While Ukraine fights to survive a protracted Russian invasion, it is also fighting a quiet, parallel war against the systemic corruption that has historically undermined its institutions and spoiled its image abroad.

Officials and analysts say that by aggressively targeting lawmakers, military procurement schemes, and state-owned enterprises, Ukrainian authorities are trying to send a signal to their own citizens as well as to the European Union: money cannot be wasted on corruption at a time when the army needs every cent, and that Brussels must see that even while fighting a war, Kyiv is progressing down the path toward European Union membership.

In recent weeks, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, known as NABU, and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, or SAPO, have announced several new cases. The agencies said on Tuesday that they have notified an official of Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency, the Security Service of Ukraine, he is suspected of trying to arrange a $150,000 bribe to help return money seized during a search and close a criminal case.

Days earlier, NABU and SAPO said they had exposed an alleged scheme involving the embezzlement of armored vehicle parts by a deputy commander of a military unit in the Kharkiv region. They have also reported cases involving an alleged $1 million bribe for drone supplies, road repair corruption, and a suspected 170 million hryvnia energy-sector embezzlement scheme involving Energoatom, Ukraine’s state nuclear power company.

The most politically damaging case remains the so-called Operation Midas investigation, in which Ukrainian anti-corruption authorities alleged a $100 million kickback scheme linked to Energoatom. The case shook Kyiv because it touched the energy sector at a time when Russia was attacking Ukraine’s power grid and because people close to the president’s political circle were drawn into the investigation. Reuters reported that the scandal intensified pressure on Kyiv to show progress against corruption as it sought EU membership and Western financial support.

OCCRP has also reported on several Ukrainian corruption cases during the war, including an alleged $17 million military procurement scam, a $3.3 million fraud probe at Kharkivoblenergo, and the long-running “Golden Mandarin” case, in which investigators say suspects misled the European Court of Human Rights to siphon money from the Ukrainian state budget. Together, the cases show that wartime corruption in Ukraine is not limited to one sector: it reaches defense, energy, local infrastructure, courts, customs, and state-owned companies.

Yaroslav Zhelezniak, a Ukrainian lawmaker, told OCCRP that the fight against corruption is Ukraine’s “number one” issue in public opinion polls, because “every hryvnia stolen from the Ukrainian budget is a hryvnia stolen from the army.” He added that NABU is now doing “the most important work after the military,” helping Ukraine spend its resources more effectively and resist Russia.

Ukraine’s anti-corruption drive is also shaped by external pressure. On June 15, 2026, the EU and Ukraine opened accession negotiations on the so-called “fundamentals” cluster, which covers rule of law, fundamental rights, democratic institutions, public administration reform, and economic criteria. The Council of the EU said progress under this cluster “will determine the overall pace of negotiations.”

EU Ambassador to Ukraine Katarína Mathernová said in May that strengthening the rule of law “remains essential for Ukraine’s progress towards EU membership,” adding that the country had made significant progress in building anti-corruption institutions but that “important work still lies ahead.”

Ukraine’s National Agency on Corruption Prevention has also said the country’s draft Anti-Corruption Strategy for 2026–2030 is tied to its international legal obligations.

But there were attempts to slow down the progress. In July 2025, Ukraine’s parliament passed a law that critics said would undermine the independence of NABU and SAPO. OCCRP reported that the agencies warned the law would “destroy” Ukraine’s anti-corruption infrastructure. After rare wartime protests and pressure from European partners, Zelensky reversed course and signed a bill restoring the agencies’ independence, though legal experts later warned that some concerns remained.

Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, called corruption “an ally of our enemy,” arguing that it degrades state institutions and drains resources that should support Ukrainian soldiers or protect critical infrastructure. “During war, it is especially clear that corruption can kill,” she told OCCRP. “For us, this is a security issue, not only a question of justice.”

NABU and SAPO are crucial to fighting high-level political corruption because they were created in response to public demand that no one in Ukraine should be untouchable because of political privilege or office, Kaleniuk added.

Brazil’s Supreme Court sentenced former lawmaker Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of ex-President Jair Bolsonaro, to four years and two months in prison in absentia after finding him guilty of coercion of justice and illegally lobbying the U.S. government to interfere in his father’s coup-plot trial. 

