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The Untangling of Ukraine’s Corruption Knot
The war has devastated the country, but it is also empowering the fighters (the people) to challenge the power of Ukraine’s post-Soviet disease
Many in the United States view Ukraine as a mini-America fighting off the genociding colonial empire. Instead of being the British in their thick, red coats and smart battlefield drill, it’s the barely-civilized hordes of raping and pillaging Russian civilian soldiers — the epitome of chaos, and all that is wrong with modern humans.
Ukrainians have demonstrated to the world through their courage and determination that they, too, aspire to live lives with meaning. Not wanting to be mere pawns whose fate is controlled by the sick perversions of demented cowards like Putin, Medvedev, and so many more of the Moscow-based sycophants, they fight in ways that Russians never could — or would.
They fight because a sense of “self,” expressed through the hints and shadows of a pulsating civil society, has formed since August 1992. Ukrainians, despite all of the failed “people’s revolutions” and the fits and starts the country has made to free itself from the cacoon of rot created by Soviet ineptitude and criminality, have managed to develop a voice in the corrupt crowd that regularly nudges the…
