Law enforcement in Ukraine is a set of activities carried out by a system of dedicated government bodies, aimed at maintaining public order and internal security, ensuring integrity of the law and inevitability of punishment for breaking the law, guarding the national security as well as safety of people and their property. Most of law enforcement operations are carried out by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA), but also by a number of independent agencies and agencies from other ministries.
The primary law enforcement agency in the country is the National Police of Ukraine, which is subordinate to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Other prominent agencies include Security Service of Ukraine (an independent agency, responsible for national security, anti-terrorism, counter-intelligence and fighting organized crime), National Guard of Ukraine (part of MIA, the national gendarmerie) and State Bureau of Investigation (an independent agency, investigating misdemeanors and crimes committed by other law enforcement officers, judges, and high-ranking officials).
Due to the fact that Ukraine is a unitary state, the law enforcement is centralized at the national-level and is carried out by national level bodies. All law enforcement officers, although usually attached to a certain territory and working primarily inside that territory, retain their powers anywhere in the country. Local governments do not have their own forces, except municipal guard forces, which have limited scopes and powers. The law framework in Ukraine is also national level only, territorial subdivisions do not have their own legislation, unlike in federated states. However, local governments can issue limited scope decrees that are enforced by the law enforcement bodies, for example for regulation of alcohol or usage of fireworks.
There is a dedicated system for corruption crimes which is separate from the rest of law enforcement. The military used to have their own justice system as well, but it was shut down in the beginning of the 2010s, and now there are discussions about bringing it back.
Some of the Ukrainian law enforcement agencies are also military formations, in particular National Guard of Ukraine, State Border Guard Service of Ukraine, Security Service of Ukraine and State Security Administration, which apart from their law enforcement activities are also tasked with purely military activities, and they are considered to be an integral part of the defence forces of Ukraine.
As of end of 2010s-start of 2020s, Ukraine had roughly 300 000 active law enforcement personnel, servicing the population of approximately 40 million: 135 thousand in the National Police, 60 thousand in the National Guard, 53 thousand in the Border Guard, 27 thousand in the Security Service, and around several thousand in each of the remaining law enforcement bodies. However, not all of them execute law enforcement duties, some of them are only active in the field of national defence.
Each law enforcement body tends to have its own special tactical team for such sensitive tasks as hostage rescue or apprehending well-armed criminals. For example, DOZOR in the Border Guard, KORD in the National Police, Alpha in the Security Service or Omega in the National Guard.
Ukraine inherited its law enforcement and justice systems from the Soviet Union (with militsiya being its core part), which were plagued by politisation, corruption, brutality and even fusing with the crime world. But after the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, the public demand for reforms drove the large-scale law enforcement and judicial reforms in Ukraine, which significantly improved transparency and integrity of law enforcement and judiciary, gradually making them more alike those in the other European countries and less post-Soviet. This article describes the law enforcement in Ukraine how it was from 2014 onward. Before 2014 the system of law enforcement was very different.
History Before 1991 For most of their history (from the fall of Kyivan Rus in 1240 to the independence from the Soviet Union in 1991), Ukrainians did not have their statehood, so the law enforcement on the territories, that are now Ukraine, was carried out by the occupying powers and their respective agencies: Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 13th–18th centuries, Russian Empire and Austria-Hungary in 18th–20th centuries, Soviet Union and Second Polish Republic in 20th century. Laws and their enforcement in those state entities tended to be at best very biased and discriminatory to Ukrainians, heavily favouring people of respective titular nations, and at worst being extremely oppressive and punitive to Ukrainians, treating them as second-class people or even as slaves with no rights. That created a longstanding strong tradition of distrust and antagonism to any law enforcement, which exists to this day.
The Rus Justice of 11th–12th century and the Statutes of Lithuania of 16th century are worth mentioning as the earliest known codified laws written in Ukrainian language and enforced on the territory of what is now Ukraine. They laid the foundation for the modern law in Eastern Europe and in Ukraine.
1991–2014
When Ukraine proclaimed independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the Ukrainian government just took over all Soviet law enforcement bodies operating on the Ukrainian territory, without reforming them any further than just renaming them. Soviet laws, procedures, practices, philosophy and society-government relations carried on, just under a different flag. This state of affairs remained pretty much unchanged until massive reforms began in 2014.
