 So, ladies and gentlemen, let me welcome you to the United States Institute of Peace. We're very glad to have you in this building. Thanks for coming out on a cold afternoon. I'm very appreciative of the panels, both expertise and willingness to share that, at this discussion of Ukraine, anti-corruption efforts, probably broader kinds of issues. I just wanted to set a little bit of the stage before we focus down into the main topic of today. Ukraine, of course, facing big challenges. Many people in this room I have served with in GAVE and we're all following this very closely. The business of anti-corruption in Ukraine is a serious issue that we're going to spend some time on, but in the context of what's going on today, we want to be sure we've got the frame. The big challenges, of course, that the Ukrainians face right now, military. I mean, they've been invaded. They've had part of their country annexed. The Crimea has been annexed and an illegitimate referendum has tried to legitimize that, so that is one challenge. Since there was not a lot of pushback, the Russians have proceeded and they have now moved into the southeastern part of Ukraine. And we've now seen some attempts at a ceasefire, wasn't abided by the outset, seems to be starting to hold at this point. However, there is still the Russian invasion coming across from Russia into southeastern Ukraine. Big challenge for the Ukrainian government in Kiev. There is an enormous economic challenge. The economy of Ukraine is in as bad a shape, maybe worse than the economy of Russia. They both face the same kinds of problems in terms of a falling currency, of a devaluing currency. They both face enormous challenges on restructuring their debt. Now, the difference between Russia and Ukraine, of course, is that Ukraine has access to the international markets. It has just signed a deal or is working out a deal with the IMF. In addition to the 17 billion that they're talking about, there's another amount to get us up to 40 billion, which is the kind on the order of magnitude of the resources that Ukraine is going to need. But that financial challenge leads us into the reform issue, which we're going to get today. Because unless there is serious economic reform, governance reform, anti-corruption reform, the finances from the IMF and the related bilateral assistance and other international financial assistance can't come. In order to invest into Ukraine, the reform is necessary to make that a worthwhile investment. So that gets us to the anti-corruption thing, which we're going to talk about. Western support to Ukraine in order to deal with these problems. We should provide military support. We should provide security assistance. And some of that, of course, has already begun. We should provide big financial assistance to deal with the financial deficit that we're talking about. And as I said, that is starting to come as well. We should help them with reform. On the governance side, and particularly on anti-corruption, I'm about to turn it over to Colin to introduce the panel. That's what we'll be talking about here today. That's going to be a key piece for all of the others that we do. Anti-corruption, some of the assistance is coming from outside. As we know, several of the ministers, several of the new members of the new cabinet, are not Ukrainian, or at least now they're Ukrainian, because they've been given Ukrainian citizenship. But there are several ministers who are, one's Georgian, one's Lithuanian, one's American. The minister of finances is, of course, Natalie Giresko, Ukrainian-American, who's now has Ukrainian citizenship, I think. And they're going to give George Kent Ukrainian citizenship, because of the work he's done with his wife, Valida. So there is this opportunity for us, the international community, to support Ukraine in lots of different ways, in particular on reform. And that is the topic of today. So with that, let me turn it over to Colin Cleary. Colin and I, and several of us in this room, served together in Kiev. And Colin also had the benefit or challenge of serving in Moscow. So he has both of those perspectives. And is here at the Institute of Peace on a fellowship from the State Department across the street. And is helping us develop this kind of a program in both the Russia and periphery, in particular Ukraine. And so Colin, we're glad to have you here. And over to you. Thank you, Ambassador, and thank you all for coming out today. It will be my honor in one minute to introduce the panel. I just wanted to say, Ukraine is basically in a war of two fronts. The war that gets perhaps the most attention as the war in the East, but equally important is the war at home, which is the war of dealing with the legacy of institutionalized corruption that has been the plague or cancer on Ukraine for 20 years. And so with that in mind, and the fact that Ukraine is still ranks in 2014 142nd out of 177 in Transparency International's Corruption Index, there's a lot of work to be done. And the Ukrainian government has declared a very strong intent to reform, but the question of whether turning that intent into a reality is really before us. And each member of the panel now will offer their insights on how that's going. Our first presenter, I'll introduce everybody and then they'll each start, is Edward Chow, who is a senior fellow in the Energy and National Security Program at CSIS and a renowned expert on global energy, but with a particular expertise in the Soviet Union, benefiting from many years' experience with Ukraine and a deep knowledge of the intricacies of how the systems work and don't work. And so we're going to be looking forward to his perspective on whether things have changed or not with regarding to the current environment. Adrian Karatnitsky is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and similarly has decades of experience as a widely cited and