Ukraine Wants New Harassment Rules for Police. But Who Protects an Officer When the Complaint Is Against the Boss?

Bill No. 15545 was registered in Ukraine’s parliament on August 21, 2026 by the Cabinet of Ministers. As of September 5, it has not become law and remains under committee consideration. On September 3, parliament’s Human Rights Committee reviewed the proposal and asked the law-enforcement committee to take its comments into account.

According to the government’s published summary, the bill would expressly require police officers to refrain from sex discrimination and sexual harassment.

Police commanders would also be required to organize the work of subordinates in accordance with the principle of equal rights and opportunities for women and men.

For disciplinary investigations involving sex discrimination or sexual harassment, the government proposes equal representation of both sexes on the disciplinary commission.

That is significant.

But it is not the beginning of protection from zero.

In February 2026, the Ukrainian government adopted Resolution No. 226, establishing a broader procedure for responding to sex discrimination, gender-based violence and sexual harassment within public authorities and security institutions.

The procedure provides for standing commissions, oral and written complaints, electronic trust mailboxes, confidentiality, review deadlines and a burden-of-proof mechanism under which a complainant first presents information suggesting misconduct and the person complained against must then rebut it.

It also prohibits discrimination linked to filing a complaint, participating in its examination or supplying information. Cases containing indications of an administrative or criminal offence must be forwarded to the appropriate investigative authority.

So describing Ukraine as having no protection at all would be inaccurate.

The more difficult issue is whether those protections are sufficiently independent and safe in a rigid hierarchy.

One notable limitation is that formal complaints under Resolution No. 226 cannot be anonymous. They are to be treated confidentially, but anonymous submissions are expressly excluded from the formal review procedure.

That distinction matters.

A junior officer may depend on senior commanders for evaluations, assignments, bonuses, transfers and career progression. If the person she accuses belongs to that same command structure, confidentiality on paper may not eliminate fear of professional consequences.

There is another structural question.

The commission itself is created within the institution. Its membership is determined internally. A member with a conflict of interest must step aside — an important safeguard — but the system remains, fundamentally, an internal one. Its conclusions can include recommendations to the head of the institution on sanctions and protection measures.

Ukraine’s National Police already recognizes this specific danger in its own guidance.

Police materials describe sexual harassment as including unwanted touching, sexualized communications, repeated pressure for personal relationships and situations in which acceptance of sexual advances is tied, explicitly or implicitly, to promotion, career opportunities or favorable evaluations.

The same guidance identifies the use of official authority to discourage a person from exercising the right to complain as a form of abuse of power.

In other words, the key problem is not sex.

It is power.

Ukraine has already seen what a conflict between a female subordinate and a senior officer can look like.

In 2021, Ukrainian Armed Forces Lieutenant Colonel Olha Derkach publicly accused Chernihiv regional military commissar Oleksandr Kryvoruchko of years of sexual harassment.

Kryvoruchko denied the allegations.

A military law-enforcement inquiry followed. According to a Defense Ministry response reported by Ukraine’s public broadcaster Suspilne, an anonymous survey at the military commissariat partially corroborated the information. Police opened a criminal investigation. Kryvoruchko later left his post and sued Derkach, seeking a retraction of her public statements. A court rejected that civil claim in September 2021.

The legal distinction is crucial: losing a defamation-style civil claim does not amount to a criminal conviction for sexual harassment. We did not locate a later final criminal conviction in this case during our September 5 review.

Still, the case illustrates the institutional problem clearly: a subordinate accused her superior, triggering internal inquiries, a criminal proceeding, public scrutiny and litigation.

Another well-known controversy arose at a Territorial Recruitment and Social Support Center, or TCC — Ukraine’s military recruitment administration.

In 2024, secretly recorded footage appeared online showing Rivne regional TCC chief Oleksandr Yarmoshevych kissing different women in his office at different times. A service inquiry followed. He later requested a transfer to a combat unit, and the transfer order was approved. Authorities also examined who had installed covert surveillance equipment in the office and why.

There is no basis, however, to automatically describe the footage as evidence of sexual harassment.

Nor does it establish anything about the “morality” of the women shown.

The legitimate questions concern the conduct of a public-sector commander in a workplace, boundaries between private and official behavior, institutional reputation and the disturbing presence of hidden surveillance equipment.

A very different scandal struck the National Police in May 2026.

Ukrainian investigators announced suspicions against several senior police officials in a corruption case involving the alleged protection of so-called “porn offices.”

Among those named were the head of the Ivano-Frankivsk regional police, Serhii Bezpalko, his deputy Volodymyr Yatsiuk, and senior police officials from the Ternopil and Zhytomyr regions, as well as a driver employed within the Interior Ministry system.

Investigators allege that officials received or arranged improper payments in exchange for allowing premises producing and distributing pornographic content to operate without interference.

Courts imposed pretrial measures with bail options, and police leadership suspended the police suspects. One defense lawyer publicly challenged the strength of the suspicion; several other suspects or lawyers declined substantive comment.

This is not a sexual-harassment case.

And the women involved in adult-content production are not the central institutional issue.

The much more serious allegation is that senior police authority may have been monetized.

No final conviction in that case was located during our review, so the officials must still be described as suspects, not as guilty persons.

There is, however, another police case where the judicial process has reached a final stage.

On February 19, 2026, Ukraine’s Supreme Court upheld 11-year prison sentences for former police officers Serhii Sulyma and Mykola Kuziv for the rape and torture of a woman at a police station in Kaharlyk in 2020. One of the convicted officers had held a leadership role in the station’s criminal police unit.

That crime was far more serious than workplace harassment and did not involve a police employee complaining about a supervisor.

But it demonstrates why institutional safeguards cannot be based simply on rank, uniform or presumed professional ethics.

People who wield coercive authority require stronger scrutiny, not weaker scrutiny.

This is why Bill No. 15545 matters.

Yet a disciplinary panel containing equal numbers of men and women should not be confused with an independent investigative body.

Gender balance may improve a panel.

It does not, by itself, remove institutional dependence.

There is also a revealing legislative history.

Bill No. 15545 is effectively the third government attempt to legislate this issue in the Police Disciplinary Statute.

A similar Bill No. 9340 was registered on May 29, 2023 and withdrawn on July 17, 2025. Another version, No. 14036, was registered on September 12, 2025 and withdrawn on July 16, 2026. No. 15545 followed just over a month later.

That history shows the issue has been formally recognized for years.

The real test is no longer whether Ukraine can write the words “sexual harassment” into another official document.

It is whether a junior police officer can reject a superior, report that superior and continue her career without unofficial punishment.

Existing rules already promise confidentiality and prohibit retaliation through discrimination.

The next test for Ukraine is proving that those protections work when the person accused has rank, connections and influence inside the same institution.

That is the question Bill No. 15545 should ultimately be judged against.