During this period, the two pillars of law enforcement in Ukraine were the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Security Service, doing the absolute majority of the law enforcement activity in the country. There were not many other law enforcement bodies, and those that were present were much smaller and had much narrower scopes. The MIA was a law enforcement body in its own right, not a parent governing body for other law enforcement agencies as it is now. At that time, the word "militsiya" was used instead of the word "police". But militsiya was somewhat an abstraction: there was no legal entity for militsiya, its officers were officially employed directly in the MIA, militsiya units were embedded directly into the structure of the MIA. The Security Service of Ukraine was an immense structure, having an exorbitant range of duties and powers, from investigating tax evasion to carrying out foreign intelligence.
From 2014 onward In aftermath of the Euromaidan and the following Revolution of Dignity in 2014, radical reforms of law enforcement and judiciary began in Ukraine, driven by the firm demand from the society, which would no longer tolerate the old flawed system, and by political pressure from the European Union, United States and other western partners, on which Ukraine became very dependent due to the beginning of an economic crisis and war with Russia. They usually conditioned their economic support on the progress of reforms in Ukraine, including reforms of law enforcement and judiciary. The EU treated progress in those reforms, especially progress in creation of the anticorruption system, as one of the key conditions for the EU-Ukraine association agreement, visa-free entry to EU for Ukrainian citizens and for accession of Ukraine to the European Union, i.e. whenever there were serious delays or disruptions to those reforms, the EU could temporarily suspend negotiations on those matters.
A new anticorruption law enforcement system was created from scratch in the mid-2010s, pushed by the western partners and by the civic society. The process of creation of this system was difficult, experiencing a lot of sabotage and opposition from different actors during its every stage. This problem gained the most publicity on 22 July 2025, when Verkhovna Rada voted in all three readings to eliminate independence of the anticorruption agencies and President signed this into law, all in one day. This immediately sparked mass protests, the very first of a kind since the beginning of Russian full-scale invasion, as well as a strong outcry from western partners, forcing them to revert a week later.
Previously, corruption crimes fell into jurisdiction of the Anticorruption department of SSU, which was found to be ineffective, prone to political influence and corrupt itself.
In 2014 it was decided to restore the National Guard of Ukraine, that existed before, but was disbanded in 2000. It was created on the basis of Internal Troops of Ukraine. The need to recreate the National Guard was driven by the start of Russo-Ukrainian war and by the negative reputation gained by the Internal Troops during the Euromaidan protests.
Another force that was disbanded in 2014 in aftermath of Euromaidan was the special police force "Berkut". It was created in 1992 as a special tactical unit to combat organised crime, but with time it morphed into a secret police and riot control unit, with a strongly negative reputation for their systematic extreme brutality and torture, kidnappings and unjustified detainments, extrajudicial punishments, intimidation of protesters, activists and journalists, strong anti-Ukrainian sentiment and a whole range of illegal activities. There were multiple notorious instances of "Berkut" brutally dispersing peaceful protests or brutally battering football fans for minor wrongdoing while "guarding" football matches. After their dissolution, some of them defected to Russia and started working in the Russian law enforcement. Several of those who remained were put to trial.
Another aspect of reforming the law enforcement system is the deconsolidation of functions from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Security Service to other agencies, most of which were created from scratch, like SBI or ESBU. For example, corruption investigation was transferred from SSU to NABU, guarding courts from police to Court Security Service, economic crimes investigation from police and SSU to the ESBU. The intent of this is to lower the immoderate influence that MIA and SSU used to have and make the system more balanced by introducing more checks and balances.
Police reform The most notable reform with the most publicity was the reform of the police force. Being inspired by the success of the police reform in Georgia, the Ukrainian government invited Eka Zguladze, the former deputy minister of internal affairs of Georgia, and Khatia Dekanoidze, former head of Georgian police academy, to implement the same reform in Ukraine by the same patterns (appointing both of them to equivalent positions in the Ukrainian government). In addition to them, David Sakvarelidze, the former deputy chief prosecutor of Georgia, was invited to reform the system of prosecutors in Ukraine.
In 2015 the National Police of Ukraine was established as a new organisation to supersede the militsiya as the primary law enforcement body in the country. The very first unit of the newly reformed police, Kyiv patrol police, took oath on 4 July 2015. Several years later, this date, 4 July, was established as the Police Day to be celebrated annually. The new police force was meant as a clean start, both in principles of work and in name. The word "militsiya" remained from the Soviet Union, where it became the term for the policing force, derived from militia, a nonprofessional paramilitary troop tasked with law enforcement in Soviet Union in the very beginning of its existence. Due to the movement of decommunization, very active in Ukraine at that time, there was a public consensus to get rid of Soviet word "militsiya" ("militia") and start using "politsiya" ("police") like the rest of the world.