Demystifying Corruption in Ukraine
Some creative ways Ukraine is attacking corruption that the West should consider.
“I pretend to work, and they pretend to pay me.” Soviet and post-Soviet workers statement.
To create a false guise of equality across the Soviet Republics as well as a way to keep costs affordable, the Soviet people became used to long lines and shortages. When they needed something that wasn’t available in the stores, they used the extensive black market or the barter method of trading favors. This created a society comfortable with petty and more institutionalized corruption.
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, corruption continued in the nations born after. When I lived in Ukraine as an American-born Ukrainian in the mid-1990s, I was warned about the existing corruption. Having a car in Ukraine without diplomatic status was a calling card for police harassment and bribes. Whether you followed the law was of no concern. Your foreign currency was.
Former state-owned enterprises that couldn’t afford to pay their workers would give them the product they produced instead. The workers would then have to spend their nights and weekends selling that product at a discount in open-air markets, hoping to have enough money to live.
Buying a full birth in an overnight first-class train because you didn’t want, to share a sleeping compartment with a male stranger, meant the train monitor would resell your second ticket to someone else behind your back, and you would have to bribe them onboard so you could keep the compartment to yourself. At the airport, my brother, who didn’t speak a word of Ukrainian, was stopped by security and harassed until he paid them a bribe. These were limited nuisances that you just got used to doing in Ukraine. You had no option to push back and not do them since you were dealing with government and corporate authorities who held power over you.
While I haven’t been back to Ukraine since its early days of independence, I have continued to read about the country’s progress. I followed them through the Orange Revolution, the Maidan Revolution, the annexation of Crimea, the invasion of the Donbas, the Burisma scandal, Trump’s first impeachment, and the 2022 Russian invasion. I even witnessed the politicization and polarization of the Ukraine issue in American society.
As Ukraine became villainized by right-wing media during the first Trump impeachment trial, I even became a victim myself. After my daughter was born in 2020, I began receiving vicious letters from whom I believe to be a disgruntled and jealous neighbor who doesn’t think I can afford a renovated apartment in our coop building in New York. Instead, I am on the bankrolls of Burisma working with Hunter Biden because I have a Ukrainian name. If you are curious to know, I have never met Hunter Biden or anyone from Burisma. However, conservative media and politicians seem to focus steady attention on Ukrainian corruption and use it as a rationale to discontinue funding Ukraine.
What is the truth? Is Ukraine a very corrupt nation that cannot be trusted with American funds or weapons? Or is the answer more nuanced than that? How do Ukrainian anti-corruption practices compare with American anti-corruption practices? Let’s take a closer look.
Ukraine has made significant progress in reducing corruption since the Maidan revolution of 2013. They are combatting corruption using three main methods: independent government and judicial agency oversight, increased transparency, and technology.
Anti-corruption agencies
Ukraine has established a national anti-corruption bureau of Ukraine, a special anti-corruption prosecutor, a special anti-corruption court, and a national agency on corruption prevention which are all independent organizations from the President, Rada, and the Courts. These organizations are allowed to open an investigation against anyone they believe to be involved in corruption and litigate it in the anti-corruption court.¹
In the United States, we don’t have independent agencies to act as watchdogs against elected officials. It must all go through the justice department where it is often considered a political witch hunt by the other side. We have elected officials in Congress like George Santos and Bob Menendez who are under active investigations of wrongdoing and yet still serve because there is no easy method to remove them from office.
Increased Transparency
As part of the work of independent anti-corruption agencies, Ukraine has passed laws that require its elected officials to report their assets to be shared online for all of its citizens to access. With this transparency, it’s more difficult to take bribes, commit fraud, or hide those corrupt assets. The government is also keeping a detailed record of every piece of equipment and weapon in a government database. Soldiers are taking unusual risks to their safety to retrieve damaged weapons on the frontline to show the West, its commitment to safeguarding these resources.¹
In the United States, our elected officials are not required to record or report assets to our citizens. We have minimal oversight over our congressmen buying and selling stocks.
Technology
Ukraine has realized a good way to combat petty corruption and bribery is to take the human element out of government services. Ukraine introduced an online government ID system called Diia which helps Ukrainians to gain access to government services without human intervention eliminating the potential for bribes.² In addition, through government phone apps, Ukrainians can set up government appointments. When they must interact with a government agent, there are two computer monitors one of which faces the citizen so he/she can view what the government agent is reading or typing into the government system.
As an American, I could never imagine going to the Department of Motor Vehicles and having access to the records the government officials were viewing about me.
How have these reforms changed corruption in Ukraine? The Wilson Center which last evaluated the country in 2021 has reported since 2013, Ukraine has improved by eight points on the Corruption Perception Index (CPI). It ranks 76th out of 140 countries analyzed — thirty above Russia and one above India.³ NGOs have suggested that Ukraine has improved further since 2022.
Is Ukraine free of corruption? No, but it is making progress and will continue to do so. The Zelensky administration and government understand their existential fight requires continued support from their citizens, Europe, and the United States, and the only way to maintain the trust of these three critical constituents is to root out corruption from within the government and overall society.
Ukraine still has a long way to go but I applaud how far they have come since I lived there in the 1990s.
¹https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/12/world/europe/ukraine-weapons-tracking-corruption.html
³https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/ukrainian-corruption-russian-corruption
