The venue is a favored one for big government-sponsored conferences. On April 28, officials hosted the hastily renamed International Support for Ukraine Conference in the same place. They did so after scrapping the original idea of an international donors conference when it became clear that neither the donors nor the donations would materialize on the scale expected.
Like the previous conference, this one had its surreal moments. The most depressing fact: Authorities are still trying to recover the $300 million stolen by convicted ex-Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, who left office in 1997 and who served a 97-month sentence in U.S. federal prison. This 18-year-old case dashes hopes for quick return to Ukrainian taxpayers of the billions of dollars believed to have been looted by ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s gang.
President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk opened the conference with speeches and then hustled out. They were spared listening to speakers who criticized them, directly or obliquely, for obstructing the fight against corruption rather than leading it.
Before moderating a panel discussion, lawmaker Svitlana Zalishchuk of the president’s bloc explained to the Kyiv Post why she supports the resignation of Yatsenyuk and Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. But she said the problem is with a broader group of people in power. “There is no clear political leadership in terms of bringing justice to this country,” Zalishchuk said.
Yatsenyuk laid out an ambitious agenda, which called on the international community to send its top law enforcers to help clean up Ukraine. While there may be a place for Western expertise and money, corruption is a problem that Ukraine needs to solve. Above all, political will is required but sorely lacking. Instead, leaders come up with delaying schemes or proposals that they know can be scuttled later in parliament or that fancifully depend on Western saviors. Yatsenyuk cynically said that oligarchs have no influence on the government, something that most Ukrainians would disagree with. As Nicola Bonucci, director for legal affairs of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said: “You need to fix it.”