prominent commentator on Ukrainian affairs. He also has the benefit of having served for almost a decade as the head of Freedom House and he frequently is traveling to Ukraine and so can give us that perspective from the on the ground perspective as well as knowing very well how things operate here. Our third panelist is Robert Artung, who is a professor at George Washington University. Amongst many affiliations, he is the deputy director of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies. He's done a lot of work on corruption in Russia and now is turning with particular attention to Ukraine as well. And so we're delighted to have him here to benefit from his expertise. Next is George Kanta, State Department colleague who, as Ambassador Taylor mentioned, he and I both have the benefit of having served at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev. And George is currently the senior anti-corruption coordinator in the European Bureau at the State Department. So the State Department has seen fit to recognizing the national security dimensions of corruption to appoint someone to a position strictly dealing with that and liaising with embassies and with partners regionally. And so George will inform us of that perspective from the United States government, how things look and the way forward. He also will be returning to Kiev as deputy chief of mission in about a year. And later we hope to be joined by Skype from Ukraine by Inna Podluska, who is an expert in civil society. She's the deputy executive director of the International Renaissance Foundation, which is Sora's affiliate. And she's got over two decades working in civil society and the engagement of civil society in the anti-corruption reform effort is very characteristic of the Maidan Revolution and the way forward. So she will be trying to comment on how that looks from her perspective. So with that, I'll turn it over to Ed Chow. Thank you very much, Bill and Colin, for inviting me to USIP for this discussion. As Colin mentioned, I worked on and off on Ukrainian energy for, I guess, the past decade and a half. Much of that time under the forbearance of Ambassador Taylor when he was ambassador in Kiev in the period immediately after the Orange Revolution. When you have corruption that is as pervasive as it is in Ukraine since independence, corruption is not just a poison within the body politic. It's actually the way the place works. And this is, in my mind, this is what Euro Maidan was all about. It wasn't about whether Ukraine was going toward a European direction or not, but it was Ukrainian society's, it was also that, but it was mainly Ukrainian society's strong reaction to a fundamentally rotten system. People were simply fed up. And of course, the energy sector is in the core of that corrupt system. A fact which is both well known and well documented. Literally billions of dollars were siphoned off from the state controlled energy sector every year by politically connected special interests. State-owned assets were hijacked for private profit. The system of energy corruption was controlled at the very top of the government of Ukraine. It was used not only for political gain, but also as a political war chest. The energy franchise was actively fought over as a spoil of high political office, sometimes between president and prime minister. So my answer to the question that Colin has posed to us tackling corruption in the midst of war is that Ukraine must change the equation because this is the very essence of what the Ukrainian people are fighting for. Of course, the Ukrainian political class does not have a lot of credibility before its own people on fighting corruption. Both the current president and prime minister are in many ways products of the old system. They have appointed 30-some-year-olds with no experience in the energy industry to head major energy organizations, which begs the natural question, who do they really represent? There's a lot of skepticism in the donor community. It just came from Brussels this weekend. The donor community itself is poorly coordinated. One year after the departure of Yanukovych, we still haven't had an international donors conference. We can't even figure out when it's going to be scheduled for, it keeps being postponed. Energy policy adjustment to the best that I can understand it so far has been piecemeal in response to IMF demands in order to get the next tranche of funds. Rather than strategic with concrete steps and targets for improvement over multiple years. Most importantly, I think Ukrainian civil society has to be part of the process. A case for energy sector reform must be made to the population in order to sustain reform. Why do prices need to rise in order to improve energy efficiency? What incentives are there to increase investment in domestic energy production? Rather than increasing tax and royalty rates to confiscatory levels, which is what the government is currently doing. In order to fill a fiscal gap that's defined by the IMF, that's nice in theory, but it doesn't really work very well in practice. Last minute, hurried debate in Dorada to satisfy some IMF deadline will only remind most Ukrainians of business as usual. Of another government trying to muddle through when this is no longer an option muddling through. It may seem like I'm dismissing the threat of Russian aggression in Crimea and Donbass. And what opposed to Ukrainian national security and the reform process itself. I know conditions must be very, very difficult. Ukraine is in a true national emergency. But I return to my original supposition. If this is not the time to get rid of fundamentally corrupt and dysfunctional system that put the nation itself at risk, then when is the right time? Times running out. True energy sector reform is critical as Ukraine's energy insecurity not only threatens itself, but also its European neighbors. A