The West Is Enabling Graft in Ukraine

April 12, 2016 (The New York Times) This article was written by Oliver Bullough who is a writer specializing in corruption, tax havens and the former Soviet Union. Here you can read just a few most bright quotations taken from this article. 

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Corruption on such a scale, economy-wide, would cripple any state, let alone one as fragile as this one. In 1991, Ukraine’s G.D.P. was about two-thirds of Poland’s G.D.P.; now, it is less than one-quarter. Corruption has ruined this country, dooming a generation of Ukrainians to poor education, unsafe streets and blighted careers.

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In August 2014, when Ukrainian soldiers were trapped under artillery bombardments during the battle of Ilovaisk, President Petro Poroshenko, a candy magnate, was setting up a corporate vehicle in the British Virgin Islands. While young men were dying to defend Ukraine, their commander-in-chief was looking for ways to deny Ukraine taxes from his own business empire.

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In 2006, a court in California sentenced Pavlo Lazarenko, Ukraine’s prime minister in 1996-97, to nine years in prison for misusing his post to extort tens of millions of dollars from Ukrainians. By the time he was released in 2012, hundreds of millions of dollars more had been stolen from Ukraine.

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It’s difficult to chart the precise dimensions of this corruption. It is a submerged leviathan, and small bits of it are only occasionally exposed by brave Ukrainian investigators or forensic probes from abroad.

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The whole article is available at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/08/opinion/the-west-is-enabling-graft-in-ukraine.html?_r=0