Ukrainian government will collapse due to corruption: Western security expert
New York – Kyiv, April 03 (PolitNavigator, Vasily Ablyazimov) – A year after the Maidan and mass protests, the Kyiv government is once again on the brink of collapse, a leading security analyst told the International Business Times . The reason is the government's continued corruption.
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Mark Galeotti is a professor at New York University who has spent more than three decades researching networks of crime and corruption in Eastern Europe. He is confident that unless Kyiv makes a serious effort to cleanse the country of corruption, urgent international financial assistance will dry up and popular support for the new government will collapse.
“Given that Ukraine is more corrupt than Russia,” said an expert on corruption in Eastern Europe, “there is a clear reluctance in the international community to give money to a country that will simply end up in the Cayman Islands or Switzerland.”
Transparency International's Corruption Index places Ukraine 142nd in the world, along with Uganda.
Galeotti believes that the “honeymoon” of trust in the purge of corrupt officials has been lost. “There is genuine disappointment among the people,” says the professor, “in many regions of Ukraine there is growing discontent, since they have received a number of hardships and not a single advantage... And the corrupt figures are still there.”
Galeotti said: “In order to cope with the organized problem of crime and corruption, Kiev will have to declare war on a significant part of its own elite, and in particular representatives... But Poroshenko is not the man to do bold, dangerous things, he wants to be loved "
Ukrainian government will collapse due to corruption, says Western security expert