government and society that is united in a realistic long-term plan to reform and reduce corruption deserve and will receive international support. And I am concerned that we're running out of time and the skepticism and the lack of donor coordination because of the skepticism in some ways is going to cause a catastrophe that would be very difficult to recover from. So my answer to the question is that whether it can happen or not, it must happen if Ukraine is to survive as a nation. Thank you. Great pleasure to be here with so much knowledge at the table and so much experience. I'd like to sort of rephrase the title of our discussion, tackling corruption in the midst of war is kind of rehashing the old can you walk and chew gum at the same time phrase. But in point of fact Ukraine's choice is not between walking and chewing gum at the same time. It's between walking and chewing gum or crawling and chewing gum. Ukraine has no choice because it faces a threat to its sovereignty, to its existence as a state, but to find the efficient use of resources. Even if the country had lower levels of corruption than Ukraine does, this national emergency requires taking every possible step to free up resources, to redirect resources, and to come up with the capacity to sustain an aging population, to handle the steep decline of the currency, to handle 5% of the budget going to the war effort and possibly more in real terms. All of these kinds of challenges mean that these are not long-term needs of the Ukrainian state, but are urgent needs for its very survival. This may especially be the case if what we are facing now is a shift in tactics by President Putin and Russia to an effort to basically to see whether he can help to bankrupt the Ukrainian economy and to contribute to its own sort of internal collapse into divisiveness and so on. And for the sake of national coherence, if the ceasefire lasts, then we in effect have a frozen conflict for a while. Ukrainian leaders have to take very clear and concrete steps in the areas of corruption because their publics are being asked to make incredible sacrifices of belt tightening required by restructuring of their debt, restructuring of their financial house and so on and also for the war effort. And the society will not, I believe, tolerate the kind of systems that existed not in the last five years under Yanukovych, which was a special kind of elite corruption, but the traditional system of corruption which involves huge amounts of rent-seeking with quiet payoffs or non-competitive bidding, the sale of assets at prices well below their levels, and of course the centerpiece of grant corruption, the energy sector which Ed Chow spoke about. That said, the Ukrainians are taking some steps. There is a sense that they have a sense of greater urgency. There remain, alas, the same sort of long-term relationships with oligarchic groups that existed before, but one thing is gone from the Ukrainian scene and that is the specific system of Yanukovych corruption, which is to say that Yanukovych and his clan did not create and take over vast enterprises. They took away and collected vast amounts of cash and wealth, and much of it was not invested in Ukraine, much of it was spirited off to other places, to other large economies and non-transparent economies such as Russia and China. So it will be very hard for Ukraine to recover many of those assets. It is estimated that the Yanukovych network took several percent of the GDP out of the budget for its own personal and corrupt needs. Only a part of that I think will be recovered as assets inside the country, partly because they wasted them on incredibly ornate, you know, lavish lifestyles, building vast palaces and so on, partly because they shipped the money overseas, and partly because they didn't take enterprises, which could be taken back from them. They took the takings of those enterprises, and they basically engaged in the taking of rents with energy being one of the greatest sources. So some of the cleaning up is occurring, and there are a lot of institutional steps that have been taken in recent months, but it's a rough, it's a hard slog. So there is a new, as you know, anti-corruption bureau, or you may not know that it was established four months ago. It has a team of nine people of the highest integrity who are supposed to come up with three candidates to propose to the president of Ukraine for the head of this anti-corruption bureau. There is a state agency that doesn't deal with prosecuting, with investigating acts of corruption, it deals with corruption prevention, that's a second entity that has been called into being, and perhaps most importantly there are the reforms on the judicial and prosecutorial front, both in terms of the will of the new prosecutor general to begin to have cases and to actually take and to challenge and to indict and to investigate key schemes and key elements of the old system and maybe even of the new system. But also a beginning of investigations and criminal investigations against judges who were basically in the pocket of some of the people in the political establishment. So three judges just this week were, their offices were raided and criminal cases have been launched against them, and today unfortunately as another sign of why everything is not as easy in Ukraine there were all sorts of maneuvers going on in the Ukrainian parliament, fistfights about extraneous issues but in the end what they did was they impeded the rapid decision of the parliament to remove the immunity of those judges and to allow their arrest, maybe giving them time to leave the country although one hosts the security services will hang on to them. What I want to return to is that we've got some positive steps institutionally and more importantly on the legal side in addition to this judicial and more active prosecutorial activity is the fact that there