kravietz 🦇 on Nostr: #Ukraine National Agency for Countering Corruption (NAZK) summarized polls where 17% ...
#Ukraine National Agency for Countering Corruption (NAZK) summarized polls where 17% Ukrainians reported being impacted by corruption, reminding that in 2019 that indicator was 27% and in 2010 — 60%.
https://zn.ua/ukr/anticorruption/u-nazk-zaj...
Note that corruption is a very complex social phenomenon. A popular whataboutism wisdom is that "corruption is everywhere". This is a half truth: rigging a road construction tender to be 10% more expensive to benefit a chosen company of course is corruption, and is present in EU and elsewhere.
But the corruption we're talking about in the context of Eastern Europe is however a completely different experience: imagine a construction tender where the road is never really built, but "on paper" it's not only first-class asphalt road but also with annual maintenance budget, repainting of markings, snow removal etc, where in reality it's an old gravel track. That's a real example, from Russia in this particular case.
We're talking about an omnipotent culture of bribery, where people from position of power extort bribes from you at school, hospitals, roads, government offices and everywhere else. Poland had this first-hand, but now it's mostly gone. It took 10-20 years to eradicate this kind of aggressive bribery. The worst thing is that its overwhelming character makes it an individual heroism to refuse giving bribes: not only you're bullied by the officials, but your relatives look at you like some kind of idiot who "doesn't understand the world".
As I was driving through Ukraine periodically between 2002 and 2020, there was a slow but consistent improvement and I'm pretty confident Ukraine will join EU not worse and likely better than Poland or Romania was in 2004 when they joined.
https://zn.ua/ukr/anticorruption/u-nazk-zaj...
Note that corruption is a very complex social phenomenon. A popular whataboutism wisdom is that "corruption is everywhere". This is a half truth: rigging a road construction tender to be 10% more expensive to benefit a chosen company of course is corruption, and is present in EU and elsewhere.
But the corruption we're talking about in the context of Eastern Europe is however a completely different experience: imagine a construction tender where the road is never really built, but "on paper" it's not only first-class asphalt road but also with annual maintenance budget, repainting of markings, snow removal etc, where in reality it's an old gravel track. That's a real example, from Russia in this particular case.
We're talking about an omnipotent culture of bribery, where people from position of power extort bribes from you at school, hospitals, roads, government offices and everywhere else. Poland had this first-hand, but now it's mostly gone. It took 10-20 years to eradicate this kind of aggressive bribery. The worst thing is that its overwhelming character makes it an individual heroism to refuse giving bribes: not only you're bullied by the officials, but your relatives look at you like some kind of idiot who "doesn't understand the world".
As I was driving through Ukraine periodically between 2002 and 2020, there was a slow but consistent improvement and I'm pretty confident Ukraine will join EU not worse and likely better than Poland or Romania was in 2004 when they joined.