The younger Bolsonaro, who has been living in the U.S. since last year, was convicted by a unanimous panel of justices. The Prosecutor General’s office charged him with courting interference from the Trump administration to “prevent the conviction of his father” by orchestrating for tariffs on Brazilian goods and punitive sanctions against the high court’s justices and government officials, state-run media agency Agência Brasil reported. 

In addition to the prison term, Bolsonaro will be banned from holding public office for eight years upon completion of his sentence.  

Eduardo Bolsonaro denounced the ruling as baseless and politically motivated. In a statement published on his social media, the former congressman claimed he had not been officially summoned to the trial and only learned of the conviction through the press.

“A sentence without respect for due process is null and void,” Bolsonaro wrote. “Therefore, the real objective of this nonsensical trial is only one: to remove my name from the elections.”

His father, the former far-right president, was sentenced in September last year to 27 years in prison for attempting to abolish the democratic state, leading an armed criminal organization, and other charges tied to a failed coup plot following his 2022 election defeat. 

In July 2025, the Trump administration hit Brazil with a 50% tariff on all imports over what President Donald Trump called “insidious attacks on Free Elections.” At the time, Trump demanded that Brazil halt the coup trial of Jair Bolsonaro, claiming the judicial process was politically motivated and amounted to a “witch hunt.”

Jair Bolsonaro has faced multiple corruption allegations and was named the OCCRP’s 2020 Person of the Year for enabling organized crime and corruption. In 2022, Brazil’s top electoral court fined Bolsonaro’s coalition $4 million, ruling that it had filed a bad-faith lawsuit to overturn the election results. If convicted, he could be barred from running in Brazil’s 2026 presidential election.

This story was originally published by ProPublica.

Frank Ssekamwa says the United States presented his country with an impossible choice. If it accepted the terms of a new health assistance agreement, Uganda would have to give the U.S. access to the data of millions of his fellow citizens — a decision he worries would make their personal information more vulnerable to breaches and possible exploitation.

But if it refused, the East African nation would likely lose out on more than a billion dollars to address HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and other illnesses, even as its people face rising threats from Ebola and other deadly infectious diseases. 

So, on Dec. 10, it agreed.

“If you take the deal, you’re going to be exploited. If you don’t take it, you’re going to die,” said Ssekamwa, an attorney and digital rights expert in Uganda. “It’s the essence of digital colonialism.”

Across Africa, countries have faced similar dilemmas in a series of closed-door negotiations in which the U.S. has conditioned lifesaving aid on access to citizens’ health data. The negotiations come in the wake of the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which — in contrast with the new contracts — provided billions of dollars in aid with few strings attached. Officials in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Ghana have been so outraged by the demands that they rejected the initial deals. 

The demand to access health data is central to the Trump administration’s new America First Global Health Strategy, an openly transactional approach that seeks to leverage the desperate need for medical treatments abroad. Aid will now be given “in a way that directly benefits the American people and directly promotes our national interest,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated in September.

The State Department declined to publicly release global aid and data-sharing agreements it has signed with more than 30 countries as part of its new approach. But a ProPublica analysis of nine of the deals offers a window into the extensive U.S. demands for access to data — and the potential risks and vulnerabilities for the citizens of countries that have signed them. ProPublica also reviewed a data-sharing agreement struck with Uganda, which has not previously been reported; a data agreement with Kenya; six agreements over the sharing of pathogens that can cause pandemics that were made public by the State Department this week; generic templates of deals for sharing both data and pathogens that can cause pandemics; and an analysis of the documents by the advocacy group Public Citizen that it shared exclusively with ProPublica. 

ProPublica also consulted more than a dozen experts in data privacy and global health, including several with direct knowledge of U.S. policy, who said that the insistent demands for data access and other resources as a condition of aid are unprecedented. Without seeing the full suite of agreements, they could not identify all vulnerabilities. But they spotted some red flags: The terms of the deals are vague and lack language standard in most data-sharing agreements that adequately limits what data is collected and how it can be used. That increases the risk that individuals’ personal data could be exposed, misused or commercialized without their consent.  

In the Ugandan data deal, the U.S. will get direct, real-time access to nine of the nation’s health data systems for seven years, including the central repository that stores all of its health information, lab data, data collected by community health workers and, critically, its system for managing individuals’ electronic medical records. The agreement calls for the sharing of aggregated data with all personally identifiable information removed. It also says the data should be used for delivering and auditing healthcare services. 

But lawyers and digital privacy experts argue that the deal raises questions about who will have access to the massive cache of health data and whether it could be inappropriately accessed and exploited.

