As the only American citizen connected with this publication, I could not pass over in silence Rostyslav Khotyn’s good words about all America has done and could do for Ukraine. However, as an American who has lived in this country for most of its current independent history, I have a somewhat different perspective. I have yet to meet an American expert or businessman without his own personal horror story about dealing with Ukrainian ministries who were trained in another reality, a civilization that no longer exists (thank God!) and are completely unable to adapt to the realities of the world they grew up in isolation from and which they neither understand nor trust. And this is the West’s dilemma in Ukraine: you can save a drowning man, but it becomes a great deal more difficult when he starts fighting you while you are trying to bring him ashore.
NBU Chairman Viktor Yushchenko’s statement that Ukraine’s government is too big and has too many functions echoes what I have been writing in this country (in Ukrainian, by the way) for four years. This is the crux of the problem, and until it is addressed, Western, including American, aid will continue to be poured down the same old rat hole of corruption and incompetence. Having defended a doctoral dissertation on this country’s history seventeen years ago and having spent the rest of my adult life studying it, nobody can accuse me of indifference toward its fate. But the Soviet administrative elite that has become the dominant force in independent Ukraine has deeply dysfunctional qualities (again, I have discussed them elsewhere) which will render any aid ineffective unless addressed. Suffice it to state here that Ukraine’s excruciatingly gradual “reform” meant that its content was “adapted” to the interests of precisely those structures that ought to have been reformed out of existence in order to let the people get on with their lives economically. There is such a thing as tough love and a time when it is the only way to help. For this country, that time has come.
