What did Kyiv's streets say on 23 July 2025?

What did Ukrainians make of a law that changed who controls their anti-corruption institutions? By 23 July 2025, the answer was already visible in the streets, a day after protests spread across the country.

On 22 July 2025, the Ukrainian parliament adopted a law placing the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office under the Prosecutor General. Despite calls to veto it, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed the law. Protests broke out nationwide and were reported as the largest anti-government demonstrations in Ukraine since the start of the Russian invasion in 2022.

The demonstrations were later described as the Cardboard protests, a name taken from the handmade posters carried by participants. Later accounts say they ran from 22 to 31 July 2025 and drew crowds in Kyiv, Odesa, Lviv, Dnipro and other cities.

Other news that week

The protests were not the only development of those days. On 21 July 2025, the United States and Germany agreed to send five Patriot missile defence systems to Ukraine. On 22 July 2025, a suspected administrator of the cybercrime platform xss.is was arrested in Kyiv.

What the day showed

The opinion to draw from 23 July 2025 is plain enough: the street reaction was immediate and national in scale, and it came while the country remained at war. Signing the law despite calls for a veto put the president's decision at the centre of the public argument. Whatever followed, the first days of the protests made clear that control over NABU and the anti-corruption prosecutor's office mattered to a large number of Ukrainians.