Some expressed concern that, because it is possible to reverse-engineer data that has been anonymized, people with HIV, tuberculosis and other diseases could have their records exposed.

Stephanie Psaki, who served as the U.S. coordinator for global health security under President Joe Biden, described the Trump administration’s approach as a “blunt instrument of ‘just give me the login to your data systems.’” 

“The U.S. would never agree to that,” she said, if the deal were offered in reverse.

In Uganda, the U.S. will provide up to $1.7 billion over five years for health security and the treatment and prevention of often deadly afflictions such as malaria, tuberculosis, HIV and polio. In the past, the U.S. gave this aid without asking for direct benefits in return, while saving an estimated 170,000 Ugandan lives per year. 

While a significant investment, the new U.S. outlay is less than it previously spent in Uganda and will decrease every year of the agreement. By 2030, the African nation will receive 45% less global health funding than when Trump retook office, according to an analysis by Vincent Lin of the charity Partners in Health, which provides healthcare in poor countries. 

Several experts said there is broad support for some of the goals of the new plan for aid, including reducing African countries’ dependence on the U.S. for healthcare needs. But they worry the transactional nature of the approach could backfire by undermining trust or, in some cases, driving nations to reject deals altogether.

After withdrawing from the World Health Organization and losing access to its global network that tracks and combats disease outbreaks, the U.S. is attempting to obtain the information necessary to address potential pandemics through a patchwork of deals with individual countries. Each of the agreements ProPublica reviewed includes a section on responding to outbreaks. And some countries have signed separate pathogen-sharing agreements, which state that countries must “initiate sharing specimen(s) and related data” within five days of a U.S. request. The Trump administration is also planning unprecedented involvement of private companies to manage and process data.

The State Department told ProPublica that it needs access to the data to improve health outcomes in recipient countries and keep Americans safe. The new approach also requires countries to invest more in their own health systems in exchange for the aid, a promise many countries will likely struggle to fulfill. And, in some cases, including the deal with Uganda, it aims to boost local manufacturing through partnerships with American companies.

The State Department said it took multiple factors into account to ensure the required investments from other countries were “realistic and achievable.”

“The United States is investing billions of dollars in other countries’ health systems to fight infectious disease. In return, we expect governments to increase their own spending on health, so programs are sustainable and under genuine national ownership, not permanently financed by U.S. taxpayers. For the first time, both sides are putting skin in the game to ensure lasting impact,” a State Department spokesperson said in response to questions about the agreements.  

Following up on additional questions from ProPublica, spokesperson Tommy Pigott said the agreements call for countries to “share only the same kinds of aggregated, de-identified data that has been shared and used for years in the fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and other diseases. All data sharing is consistent with each country’s laws and approvals. No personally identifiable information is being received or shared by the United States government.”

Uganda’s Ministry of Health, Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Personal Data Protection Office and the Ugandan Embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to questions for this article. 

In the age of artificial intelligence, large health datasets have become so valuable they’ve been referred to as the new gold. The precise value of the health data of an entire nation is unclear, but it could be extremely valuable to artificial intelligence-driven companies for training models. The industry of buying and selling such information troves is worth billions. And countries around the world have come to regard their citizens’ health records as national assets that deserve special protections and can confer economic and strategic advantages. 

Yet the U.S. agreements in Africa, which are part of a strategy the State Department openly states is intended to make America “more prosperous” and “promote American health innovations,” provide no guarantee that Africans subject to them will have a say in what happens to their data or receive a fair share of its benefits. “Once companies get this data, the value is being accrued. But there’s no way for the [African] population to know how companies will use it,” said Jane Munga of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has argued that the agreements may violate African privacy laws.

Africans have also expressed concern that they will not be able to access and benefit from medicines and vaccines developed from pathogen samples shared with the U.S. Five of the six specimen-sharing agreements reviewed by ProPublica state that, in the event that a medical product is developed primarily from a specimen from the country, the U.S. government “shall prioritize” a request from that government behind the needs of the U.S. Only one of the agreements, with Nigeria, commits the U.S. to facilitating “priority access” to — and the donation of — any medical products developed using the specimens.

The phenomenon of extracting information and samples from less-resourced populations and failing to credit and compensate them for their contributions to medical developments is well known enough to have several names, such as “parachute science.” Just a few years ago, countries, including some in Africa, hosted COVID-19 vaccine trials, only to later struggle to access the shots they helped to develop.

