The Ceasefire With Russia Has Exposed The Rot At Ukraine’s Core

[Purveyor]

Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg News | November 9, 2015 12:52 PM ET

The most effective thing Russian President Vladimir Putin did to destabilize Ukraine was the one thing the West was demanding: He leaned on pro-Russian separatists in the country’s east to cease fire. Left without the much-used cover of a war, the internal divisions and dysfunctional core of the Ukrainian political elite didn’t take long to reveal itself. Rather than the democratic hope it might have become after last year’s “Revolution of Dignity,” Ukraine now looks like just another incompetent and corrupt post-Soviet regime. It’s no wonder cracks are appearing in Kyev’s all-important relationship with the West.

The government is in turmoil: Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk is in danger of being fired as soon as that becomes legally possible in December, threatening the fragile ruling coalition, in which Yatsenyuk’s party is the second strongest force. If the coalition falls apart — a likely outcome if Yatsenyuk is forced to resign — there will be an early parliamentary election. Pro-European Ukrainians might actually be relieved at that. Populists dominate the legislature, which would have made it difficult to push through meaningful reform — if anyone were trying. On Thursday, the parliament rejected a bill specifically banning workplace discrimination against homosexuals.

President Poroshenko is the only one of the country’s 10 richest people to see his net worth increase in the past year

Despite attempts at change by a new generation of bureaucrats, Ukraine’s economy remains unreformed. Taxes are oppressive but widely evaded, the shadow economy is growing and the regulatory climate for business has barely improved. The International Monetary Fund, the country’s biggest source of hard currency after a steep drop in exports, is optimistic about next year’s economic growth prospects, forecasting a 2 percent expansion, but last month it revised this year’s projection to an 11 percent decline. Ukraine’s most popular politician — not a Ukrainian but Mikheil Saakashvili, the former president of Georgia, appointed by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to run the Odessa region — has proposed a libertarian reform package, but Poroshenko hasn’t given it his official backing and the current parliament is not likely to adopt it.

Equally unreformed is Ukraine’s incredibly corrupt justice system. In September, Christof Heyns, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said after visiting Ukraine that the country lived in an “accountability vacuum.” Heyns bemoaned the failure of the Ukrainian authorities to investigate the deaths of more than 100 people on the streets of Kiev in the final days of the revolution and of 48 pro-Russian protesters in a burning building in Odessa in May, 2014. Those investigations are stalled, and attempts by the victims’ lawyers to speed them up have been stonewalled by authorities as some of the suspects in the Kiev shootings are still employed by the Interior Ministry.

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[Nitram]

1. Putin has done his work well.

He learned his lessons in the KGB well: de-stabilization, misdirection, misinformation, propaganda, and covert introduction of highly-trained troops to help proxy allies.