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restaurant in Odesa simply because he had a good meal there. He looted the government coffers for billions of dollars and when he was eventually ousted, in his palatial dacha, the astounded protestors that broke into the building found a loaf of bread cast from solid gold (which has since gone missing) amongst an Aladdin’s cave of treasures.
As president, Yanukovych arrested Tymoshenko and jailed her, his main political rival, causing outrage in the West, which linked further economic relief to her release. While Yanukovych was pilloried in the West for his corruption, Tymoshenko was held up as a liberal martyr and her gas princess past quietly swept under the carpet.
Euromaidan
Following the next Euromaidan revolution in 2014 that deposed Yanukovych, corruption was front and centre again under the new oligarch-turned president Viktor Poroshenko.
A former minister under the Yanukovych administration, Poroshenko was also a billionaire businessman with holdings in media, banking and confectionery amongst other things.
While not known as overtly corrupt, Poroshenko was a product of the system and vigorously resisted Western pressure to crackdown on corruption. However, under his first term in office he was the only oligarch to see his wealth increase while the others went down and he pointedly refused to put his media assets into trust while he was president.
For someone like Poroshenko, who doesn’t need the money, corruption is not a problem for the system, corruption is the system. Without free and fair elections, functioning courts or overseeing independent institutions, it is corruption that gives a leader his power: the ability to dish out lucrative sinecures at the head of some agency or other, and the power to take them away again.
The problem was highlighted when Ukraine's economy minister Aivarus Abromavicius quit in spectacular fashion in February 2016, accusing Poroshenko’s government of unbridled corruption.
The Lithuanian-born naturalised Ukrainian and former highly successful investment banker, Abromavicius was attempting to battle corruption and making inroads. But in a conversation with bn e IntelliNews at the time, he complained that the president was assigning his deputies to key jobs that controlled major flows of public cash. Abromavicius and his entire team eventually quit lambasting the government’s ingrained corruption, causing a political crisis.
“Neither I nor my team have any desire to serve as a cover-up for the covert corruption, or become puppets for those who, very much like the ‘old’ government, are trying to exercise control over the flow of public funds,” Abromavicius said at the time of the Poroshenko administration, which if anything, was even more lionised in the West than the Orange government of Yushchenko.
Nevertheless, under Poroshenko, at the West’s insistence, bodies like National
12 UKRAINE Country Report February 2024 www.intellinews.com