Each agreement includes “benefit-sharing provisions,” the State Department said in response to questions. 

*   *   *

After the Trump administration dismantled USAID, the world’s largest provider of humanitarian assistance, it also drastically reduced funding for international health work done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and severely scaled back the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which combats HIV globally. In addition to withdrawing from the WHO, the U.S. removed itself from international negotiations over a pandemic agreement intended to affirm countries’ sovereign rights to their biological resources and ensure equitable access to medical interventions.

Brad Smith, an entrepreneur who served in the first Trump administration, is now in charge of creating the system that would rise from the ashes of that burned bridge. Before joining this administration, Smith founded three companies with business models that rest in part on using data to reduce healthcare costs, including CareBridge, a home care provider that sold for a reported $2.7 billion in 2024. During the presidential transition that year, Smith led the government efficiency panel that would become Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. After Trump took office, he presided over some $67 billion in sweeping cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services before being brought on as an adviser to the State Department. 

Although the humanitarian aid system had been largely dismantled, Congress required the executive branch to continue providing aid. So Smith and his team had to find new ways to get the funding to countries, ensure that it was being spent wisely and address potential pandemics — all without most of the international partners and staff the government had previously relied on to carry out this complex work. 

A Rhodes scholar known for his intense work ethic, Smith threw himself into the effort. State Department staff fielded calls from him at all hours of the night to explain budget items on spreadsheets.

Through his personal lawyer, Smith referred questions from ProPublica for this report to the State Department.

One of the greatest challenges in negotiating the agreements lay in the handling of health data. In the past, PEPFAR, the global HIV treatment and prevention program, built its own systems to handle anonymized data, separate from government health records — a setup that Trump administration officials and others have criticized as inefficient.

The America First plan proposed standardizing data collection and processing within countries. The Ugandan agreement requires the country to provide the U.S. — and its contractors — with logins “or other secure access mechanisms” to directly enter the country’s data systems. The new approach, U.S. officials say, will enable the U.S. to continue auditing programs and track outbreaks. 

The agreements ProPublica reviewed include statements about the U.S. government’s intent to ensure data security and say that the data is being accessed for the purposes of addressing diseases and auditing that work, but they leave open the possibility that sensitive information could be revealed, according to the data privacy experts ProPublica consulted. 

At particular risk are countries that don’t have national data privacy laws, such as Liberia, whose memorandum of understanding requires “interlinked and interoperable” data systems for “surveillance, laboratory, response, health, environment, agriculture.” That country’s main health agreement doesn’t require the U.S. to limit the amount of data it takes to the least needed, a standard clause in U.S. contracts, according to Abdoul Jalil Djiberou Mahamadou, a recent postdoctoral fellow focusing on bioethics at Stanford University. (Neither Liberia nor the State Department has released the supplemental data-sharing agreement.) “Once data is breached, it’s nearly impossible to get it back,” Mahamadou added.

The Liberian government did not respond to a request for comment.

The Ugandan data-sharing agreement says it will comply with the laws of both nations and permits the sharing of “sensitive personal data” if the consent of individuals whose data is shared is obtained, there is a compelling public health emergency of international concern and it is the only way information can be provided in a “timely and accurate format.”

Ssekamwa, the digital rights expert who also founded and runs the African Center for Digital Justice, said there are important questions that haven’t been answered by the Ugandan government.

“Does the U.S. have appropriate data protections? Can the systems provide anonymized data? Are they really up to that standard?” said Ssekamwa. “If I’m someone who has had health issues, can you deny me a visa because of the health issues I’m having?”

Psaki, the former global health security coordinator, worried about the haste with which the changes to data access are happening. “Even in the best of circumstances, you can’t go from having parallel data systems that were established over 20-plus years to finding some way to integrate those data systems in six months.” 

Speed has been a hallmark of the America First global health effort. In September, just a month after Smith joined the State Department, it launched the new strategy at an event co-sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and five large pharmaceutical companies. By November, Smith was crisscrossing the African continent with a small team of negotiators, trying to persuade dignitaries to agree to deals. 

The State Department said the deals were “negotiated in a thoughtful and strategic way over many months.” 

On Dec. 4, Kenya became the first country to sign, during a triumphant celebration with Rubio and President William Ruto in Washington. Outcry over the agreement had already begun two days earlier, when a Kenyan activist named Nelson Amenya announced on X that he had seen a sample of the specimen-sharing agreement as well as a legal analysis that showed it would violate Kenyan law.

