⚠️ Violation Context

🏛️ About

Centre for Economic Strategy#

The largest single bloc of delegates in the PIC’s two most recent compositions

The Centre for Economic Strategy is an independent Kyiv economic think tank, registered in 2015. It is documented on CrimeaWatch because it has placed eight members on the Public Integrity Council across the Council’s third and fourth compositions — the largest bloc from any single organization — in the body whose Indicators of Integrity treat visits to temporarily occupied Ukrainian territory in the same terms as visits to the Russian Federation.

Why This Profile Exists#

An economic think tank is an unexpected supplier of personnel to a judicial vetting body, and the scale is what makes the relationship notable: five of the twenty-three members of the PIC’s third composition and three of the eighteen members of the fourth were delegated by the Centre for Economic Strategy.

Both entries were made through a documented state procedure. The High Qualification Commission of Judges vets the organizations permitted to take part in the assemblies that form the PIC and publishes the result; the Centre appears in decision No. 40/zp-23 of 27 July 2023 and again in decision No. 138/zp-25 of 21 July 2025, identified by its registration code.

Both dates fall well after 16 December 2020, when the PIC unanimously adopted the revised Indicators containing paragraph 1.5, and after the Council had begun issuing negative conclusions against judges over Crimea-related connections. The methodology was in force and its application was public when each decision to participate was taken.

Scale and Responsibility#

Where an organization supplies one member, the connection between the organization and the body’s methodology can reasonably be described as thin. At eight members across two consecutive compositions, that description no longer holds.

The Centre’s delegates did not sit at the margins of the Council. Olha Veretilnyk, first delegated by the Centre to the third composition, was elected speaker-coordinator of the fourth. The organization’s personnel have been part of the Council’s core through both cycles in which the Indicators have been applied at scale.

Ukrainian law draws a distinction the Indicators do not. The Constitution defines Crimea as an integral part of Ukraine (Articles 2, 73, 133–134); the Law on the Temporarily Occupied Territory (No. 1207-VII, 2014) establishes a legal regime for the peninsula that is deliberately separate from the regime governing a foreign state. Paragraph 1.5 assesses conduct as though that separation did not exist. The Centre has published no analysis of the conflict.

What This Profile Does Not Claim#

CrimeaWatch documents no statement by the Centre for Economic Strategy recognizing Crimea as Russian territory, and none is alleged here.

Delegation is not a vote. The Centre’s delegates voted on the Council’s conclusions; the Centre did not. What is documented at the organizational level is the repeated placement of members into the body, established by published state acts, and the absence of any public objection to the methodology those members applied.

Nomination Record#

In the assembly that formed the Council’s fourth composition in 2025, the organization put forward 3 candidates and 3 were seated. Its nominations overlapped with those of the Institute of Legislative Ideas, Nova Kraina and the Anti-Corruption Action Center. Across the assembly as a whole, twelve organizations submitted 41 nominations covering 24 distinct people for 20 seats, and 14 of the 18 members elected were nominated by two organizations at once.

Cross-nomination is permitted by the procedure and is not in itself irregular. It is recorded here because the authority of the Council’s Indicators of Integrity rests on the breadth of the body that adopts them, and the published candidate tables are the only public measure of that breadth. See Who Vetted the Vetters for the full arithmetic.

Response and Corrections#

The Centre for Economic Strategy may submit a response or a correction request to [email protected]. Submissions are assessed against the underlying sources. Where a statement on this page is shown to be inaccurate, incomplete or out of date, the profile is amended and the correction is recorded.

CrimeaWatch does not publish responses verbatim and gives no undertaking to reproduce them. What a verified response changes is the content of this profile.

Summary#

The Centre for Economic Strategy is documented on this site as the largest single supplier of personnel to the Public Integrity Council in its two most recent compositions: five delegates in 2023 and three in 2025, admitted on both occasions by published decisions of the High Qualification Commission of Judges.

An economic think tank has supplied eight members to a body whose Indicators of Integrity treat travel to temporarily occupied Ukrainian territory in the same terms as travel to the Russian Federation, and has not publicly addressed the contradiction between that methodology and the legal regime Ukrainian law establishes for the occupied peninsula.

ℹ️ What Else We Know

👥 Leadership

📅 Activity Timeline

📋 Documented Instances