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delivery within the next few months; holding back Russia’s Black Sea Fleet to protect naval transit from Ukraine’s ports; and tying up Russian forces inside Crimea with missile strikes and special operations sabotage.
US policymakers say they expect the war will eventually end through negotiations — but also that they don’t think Putin will be serious about talks this year, in part because he holds out hope that Trump will win back the presidency in November and dial back support to Kyiv.
2.4 Democracy vs corruption in Ukraine
The Zelenskiy administration has been rocked by a fresh corruption scandal at the Defence Ministry this week. Senior unnamed Defence Ministry officials and top managers at a leading arms manufacturer were busted by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) for running a UAH1.5bn ($40mn) scam to procure artillery shells that were never delivered. Five suspects have been issued with “suspicion of wrongdoing notice” and one was arrested trying to flee the country.
Ukraine is no stranger to corruption and despite Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's accession to power on an anti-graft ticket in 2019, it still has a bad corruption problem. There is a reason why Ukraine has been overtaken by nearly every other country in the Former Soviet Union (FSU) in per capita income terms and remains today the poorest country in Europe, despite its significant industrial, agricultural and human capital resources. It should be one of the richest countries in the region.
But corruption has been hard wired into the system from the start and has since also become a tool of politics. Moreover, as in Russia, a set of mega rich oligarchs emerged from the chaos of the 1990s, but unlike Russia, where Russian President Vladimir Putin curbed their avarice and threw them out of the corridors of power in 2000, Ukraine’s oligarchs have had another quarter century of unfettered activity to deeply ensconced themselves into the bedrock of the system. Zelenskiy only launched Ukraine’s anti-oligarch drive with his oligarch speech in March 2021 before finding himself distracted by a war with Russia less than a year later.
Ukraine’s detractors have pointed to its long history of corruption and claim it is unreformed. Ukraine’s supporters point to its new history of adherence to democratic values and say its reformed. But for most of the last decade the two, democracy and corruption, have gone hand in hand.
Eural Trans Gas & RosUkrEnergo
Barely remembered these days, Eural Trans Gas and RosUkrEnergo were trading companies that had the exclusive right to buy gas from Russia’s Gazprom and sell it to the Ukrainian government.
Eural Trans Gas was set up in 2002 and is part owned by Ukrainian oligarch Dmitri Firtash, who is now battling an extradition to the US on corruption charges. RosUkrEnergo was set up by former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma and Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2004 as a front for Gazprom in Ukraine.
10 UKRAINE Country Report February 2024 www.intellinews.com