As a condition for receiving $1.6 billion in aid, the Kenyan government agreed to provide access to seven years’ worth of health records — two years longer than the U.S. would provide financial support. 

Although the Kenyan data-sharing agreement states that the U.S. will take “all reasonable measures to protect the confidentiality of information” and abide by American and Kenyan laws, Amenya worried that wouldn’t be enough. “Every HIV test, TB diagnosis, malaria case — accessible to US officials,” he wrote in the post, which now has 1 million views. “Your medical records, your children’s health data — all exposed.”

A few days later, a senator in Kenya’s Parliament, Okiya Omtatah, sued members of the government over the agreement, arguing that it poses a threat to citizens’ constitutional right to privacy by “allowing broad foreign access to sensitive data.” A Kenyan nonprofit also sued, and more than 50 groups weighed in on its side, complaining the document gives the U.S. “excessive access” to African data and risks serious human rights violations. 

In court filings, the Kenyan government argued that it is obligated to achieve the “highest attainable standard of health” for citizens and that it is unable to do that on its own. After blocking the deal for months, in May, the Kenyan High Court temporarily allowed implementation of the agreement to proceed while it considers the case.

Since outrage bubbled up in Kenya, some other countries have negotiated shorter terms for sharing data and pandemic specimens and have inserted additional protections, according to the Public Citizen analysis.

Still, groups across Africa have sounded alarms about dangers inherent in these agreements, including data breaches. Examples of such unauthorized access to personal data abound, including a recent case where the healthcare data of some 500,000 participants in the UK Biobank wound up listed for sale on the Chinese website Alibaba. 

Revealing whether someone has had an abortion, mental health condition, substance use treatment or sexually transmitted disease can be devastating anywhere. In Africa, research has shown it can lead to discrimination and violence. And even when personally identifiable information has been removed, individuals in supposedly anonymized data can be reidentified using AI and other tools. 

The Ugandan data-sharing agreement calls for the U.S. government to “promptly notify the Government of Uganda of any unauthorized access” and requires the parties to conduct a joint breach assessment and remediation plan afterward. But by that point, it may be too late, Ssekamwa fears. “Once the data gets out of Uganda, we are skeptical that the government of Uganda will actually have any power to control it,” he said.

The secrecy around both the negotiations and the agreements has raised further suspicions. The State Department has declined to share the agreements, telling ProPublica the agency will release them when negotiations with all partner governments are complete while describing its actions as “protecting sensitive negotiations — not ‘secrecy.’” In response to a public records request filed by ProPublica, the State Department said it planned to provide the documents in September 2027. The advocacy group Public Citizen recently filed suit against the federal government in an effort to obtain the documents. 

“Why are they hiding the agreement if they think the terms are OK?” asked Bernard Okpi, a Nigerian lawyer who sued his government in March, alleging that its deal violates the country’s constitutional right to privacy and promotes religious discrimination by prioritizing funding for Christian faith-based health facilities. That suit is pending, and the Nigerian government did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

The State Department said the agreement with Nigeria “was negotiated in connection with reforms the Nigerian government has made to prioritize protecting Christian populations from violence.”

The Trump administration says that its new global health strategy is designed to save lives and keep the U.S. — and the world — safe from disease outbreaks. But ultimately its hard-driving and secretive negotiations may work against those goals.

While the administration aspired to strike agreements with 50 nations, including the three countries that walked away from negotiations in part over concerns about data sharing, it has fallen far short of that number. (In Zambia, officials also balked at U.S. demands for critical minerals.) The loss of aid in those countries is already proving to be devastating. 

Despite the Trump administration’s stated goal of putting America first, the U.S. may feel the consequences of those failed negotiations, too, as mistrust compounds the loss of long-standing systems that provided care and responded to disease outbreaks. 

“It’s in everyone’s interest to have a comprehensive approach to respond to an outbreak early,” said Psaki, who pointed to the quickly escalating number of Ebola cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo as evidence. While that country struck a healthcare deal with the U.S., five of the nine countries bordering it have not. “We need to get data and samples from all nine countries to collaborate effectively on that outbreak, and now we don’t have that.”

The State Department said the U.S. has responded swiftly to the outbreak and has provided over $270 million to the global fight against Ebola.

