Ukraine also rated high enough for U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden and Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton with President Petro Poroshenko. Tellingly, Republican candidate Donald Trump – a fan of Russian President Vladimir Putin – never found the time for Poroshenko.

But with the access came much-needed tough love. For Ukraine to retain support from the West, its corrupt elites need to change and start fighting corruption. We will repeat until everyone gets the message: Corruption weakens the state, not reporting on corruption.

On its way to becoming a European democracy, Ukraine must win two wars: The one against Russia’s invasion and the domestic one against corruption. It’s not enough to win only one of them.

Biden gave a hint of the message he delivered in private to Poroshenko. “I’ve been the guy on the back of Ukrainians – which was a thoroughly corrupt system when they came in – making the case that, ‘You have to understand: everybody’s willing to blame the victim, and you better straighten up and fly right,’” Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Sept. 21, according to a Reuters news service report.

Sadly, there is no indication that Poroshenko or Ukraine’s top echelon of government gets the message. That much was evident during the Sept. 15-17 Yalta European Strategy Conference. It was clear then that the members of Ukraine’s elite who appeared at the Victor Pinchuk event – including Poroshenko, Prime Minster Volodymyr Groysman, former chief of state Boris Lozhkin, deputy head of the Presidential Administration Dmytro Shymkiv and others – still don’t understand the urgency and necessity of fighting corruption. They dump it all on Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, who in four months on the job has proven he’s unqualified and incompetent. A Poroshenko Bloc member of parliament, Olga Bielkova, is so out of touch she doesn’t see the correlation between fighting corruption and economic growth.

Groysman didn’t even try to defend the lack of progress. The same question has been asked for two years by BBC HardTalk host Stephen Sackur, who moderates panels at the forum: Can you name one big fish that has been brought to justice? Last year, then-Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk couldn’t name one. Neither could his successor, Groysman, this year. Groysman admitted that Ukraine can’t catch big fish with its small, thin rod of a criminal justice system.

It was fascinating but sad to watch the elite foreigners bring such doses of tough reality to Ukraine’s elite. CNN news show host Fareed Zakaria said Ukraine’s leaders need to wake up to the fact that, while the world is awash in capital, most of that wealth is bypassing Ukraine because it remains uncompetitive.

Sackur ended the conference by saying that Ukraine is in big trouble because it is not combatting corruption or confronting the reality of an oligarch president afraid to change the old ways. So true. Poroshenko keeps governing as if he is fearful of another revolution. But he also doesn’t want to launch any real war on corruption that would threaten to put fellow oligarchs in jail or their business empires at risk. That’s why we have an uneasy stalemate, with popular discontent rising as the president hides behind soldiers and pliable and buyable prosecutors and judges. This can’t end well.