The Maidan protests were an expression of disgust with the ongoing corruption of the Ukraine government, a corruption which has left the country mired in poverty and backwardness.
But as was pointed out in an important article in The American Interest last week, corruption could not have flourished as it did without the cooperation of banks in western Europe and the USA.
American political and business leaders tell the eastern Europeans that capitalism and democracy are the same thing. Given the type of capitalism that our government has tried to export, it is not surprising that Russians, Ukrainians and others are dubious about our type of democracy.
Imagine you spent the past decade fighting Ukrainian corruption. The model of good governance you looked up to was Britain or Germany. You applied for European Union funds. You were trained by Western foundations and EU funded think-tanks to follow the money stolen by your state.
But then you discovered something horrible: the money was flowing right back to the West. Those models of good governance you looked up to turned out to be providing money-laundering services to the very people and institutions stealing your country’s future.
This is what happened to Daria Kaleniuk at Kiev’s Anti-Corruption Action Centre. The director of one Ukraine’s most important NGOs battling corruption spent years investigating how corruption actually works. But the more she learned, the more she viewed both America and the European Union as hypocrites.
Kaleniuk explains:
What we found was that the money stolen in Ukraine was heading into British and European tax havens and hidden using shell companies inside the European Union. This was very uncomfortable to find out. What we felt is the Western elites were being hypocritical to us—preaching anti-corruption but allowing this offshore world to flourish.
Kaleniuk’s outrage is increasingly being felt across Ukraine—and not just in the think-tank world but increasingly in politics as well. Heavily involved in activism during the Maidan protest movement, Ukrainian MP Lesya Orobets is running for Mayor of Kiev on a platform that flirts with nationalist outrage. She is enraged by Western complicity with the offshore black hole into which Ukraine’s national wealth has long disappeared:
What you need to understand is that Western tax havens have resulted in Ukrainian deaths. Take for example the theft of Ukraine’s HIV budget. The national budget for fighting HIV was stolen and hidden in tax havens and in Great Britain. But this has consequences—we are now approaching a 2 percent HIV infection rate in Ukraine, which is near the no-return point of pandemic. This corruption will kill British men too. I hear they come to Ukraine. But they also return home. What will happen if the British do not close down their tax havens? I will be deeply, negatively, impressed.
Talk to any Ukrainian revolutionary and you soon realize that offshore finance is rapidly undermining Western soft power. Take activist blogger and journalist Mustafa Nayem, one of the most charismatic protest leaders in the early stages of the Maidan who first called out the protestors onto the streets. He is exasperated with Western offshore hypocrisy.
Why do they only now investigate the hidden fortunes that were stolen and hidden in Austria and in Switzerland? We told the Europeans and we told their embassies a hundred times this money as stolen and hidden in their countries. And nothing happened. Now that the regime has fallen, they suddenly—in a matter of days—can reveal the stolen money. But why did they not do this before? They are guilty—guilty of leaving us alone with these thieves. They are guilty of allowing them to plunder us.
Behind the scenes, many in the new government feel the same way. But because they are financially dependent on the West when it comes to staving off economic collapse, few American and European diplomats have picked up on what’s really going on.
Talking to revolutionary minister Dmytro Bulatov, it comes up quickly enough: “Ukrainian money was stolen and taken to Austria and Switzerland and British tax havens. But we want that money back.”
Allowing European Union and American foreign policy to be held hostage by banking interests is not in the interests of the American people nor any of U.S. allies. The banks don’t have allegiance to any particular country, including our own.
It wouldn’t take a Marshall Plan to win the friendship of the Ukrainian people. Just provide some relief from the crushing debt burden piled up by the former regime, and help the Ukrainian government track down the money that has been taken out of Ukraine all these years.