In Uganda, where people have also fallen sick and died from Ebola, Ssekamwa said that his country needs all the help that the healthcare deal can bring, including improved protection from outbreaks, but there needs to be more robust protection of people’s personal data.  

“We are happy to benefit from the technological advancement and the fruits of big data,” he said. Instead, he said, “the U.S. has left so many gaps within the agreement, which can be exploited in their favor.”

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The days of ground beef and chicken legs are long gone at the Ritenour Co-Care Food Pantry just outside St. Louis. The nonprofit has swapped out those staple proteins for cheaper ground chicken and hot dogs as it faces higher food costs and surging demand.

“We have to adapt just like everybody else,” Executive Director Angela Gabel said about rising grocery prices.

Last year, Ritenour spent about $120,000 on food. The pantry budgeted $180,000 for this year, though Gabel said that may not be sufficient.

And the number of people looking for food has increased: The pantry signed up seven new families on a recent weekday morning and expected to add 15 by the end of the day. Gabel said more people are traveling farther to visit multiple food pantries each month to stock their shelves.

Families are facing rising grocery prices at the same time that many of the most vulnerable are losing access to the nation’s largest food assistance program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. More than 4 million Americans lost SNAP benefits between February 2025 and February 2026, according to analyses of the most recent federal data. The numbers are expected to increase as states whittle the rolls further as required by the broad tax and spending law President Donald Trump signed last summer, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

“I’m absolutely terrified,” Gabel said. “We will absolutely do our best, but I think we were meant to supplement SNAP or to help in emergency situations. I just don’t think we can replace the government.”

Since the fall, states and counties that administer SNAP have been notifying residents who rely on food stamps that they must meet new work requirements or lose their food assistance. The federal tax and spending law ended exemptions to work requirements for older adults, homeless people, veterans and some rural residents, among others. The changes will put more pressure on states, likely leading to further benefit cuts as they reevaluate eligibility and begin paying for more program costs. The new rules also will further stress the already stretched charitable food system.

Gina Plata-Nino, SNAP director at the Food Research & Action Center, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit working to combat hunger, noted that children, older adults and people with disabilities are most reliant on the program. The left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated the average benefit per person this year would be $188 per month, or $6.17 per day.

“And a majority of them are making less than $1,100 a month,” she said. “So when you lose your SNAP benefit, it really does exacerbate your situation of having to choose between shelter, food and other basic needs.”

Rising need for food

National data on hunger is limited since the Trump administration terminated the annual Household Food Security report last year. But other measures indicate that more people are missing regular meals.

In May, the federal Reserve Bank of New York found a “remarkable increase” in food insecurity across the country, with more people struggling than during the peak of the pandemic. Its national surveys last October and this February found more households dipped into savings accounts, relied on food donations or had trouble finding enough food to eat or had kids who missed meals.

Democrats and anti-hunger advocates have been urging Congress to rescind the SNAP cuts for months. Current negotiations over reauthorizing the federal farm bill, which includes SNAP, have put the issue front and center in Congress. The House has passed a version of that legislation that won’t reverse the cuts.

Republicans have downplayed the effects of the changes and defended the SNAP cuts, arguing they are aimed at rooting out fraud and abuse.

U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden, a Wisconsin Republican, said he was raised in “abject, rural poverty,” by a single mother who relied on food stamps, subsidized lunches and government cheese.

But in late April, he urged support of the farm bill that cements cuts to the food stamp program.

“We do have to know that there is a tremendous amount of fraud that takes place in SNAP,” he said on the House floor, “and we want to make sure that every single dollar that is allocated to go to a hungry child or a veteran or one of our senior citizens goes to them.”

Last week, 23 state attorneys general wrote to Senate leaders who are now considering the farm bill, saying the Senate has an opportunity to “reverse course and reaffirm a bipartisan commitment that no American should go hungry because they cannot afford food.”

In Nebraska, where SNAP participation has dropped by about 11%, state lawmakers this year proposed legislation to ask the federal government for waivers from some of the new restrictions. Those bills, which did not advance, sought to protect benefits for veterans, former foster youth, homeless people and refugees.

But the problem demands a federal response, said Megan Hamann, the senior community organizer for food and nutrition access at Nebraska Appleseed, an advocacy nonprofit that works against poverty and discrimination.

“We’re going to be working with patchwork solutions in the meantime,” Hamann said. She described “a real reckoning as a result of loss of federal support and programming that has for a long time in our state and others offered stability and consistency that is no longer present.”

