Ukrainian Corruption

Ukraine gets lectured about corruption as if it were some uniquely Ukrainian vice rather than the standard issue hardware left behind when the USSR collapsed. The old Soviet model produced corruption the way a damp cellar produces mould. Shortages, bureaucracy, and an economy held together by string guaranteed that everyone learned to grease a palm just to keep the lights on. Every post Soviet republic inherited the same problem.

What matters is what happened next. Ukraine, with all the wobble of a newly reformed smoker walking past an open packet, chose the path of cleaning up. Slowly, awkwardly, often painfully, it built transparency tools, sacked ministers, and let journalists and investigators do their work. The fact that Zelenskyy’s right hand man is under investigation is not proof of terminal rot; it is proof of function. A corrupt system hides corruption. A reforming system drags it, blinking, into daylight.

Russia took a different view. Rather than disinfecting the Soviet culture of graft, Putin industrialised it. He welded the security services, oligarchs and political class into a single machine whose operating principle is extraction. Russia isn’t fighting corruption; Russia is corruption. The state is a vertical protection racket where loyalty is bought, money is skimmed before it even hits the ledger, and anyone who points this out receives a sudden lesson in gravity from an open window. It is, in short, a neo fascist oligarchic kleptocracy that pretends to be a country.

And then there is Trump, who looks at both systems like a man touring potential holiday homes. He is not corrupt in the discreet little envelope sense. He is corrupt in the spray tan and gold tap sense, where the trick is to do it so openly that the sheer audacity paralyses everyone. He rented out his own hotel rooms to the Secret Service, allowed foreign governments to buy influence by booking his ballrooms, and treated the presidency as a franchising opportunity for his offspring. In Ukraine, corruption is a legacy. In Russia, it is the governing principle. In Trump’s world, it is a business model awaiting scale.

Left uninterrupted, you can see exactly where he’d take it: the Russian route. Hollow out the institutions, pack the courts with loyalists, turn public money into private revenue streams, and call it patriotism. His admiration for Putin isn’t ideological; it is professional envy.

So when people smugly say Ukraine is corrupt, they are missing the obvious. Ukraine is the messy house being cleaned after decades of Soviet grime. Russia is the house where the windows are nailed shut and the bodies are still in the basement. And Trump is the estate agent insisting it just needs a lick of paint before he moves in.