is now going to be an anti-corruption special prosecutor's office inside the procurator's office which will not be subject to the control and the instruction neither the procurator general nor his deputies will act independently and there will be a competitive system for hiring with a completely independent board and basically these people will have an enclave inside and will be hired on a competitive basis. Other things have happened that I think move Ukraine in the right direction that is public tenders being placed in a much more transparent way, a reduction in the number of various elements of registration each path along which could be a point of petty corruption. So there are some good things but fundamentally I recall after the Orange Revolution I met with an oligarch who was on the other side, Mr. Tehipko who kind of drifted in and out of being part of the old order and not being part of the old order, he was then out of politics and he was on the losing side, he had been the campaign manager of Yenukovych's failed presidential run but not the one who ran the corrupt vote counting scheme he was the public face of the campaign which was a little bit different and he basically said that what Yushchenko has to do is to create a Khodorkovsky that is to say that to scare the bejesus out of the establishment and without actual vigorous prosecutions all of these kinds of instruments will in my view even if they are led by competent people not lead to Ukraine's elite changing its ways until people are brought on the docket in a vigorous way and there is some price to have been paid for some of the corrupt activities that have been a practice in the past and that are a practice in the present and I would argue that these cannot only be done by only prosecutions against people who have fled the country and who are outside of geographically immune once we see more vigorous prosecutions all of these other institutional steps that have been taken will start acting and one last point, there is the continuation of rent seeking and I can just give you an example of how it is incredibly important to the revenues of the country there is a company called Ukrnafta which is majority owned by the Ukrainian government minority owned by an important oligarch that company has not paid for the better part of a decade the dividends that it is required to pay to its shareholders including the Ukrainian government by some maneuver the minority shareholder was able to prevent meetings of the Board of Directors that company because meetings of the Board of Directors did not require a simple majority with 60% plus and he was able to combine a group of people that prevented these meetings and he had basically a rogue managing director of the company that was not paying these dividends out very persevering parliamentarians of a new generation pushed this issue in the Rada and finally put it to a vote and they prevailed by a handful of votes but it was very interesting that one of the main pillars of the coalition the governing coalition Prime Minister Yatsenyuk's party only gave 10 votes out of 75 for the changing of that law to enable the Ukrainian government to have these takings what that suggests to me is simply that established patterns of dependency I wouldn't say corruption but relationships in terms of media access financing of campaigns et cetera et cetera sort of the traditional kind of stuff that we grapple with in democracies are a very major part of where the sort of the struggle over corruption and rent seeking is moving in Ukraine and I think that one of the main things that should be addressed is the issue of much more transparent campaign reform and maybe even punishment for illicit campaign practices because if you look and I'll conclude on this at the expenditures of Ukrainian political parties on television at and on billboards and so on and on their reported revenues I would say that of the list of 10 or 12 parties that have conducted major campaigns and the seven or eight parties that are in power maybe one or two could roughly explain the gap between what they spent and what they claim to have received in financing and here in that inherently is this additional frontier of corruption so we're kind of the forms of corruption the forms of rent seeking the forms of buying of rents are morphing in Ukraine and I think but they are being challenged fairly well with this parliament so I do think it's a story that needs to be followed it is a story that needs to be better understood and it is a story that when the Ukrainians have successes needs to be better told and what better way of telling you than this excellent group of experts at the table Thanks Adrian Bob, maybe John Do we have a Is Inna on the line? I'm just curious She is Okay, great Will we get a visual or is she just audio? Sure Maybe we'll get the view from the ground here So Just let the record show that there is at least one woman on this panel Should be more Should be more Hello Hi, hello Inna How are you? We're here in Washington How are you doing? Thanks for joining us Yes, thank you I introduced you already a bit so the audience knows that you are an expert in civil society and that you are going to touch on how civil society is engaging on the any corruption efforts just leave it over to you Thank you so much for the introduction Colin, thank you everybody and I'm so sorry for being late joining you many things are happening here in Kiev So let me start with a few points here on what we think is fundamental and what can be done by the civil society and what civil society is doing and what we support and please do stop me when I just duplicate what has already been mentioned So we'll look at what civil society has to deal with when it attacks or addresses corruption So you could summarize that into several layers So it's weak and often inadequate institutions corrupt