Here’s the introduction to their piece..
You probably saw stories last week about Daria Kaleniuk. The co-founder and executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center in Ukraine fled Kyiv and turned up at a March 1 news conference in Warsaw. There she confronted British Prime Minister Boris Johnson about the West’s weak response to the Russian invasion and coddling of Russian oligarchs.
Ten weeks earlier, while Russian forces prepared for war, she had another message: Although Ukraine’s anti-corruption reforms haven’t yet brought its oligarchs to justice, the grassroots transparency campaign that started a half-decade earlier nevertheless moved Ukraine “closer than ever before to becoming a role model of successful democracy in action.”
“This is exactly what Russian President Vladimir Putin’s autocratic regime fears.”
Kaleniuk wrote those words with co-author Olena Halushka, a board member of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, in an article for Foreign Policy published in mid-December 2021 (“Why Ukraine’s Fight Against Corruption Scares Russia”).
Hearing praise for Ukraine’s anti-corruption reforms was surprising. From the outside, the reforms looked like a failure. If new laws and special courts couldn’t hold Ukraine’s oligarchs accountable, the battle was lost, right?
Not true, according to Kaleniuk and Halushka. That view is too simplistic and misses Ukraine’s real story. Look beyond the oligarchs, and you find a populist movement for “radical openness” that’s been transforming the country and, as Kaleniuk and Halushka see it, scaring Putin and his cronies. If people-powered transparency can transform Ukraine, it could happen in Russia too.
Read more at https://fcpablog.com/2022/03/07/reassessing-ukraines-failed-anti-corruption-reforms/
