More likely, his Jan. 17 outburst looked like a public stunt by a man with a very troubling record. It was reminiscent of former President Leonid Kuchma’s clownish anti-corruption campaigns and the utterly ineffectual former President Viktor Yushchenko’s promises to put “bandits in jail.”

Ukraine has always had a big problem with corruption. But if the Yanukovych family members are serious about tackling malfeasance, they should ask themselves some pretty penetrating questions. 

One of them is how the president’s son became the biggest winner of public tenders in 2012, according to research by Forbes Ukraine. He raked in more than Hr 1 billion than the runner-up, the president’s billionaire ally Rinat Akhmetov, who at least has a much longer and established business history. 

The president should also take a long, hard look at why he lobbied handing over public revenue from the state-owned Odesa Sea Port to an offshore company with questionable ties. Or why, according to respected public spending watchdog Nashi Groshi, a tenfold increase in public procurement has taken place since 2010 in the Donbass city of Yenakievo, where much of Yanukovych’s base comes from.

If the president was determined to dint corruption in Ukraine he would have taken a stance against the public procurement bill passed last year, which effectively moved public spending into the shadows, or banned the widespread no-competition tenders.

But there’s another, more worrying, explanation of why Yanukovych is lashing out against corruption while his administration increases pressure on government’s revenue generating arms. The explanation is that this administration and its oligarch allies don’t like competition. The economic pond of Ukraine is not growing, and most likely will shrink this year, yet the big fish are hungrier. Shouting at the smaller fish, however, won’t help.