She said putting food on the table has become a widespread challenge for many in Nebraska as the price of housing, utilities and other everyday necessities squeezes household budgets.

“I talk to people on the daily who say, ‘I’m worried about the price of groceries, I’m worried about the price of gas, I feel like everything except for my wage is going up,’” she said.

Though generally focused on housing, the Omaha organization Restoring Dignity has launched a new food assistance program to help refugees who lost SNAP benefits late last year.

“A big chunk of what we do now revolves around food,” said founder and Executive Director Hannah Vlach.

Community donations allow Restoring Dignity to provide grocery store gift cards to those refugees. But the organization, which generally serves about 5,000 refugees per year, is helping only about 200 of the most vulnerable.

“Right now we’re just focused on the families who absolutely will be evicted and will be on the streets if they don’t get any assistance,” she said, “and I have no idea how those other families are surviving.”

Vlach emphasized that the federal government has specifically approved the arrival of the refugees her organization serves, many of whom served with U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

“This can’t become our new normal — this just can’t,” she said. “It’s unethical, it’s immoral.”

States triaging needs

West Virginian Raine Gibbons said she relies more on cheap staples such as pasta and pasta sauce, trimming the amount of meat and treats she buys.

She said her family of five recently saw a reduction in monthly SNAP benefits, which now provide just over $300 per month.

Gibbons supervises an in-home education program for parents at one of the state-run Family Support Centers, which provide parenting classes, baby supplies such as diapers and emergency food aid.

Aside from grappling with higher prices and reduced SNAP eligibility among clients, the West Virginians who rely on those 57 federally funded centers face an uncertain future because of unresolved state contracting issues.

“It’s really, really stressful,” Gibbons said. “It’s so hard to stay present and be the parent that you want to be when you’re worried about those daily struggles of just how to feed your family.”

Gibbons said SNAP is not a luxury, but an essential support for many families.

“It’s really what’s keeping families like mine — who do work outside of the home, who do have a full-time job — afloat to be able to feed our families and our babies, and try to just get through this economy.”

California lawmakers are trying to help fill some of the federal void in their state. Democratic Assemblymember Alex Lee is pushing to add $100 million to a state program that doubles the purchasing power of SNAP when used for fresh fruits and vegetables. Separate pending legislation would petition the federal government for a waiver, allowing California to maintain an exemption from work requirements for former foster youth.

In California, nearly one-third of all families with young children struggled to put food on the table between July 2024 and January 2026, according to survey results from the Stanford University Center on Early Childhood.

“States are in a position of trying to triage what is the most important need for families, when really families have all of these needs that are considered pretty basic,” said Abigail Stewart-Kahn, managing director of the center. “It puts states in an untenable position to try to make decisions of which gaps to fill and for whom.”

Stewart-Kahn said many families face immediate decisions of which bills to pay and which needs to forgo, but that the parental stress and childhood distress will have long-term consequences for society.

“Every time we make a policy change that potentially increases stress in the lives of a child, we are deciding as a society that we’re OK with harming their healthy development, so that the next generation will struggle further with everything from educational attainment to mental health challenges,” she said.

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The Azerbaijani court that handles the financial crimes trial of journalists from OCCRP’s member center, Meydan TV, has replaced the entire panel of judges overseeing the case, prompting concerns from defense lawyers that the months-long proceedings will be forced to restart from scratch.

Twelve journalists linked to the news outlet have been on trial since December 2025 at the Baku Court of Grave Crimes on charges carrying potential prison sentences of up to 12 years. 

International rights groups have condemned the trial, arguing that the charges have been brought to punish the defendants for their reporting, which has included coverage of high-level corruption in the country.

Orkhan Mammadov, an editor at Meydan TV based in exile, told OCCRP that the sudden decision to replace the panel was a tactic by Baku authorities to exert “psychological pressure on our employees” and “drag the case out even further.” 

Defense lawyers representing some of the reporters expressed their fears that the proceedings would be forced to restart under Azerbaijani law, erasing months of courtroom arguments.

Nemat Karimli, a defense lawyer representing Ramin Jabrayilzade, told Meydan TV that while a criminal trial can typically proceed if a single judge is replaced, no such legal mechanism exists when an entire panel is swapped. As a result, “the trial will have to start over,” Karimli added. 

