Page 19 - bne IntelliNews Country Report: Ukraine Dec17

President Poroshenko said on November 20. “There is a lot of work ahead of us,” he said, stressing that while Ukraine has the right to membership, it needs to fulfill EU criteria “and that depends only on us. Is 15% a reasonable pace or too slow? EU authorities recently said it’s too slow. Part of the problem has been Russia’s military aggression. Another part of the problem has been resistance from the Poroshenko administration itself, but we can’t point to any other politician or party that would have pursued integration any more quickly or effectively. And in the event that Poroshenko is re-elected (which is the most likely scenario), we don’t see integration efforts accelerating at all. That’s the reality of being a country on a geopolitical fault line.
Ukraine ranks 113th among 137 countries of the world ranked by the World Economic Forum (WEF) experts in terms of levels of organized crime . Ukraine is in a group of countries with high levels of organized crime together with the states of Latin America and Africa. El Salvador, Honduras and Venezuela have the worst ratings. According to the WEF, Finland, Norway, Oman, Iceland and Singapore, forming the top five of the rating, are least affected by the organized crime. Estonia was tenth (the best result among the former Soviet Union countries), the United Kingdom ranks 28th, Japan 35th, France 48th, the United States 57th, Germany 59th, Turkey 72th, and Italy 123rd (the worst among the EU member states). Ukraine's neighbour, Poland, took the 54th place, Hungary was 56th, Slovakia 64th, Romania 71st, Russia 86th, Moldova 94th. The rating was compiled on the basis of data for 2015-2016.
Ukraine’s civil society has decried the appointment of 25 unfit judges to Ukraine’s Supreme Court. The reshuffle of the members of the Supreme Court was supposed to be a major step in the fight against endemic corruption, but the Poroshenko administration’s decision to appoint judges criticised for being either allegedly corrupt or to have been in involved in politically motivated cases or human rights abuse has caused a storm of condemnation from Ukraine’s civil society. Ukraine’s Anticorruption Action Centre (AnAC) released a report with details of the alleged abuses of the judges , who represent about a fifth of the new judges. The judges took up their new jobs on November 11. “Judicial reforms have failed. Now we have to go back and start again,” tweeted Anders Aslund, a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council.
The US has promised Ukraine “defensive” weapons, including the controversial Javelin tank-busting missile. The US National Security Council will recommend to US President Donald Trump that they allocate $47mn to the Ukrainian authorities for the purchase of weapons from the US., it was reported over the weekend. The move is aimed at "containing aggression from pro-Russian separatists," according to s report on the ABC channel in the US. The Trump administration and the US State Department declined to comment on the reports. If confirmed, the Kremlin would take this decision as an escalation and is likely to respond in kind. The deal is controversial as the Javelin missile could also be seen as an offensive weapon. Russia has been shown to be providing motorised heavy weapons, including tanks, to the Donbas rebels that are fighting the Ukrainian forces so the missile could significantly alter the balance of forces in the conflict.
The National Anti-corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) has opened a criminal case involving the possible illegal enrichment of the head of the Prosecutor General's Office (PGO) Yuriy Lutsenko , NABU's press
19 UKRAINE Country Report December 2017 www.intellinews.com