In how many countries can taxpayers be forced to spend $3 billion and counting to bail out depositors of failed banks and get no public accounting of fraudulent loans? In how many countries with bank losses at $7 billion and counting can there be no convictions or civil judgments for bank fraud?

The staying power of Ukraine’s corruption is astounding. The list of outrageous impunity is long — but lawmaker Sergii Leshchenko’s top 10 cases on page 5 makes for good reading. Corruption is so firmly rooted that it’s clear it will take new elections or, heaven forbid, a new revolution to dislodge.

We wish people wearing rose-colored glasses would come back to reality and stop exhorting journalists and others to be “optimists” rather an “pessimists,” to be “positive” rather than “negative.”

Here’s the optimistic, positive approach that Ukraine needs now: Exposure of hard realities, including brazen crimes, and those who are obstructing justice; prosecution of those guilty of serious crimes and a public accounting of why trials aren’t taking place and what evidence is missing.

Ukraine would not need any foreign loans or aid if it simply put a big dent in its corruption. And to do that, Ukraine’s Western partners must condition all aid on overhauling the prosecution service and courts.

The World Bank and International Monetary Fund, two powerful agencies, beg off such conditions, saying the criminal justice system isn’t their area. But the impunity in Ukraine only undermines their stated aims: to reduce poverty and help Ukraine create a sustainable economy.

Ukraine’s friends in the West need to cut their happy talk and start taking seriously proposals for a special foreign-led fight against corruption that involves the best anti-corruption prosecutors, police and judge legally empowered to take on the worst cases.

Anybody who looks into Ukraine’s “war” on corruption deeply enough to learn the reality knows that it is an illusory campaign that President Petro Poroshenko is trying to deceive with so that he can keep propping up the oligarchy.

He’s on his third general prosecutor, and the nation’s fourth, since the EuroMaidan Revolution drove Viktor Yanukovych from power on Feb. 22, 2014. He’s just stringing everyone along. Anyone who reads the Kyiv Post’s front-page interview with Valentyna Telychenko, the latest person to be put in charge of prosecutorial “reform,” can see that no trials or justice are coming soon, if ever.

Poroshenko missed his opportunity to be a hero of Ukraine and is now on the list of goats. In some ways, because people fought and died for a new country, Poroshenko’s betrayal of the Ukrainian people is worse than that of Yanukovych, who is a despicable criminal.