Rovshana Rahimli, a defense lawyer representing fellow detained Meydan TV journalist Aysel Umudova, echoed that concern. 

“Previously, the other two judges on the panel always remained in place. Now all three have been changed. There is a chance the trial will restart,” she said. “We will object to the trial restarting, and we will demand that the judges instead familiarize themselves with the case record.”

Meydan TV’s Mammadov said that authorities had already postponed numerous trial dates, leaving proceedings stalled for the past three months. This included a May 22 hearing when the judges reportedly cut short the testimony of detained journalist Khayala Agayeva after she mentioned Aliyev’s son, Heydar, in her statement.

Mammadov said that authorities were “making an example out of [his colleagues],” but added that they would continue to “speak openly and tell the truth, and they are not intimidated by this.”

The case began in early December 2024, when authorities detained six Meydan TV staff members and a media trainer and charged them with “smuggling committed by an organized group.” Five more journalists linked to the outlet were arrested over the following months.

At least two dozen independent journalists have been detained since late 2023 in what rights groups describe as an unprecedented crackdown on the free press in Azerbaijan. Last week, press freedom groups condemned a state prosecutor’s request for prison sentences of up to 15 years for a team of journalists at the independent outlet Toplum TV who are also facing financial crimes charges.

The next hearing in the trial of the Meydan TV journalists is scheduled for July.

Former Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero testified Wednesday before the country’s highest criminal court, categorically denying allegations that he orchestrated an influence-peddling scheme tied to a multimillion-euro airline bailout.

The Spanish news outlet InfoLibre reported that during a three-hour hearing at the Audiencia Nacional in Madrid, Zapatero formally faced four criminal charges: influence peddling, money laundering, tax fraud, and smuggling.

Investigating judge José Luis Calama alleges that Zapatero sat at the “apex” of a “stable and organized structure” that traded high-level institutional and business influence for payments. 

The probe centers on a 53 million euros ($61.5 million) government bailout granted by the state holding company SEPI to Plus Ultra, an airline with ties to Venezuelan businessmen.

The judge’s suspicions are partly based on communications intercepted by the U.S. Homeland Security Investigations from Rodolfo Reyes Rojas, Plus Ultra’s former majority shareholder. In one message, the businessman allegedly wrote: “What I want is for him or Zapatero to talk to SEPI and get at least a verbal 100 percent guarantee that they’ll grant the aid.”

Answering only questions from the judge and his defense attorney, Víctor Moreno Catena, Zapatero denied any contact with government officials or airline executives regarding the rescue funds. According to legal sources, Zapatero stated he did not meet Plus Ultra’s current president, Julio Martínez Sola, until 2024—three years after the bailout was approved.

Zapatero also distanced himself from a contract between Plus Ultra and a consulting firm run by his friend, Julio Martínez Martínez. The agreement granted the firm a 1 percent commission on the state aid, amounting to 530,000 euros ($614,679).

The judge alleges Zapatero gave “instructions” to set up an offshore company to manage funds. According to an exclusive investigation by infoLibre, that shell company—Dubái Landside Middle East FZCO—was registered in the United Arab Emirates just eight days after the Spanish cabinet approved the bailout.

Investigators connect the broader plot to payments totaling 490,780 euros made to Zapatero, and 239,755 euros made to his daughters’ design agency, WhaTheFav, over six years by a consulting firm tied to the network. Zapatero acknowledged his friendship with Martínez Martínez but distanced himself from his corporate web, testifying that the payments were for legitimate professional consulting and layout work.

During Wednesday’s hearing, Zapatero declined to comment on a separate branch of the investigation involving jewelry seized from a safe in his professional office.

Following his court appearance, Zapatero released a defiant public statement, announcing he had submitted a “voluntary universal authorization” allowing the court full access to verify he holds no hidden assets.

“I have been silent for 29 days, preparing for this moment and those to come. I remained quiet out of respect for justice and for His Honor, who had to be the first to hear me,” Zapatero said in the statement. “I am accused of very serious crimes that I have not committed. I have always conducted myself with decency and honesty, and now I have the task of proving it.”

Emphasizing that he has “absolutely nothing outside of Spain,” the former leader asked the public for patience.

“When one knows they are completely innocent, as is my case, and fully trusts in justice, the most painful thing is knowing that many people may feel disappointed if they believe the things being said about me,” he said. “I ask for your trust. I will not disappoint you. It may take more or less time to prove it, but the truth will break through.”