Ukraine’s fight against corruption is not new. It’s Still Trying: NPR

Protesters burn flares and smoke bombs in front of Ukraine’s parliament in Kyiv on June 5, 2020, during a demonstration calling for the resignation of the interior minister on suspicion of corruption.

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Protesters burn flares and smoke bombs in front of Ukraine’s parliament in Kyiv on June 5, 2020, during a demonstration calling for the resignation of the interior minister on suspicion of corruption.

Sergei Supinksy/AFP via Getty Images

KYIV, Ukraine – The recent dismissal of top Ukrainian officials has rekindled attention to the country’s decades-long battle against corruption.

Over the course of several days, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and cabinet members of the government ordered the dismissal of more than a dozen advisers, deputy ministers, prosecutors and regional administrators from their positions.

At least three of the officials have been implicated in various scandals revealed by the press. Ukrainian anti-corruption officials arrested one for bribery.

“We will never go back to how things were before, to the ways of life that bureaucrats got used to, to the old way of chasing power,” Zelenskyy said in a video address Sunday night. at the start of the redesign.

State Department spokesman Ned Price said the United States was unaware of its aid’s involvement in the allegations, but teams in Kyiv and Washington were working to ensure that aid achieves its objectives.

Here are some of the keys to understanding how Ukraine got here and what is being done about it.

He went from the Soviet Union to the Wild West

When Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, control of the country’s economy shifted from former communist leadership in Moscow to what watchdogs called “clans” – private networks ownership defined by intimidation, cronyism and crime. The free market that President George HW Bush encouraged Ukraine to adopt when he visited Kyiv in 1991 resulted in a “wild west” of backdoor deals and power grabs as high as the president’s desk .

“It was like the Middle Ages,” says Vasyl Zadvornyy, the former CEO of Prozorro, Ukraine’s public procurement agency. Many international watchdog groups have named Ukraine one of the most corrupt countries on the planet.

But after Ukrainian police responded to small pro-EU protests with excessive force in 2013, millions of Ukrainians took to the streets seeking answers behind the government’s violence.

“It became extremely clear how much damage corruption had done to institutions,” says Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics. After months of protests that culminated in further police brutality, then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, himself a member of the “Donetsk clan”, fled the country.

A visitor to a vintage car collection at Mezhyhirya, the former private estate of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, in Novi Petrivtsi, Ukraine. After Yanukovych fled in 2014, the extravagant estate was opened to the public and returned to state ownership.

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A visitor to a vintage car collection at Mezhyhirya, the former private estate of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, in Novi Petrivtsi, Ukraine. After Yanukovych fled in 2014, the extravagant estate was opened to the public and returned to state ownership.

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Immediately afterwards, Russia invaded Ukraine and supported separatist movements in the Donbass region. Mylovanov says the episode revealed how corrupt practices have undermined Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.

“The security services didn’t do anything. They just weren’t capable,” he said. Russia illegally annexed Crimea to Ukraine in March 2014 in less than a month without a shot being fired. The Ukrainians dipped into their own pockets to replenish military arsenals, emptied by years of embezzlement and bad contracts.

“A new community of civil society watchdogs has been created to provide a high level of transparency and accountability,” says Zadvornyy.

In 2015, his group worked with activists, software programmers and the Ukrainian government to unveil a brand new public procurement system called Prozorro, which means “transparent” in Ukrainian. Meanwhile, all elected and appointed officials had to disclose all their finances or face heavy penalties.

“Access to our records is much wider than in the United States,” says Vitaliy Shabunin, head of the Ukrainian Anti-Corruption Action Center, a nongovernmental organization in Kyiv.

Detailed database adds scrutiny

In 2016, Ukraine’s parliament required businesses and government agencies to use Prozorro and disclose thousands of details about every transaction, down to the cost of a pencil in a rural school district, the intended use of the pencil, the competing costs for the same pencil and contact details. for buyer and seller.

“It’s very popular among the business community,” says Zadvornyy, as it guaranteed fair market practices for the first time in Ukraine’s history.

Yet Western countries have urged Ukraine to do more as billions of dollars in public and private investment pour into the country still at war with separatists.

“It’s not enough to pass laws to increase transparency around official sources of revenue,” then-Vice President Joe Biden said ahead of a 2015 session of Ukraine’s parliament, where he promised a package of 190 million dollars to fight against corruption.

“Reform is not just good governance, it is self-preservation,” he added.

Then-Vice President Joe Biden (center), Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko (right) and Speaker of Parliament Volodymyr Groysman at the Ukrainian parliament, in Kyiv, Ukraine, December 8, 2015.

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Then-Vice President Joe Biden (center), Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko (right) and Speaker of Parliament Volodymyr Groysman at the Ukrainian parliament, in Kyiv, Ukraine, December 8, 2015.

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Yet the kinds of additional reforms that Biden and European Union officials wanted to see in Ukraine, such as better law enforcement against publicly visible corruption, never came to fruition.

Responding to a scathing 2016 op-ed by The New York Times headlined “Ukraine’s Unyielding Corruption”, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko accused the paper of siding with Russia in its war against Ukraine. Poroshenko repeated that the corruption allegations diverted attention from national defense during his ultimately unsuccessful presidential run against Zelensky in 2019.

Military purchases were secret

When Russia invaded Ukraine again in 2022, Ukraine temporarily suspended transparency requirements for national security reasons.

Over the next few months, civilian spending returned to Prozorro’s database, but military purchases remained secret nonetheless. This has led some observers, including a group of US lawmakers, to demand even more wartime transparency.

While this is debated, the question of perception remains.

“The only way to restore trust is to be as tough as possible,” Shabunin of the Anti-Corruption Action Center said of the government’s recent moves to dismiss senior officials, instead of transparency.

“Yes, we have a lot of problems, but we are on the right track, but know how it should be,” he said. “That’s why I remain optimistic.”

This seems to be, for now, the EU’s assessment of Ukraine’s anti-corruption efforts so far as well.

When the 27-nation bloc accepted Ukraine’s application for membership in June 2022, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen praised the country’s recent reforms.

“A lot has been achieved, but of course there is still important work to be done,” von der Leyen said.

Joanna Kakissis and Polina Lytvynova contributed to this story.