPO Prosecutor and certified trainer, said:

These sessions gave me structured knowledge of money laundering that I was able to apply directly in one of my cases… Being able to train others allows me to test and discuss ideas, receive additional perspectives from specialists in the same field, and develop additional skills such as public speaking, preparing presentations and using analytical tools.

Applying new methods in practice

Practitioners report applying approaches such as standalone money laundering charges and “source and application” analysis to identify unexplained wealth in their cases – methods that were not widely used before.

Enforcement results in context

Over the same period, Ukraine’s anti-corruption authorities stepped up their work on money laundering. Between 2023 and 2025:

• Money laundering cases initiated by NABU rose from 30 to 65.
• Money laundering convictions entering into force, following SAPO prosecution of NABU cases, rose from four to nine.
• Civil confiscation lawsuits targeting unexplained wealth, based on NABU material, increased from one to eight.

These results are the achievement of Ukraine’s anti-corruption institutions and the professionals within them, working under extremely difficult conditions.

Ukraine’s experience sends a powerful message. If anti-corruption institutions can make specialist skills a priority while their country is at war, institutions elsewhere can do the same – whatever pressures they face.

The Basel Institute has supported anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine for more than 12 years. The certified trainers are now extending their training expertise to the Specialised Environmental Prosecutor’s Office (SEPO) through the development and delivery of a course on money laundering and asset recovery in environmental crime cases.