Ukraine's (Temporary) Hara-Kiri

Ukraine inflicts a wound on itself— and then a U-turn

Imagine this nightmare scenario: you are in a hurry, as you forgot to set your alarm last night and have thus overslept and are already late for work. Already dazed and slightly panicked, you only halfheartedly follow the command of a bright red STOP sign and execute the notorious California Roll. Your morning immediately goes from bad to worse when you hear those loud sirens and observe those famous flashing blue lights through the rearview mirror. Your heart sinks as you grasp your new reality of having just been pulled over by the police.

In the United States, your typical response following the initial shock of this occurrence is to pull out your license and registration, calmly explain your situation to the officer, and accept that you may need to ultimately pay a traffic ticket or perhaps, as I did back in high school after running a red light, participate in a driver education program. The idea of bribing the officer in order to exonerate any responsibility for your offence is simply not a part of the American psyche. In fact, even attempting to bribe a police officer is highly illegal in all 50 states, as the integrity of most law enforcement officials in this country is strong enough to transform a minor offense into a full-blown felony. I would certainly rather be late for work.

However, this protocol within American law enforcement is unfortunately more of an exception than the rule around the world, a protocol we as Americans should always fight to maintain. In Mexico, about half of all encounters with law enforcement end with an illicit payment, with traffic stops in particular precarious situations. In India, corrupt police officers have a notorious reputation for extorting vulnerable people. In South Africa, just like Mexico, police will often demand payment to release motorists without further punishment while escaping any serious reprobation from their superiors. Finally, and perhaps most egregiously, not even an existential war of survival can halt the culture of bribery at all levels of society in Ukraine, a problem many Ukrainian officials are determined to exacerbate.

Last week, Ukrainian security services executed a brazen raid on the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), arresting several NABU officials as either Russian agents or individuals with ties to former Ukrainian officials currently living in exile in Russia. According to NABU, the raids far exceeded the legal authority of Ukrainian security agencies and would severely curtail, if not completely shut down the entire agency. The next day, allies of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Ukrainian Parliament crossed another line by rushing last-minute amendments to the criminal code reassigning the oversight of NABU to a politically-appointed ally of Zelensky, a dramatic step that would essentially dismantle the agency. Unsurprisingly, the response not only in Ukraine, but also in Ukraine’s Western sponsors, was one of outrage.

Immediately after the bill’s passage, Ukrainians in Kyiv and other cities took to the streets demanding a veto from Zelensky and a U-turn from the parliament. A unified statement of diplomats hailing from all seven G7 nations, of which the United States is the leading member, expressed “serious concerns” regarding these amendments, about the harshest diplomatic language one can use against an ally. And lest we forget Ukraine’s most important western neighbor, Poland’s often undiplomatic foreign minister Radek Sikorski urged Zelensky in the strongest terms to halt his allies’ risky plan to abandon the fight against corruption. Taken together, this assault against NABU is a clear indication that even with deadly Russian attacks unleashing horror on the Ukrainian people every day, the priorities of Zelensky and his allies appear to lie elsewhere.

In 2014, Ukraine, having encountered nearly a year of severe political turmoil that raised alarms and headlines around the world, was so bankrupt that the embattled nation had no choice but to seek international assistance from the International Monetary Fund (IMF.) One of the IMF’s critical conditions for this assistance: establish a new agency, the NABU, to unwind Ukraine’s entrenched culture of corruption that had existed since the Soviet era. Since 2014, NABU has not been without problems (the agency is distrusted by 62% of Ukrainians), but it has created a new culture in the country where high-profile corruption is no longer ignored (even though convictions are rare in Ukraine’s notoriously ineffective judicial system.) Once untouchable, even officials in the President’s inner circle such as Deputy Chiefs of Staff Andrey Smirnov and Oleg Tatarov have found themselves under NABU’s microscope for alleged bribery and money laundering.

It appears the final straw that led Zelensky to target the NABU were reports of a planned arrest of Timur Mindich, Zelensky’s partner of the Kvartal 95 production company from his acting days. The crime: embezzling from the state electric utility. Also feeling the heat from NABU was Oleksii Chernyshov, one of the president’s close political allies. His crime: abuse of power regarding a scheme to illegally seize land for development. This saga is a damning indictment of a country whose entire pitch to the world has been that only Ukraine is capable of protecting democracy and all of Europe from Russian barbarism and tyranny. Since the United States and Europe have spent literally hundreds of billions of dollars and euros propping up Ukraine, such a scheme is a massive warning of a poor return on the West’s biggest geopolitical investment. Unfortunately, despite his election back in 2019 on an anti-corruption platform, Zelensky has clearly fallen into his predecessors’ bad habits.

You may ask, why would the leadership of a country under a large-scale military assault by a superpower whose future existence is far from guaranteed engage in such a brazen assault on the institutions that are supposed to protect their country? The answer lies in an unfortunate bug of Eastern European culture. As someone who has studied the region and visited the former Eastern Bloc seven times, I have come to observe that whenever I query with the locals regarding predictions of the future, the most common response is little more than a shrug and some local version of Que sera, sera. The history of the region, fittingly labelled the Bloodlands by historian Timothy Snyder, is one where conflict is not the exception, but the norm. In such an environment where stability is never guaranteed, your priorities are unlikely to include long-term planning for the future and instead will mostly relate to mere survival just for the next day. While I have found little scholarship on this matter, the best way to confirm this Eastern European psyche is to simply visit there yourself.

This Eastern European cultural bug is why, based on several anecdotes from visitors to Ukraine even after the full-scale invasion by Russia, corruption in Ukraine, not only at the highest levels of politics, business, and government but also throughout society, remains as widespread as ever— and perhaps even worse than before. However, the actions of NABU and the Ukrainians who protested these legal changes prove that Eastern Europe’s short-term bug may no longer be as set-in-stone as it once was. Finally, in a rare bright spot in the tragic case of Ukraine, the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian Parliament) just today passed further amendments reversing their past mistakes and restoring NABU’s independence. As President Zelensky has also signed the U-turn amendments, this saga has fortunately reached a happy ending.

Despite this highly disappointing episode of the severe shortcomings of the Ukrainian leadership, the West still, as I have always maintained, has a strong incentive to not simply let Ukraine go. Beyond the fears that a Ukrainian collapse could embolden the Russian leadership to attempt an incursion into a NATO country, Putin’s reluctance to entertain any sort of a peace settlement means we have little choice but to swallow the bitter Ukraine pill lest the West be forced to encounter a humiliation far dwarfing Saigon and Kabul. This is an opinion of mine that will never change, no matter the failures of Zelensky’s most rotten associates.