judiciary, nepotism, cronism political backing of political parties, political forces direct and indirect, hidden and avert then it's a general sense of impunity which comes from this political backing and nepotism and dysfunctional institutions and also there is another aspect to that there are too many laws in Ukraine and if you look into those laws a lot of them are difficult to understand difficult to implement, difficult to follow and difficult to enforce So this is part of the huge work that the government and civil society and Ukraine is a home needs to address if it's serious about fighting corruption Well there is another aspect to that and this is the general lack of awareness of the legislation of anti-corruption legislation but also legislation in general which would say that Ukrainians are not exactly very accurate about following the law the laws can be multiple, they can be strict but as in Russia, remember who said that the austerity of the laws is compensated by the lack of necessity to implement them and to obey them This is what we are having and in a way part of this general negligence of the law is that people are just not aware of their existence or they are not aware of why they should follow them with the anti-corruption legislation especially with the new anti-corruption legislation which a lot has been adopted within the past half year It's a very interesting thing to see how little skills and capacity is there at the levels from the very local grassroots communities up to the very top ministerial levels to implement those laws We have supported some work by the civil society to educate civil society groups about the new opportunities which are open for more scrutiny more control by civil society more interaction with the government bodies on preventing corruption I was absolutely surprised how much the same information would be needed for civil servants for local self-governance people for politicians including those who would actually genuinely want to implement those laws So that's awareness of the current legislation especially the new legislation and the capacity to implement those things And last but not least and I'm always hesitant when I say this we would say that the capacity of civil society and the society in general to demand genuine fight against corruption is limited So you would have several very capable very devoted and committed groups mostly at the national level you would count like five or six probably ten some of them would actually have partners in the regions but generally if you look at the general capacity to increase the resistance to corruption at the level of the society it's still not there and really needs to be improved because people just don't know how they can tackle it they say oh it's so bad what do you do about it how you go ahead not everybody can prepare a lawsuit not everybody can actually march every day against corruption So these very practical tools is something we are trying to support and we are trying to develop Let me just give you a few comments on what I think are actually steps in the right direction and I'm mentioning them because they have been made possible only by the pressure from civil society I do believe that they would not be here Well, with the international community's pressure of course it's also a huge factor and conditionality attached to international assistance is a crucial factor but as Ukraine really slips down into the economic disaster let's be frank about it there seems to be less intention of the international community the donor community to attach these strings but the civil society still keeps pushing no no no I know you are shaking your hand and I hope this is exactly the case so Ukraine will not be excused for not doing well on corruption but still what I'm saying is that the civil society remains a critical factor in making sure that the politicians and the government live up to the expectations and deliver So this pressure from civil society actually produced the legislation you saw in October last year it also before that produced very significant legislation which regulated public procurement and in addition to pushing for public procurement legislation the civil society also did a great job in connecting in people's minds the understanding between proper public procurement of medicines from the public budget and anti-corruption and the cost of those medicines which in many cases in Ukraine was three times as high as elsewhere exactly because of the cost of corruption so LinkedIn and people's understanding things which seem so distant from them like public procurement and then the cost of services and essential things which they can get from the public funding is very important and this was done by the civil society which managed to explain why have this law then a very important law was adopted just a couple of weeks ago on the 12th of February this was the law which I would say cleared up all way to having a functioning National Anti-Corruption Bureau and other anti-corruption instruments so now it's practically very difficult and I would really think it's very difficult for an Ukrainian official to claim that we do not have enough legislation which would enable fighting corruption so it's now all there implementation remains the problem and part of the problem is that the laws were developed mostly by the reformers in the government, outside the government in the civil society expert community in the presidential administration but now they need to come to the hands of the prime minister and the cabinet to ensure that they are properly functional and launched with proper institutions staff so on and so forth this yet has to happen then there is another very important law which was adopted again in I think it was like 11th of February and it was signed into law by the president today with some delay which made actually civil society a little bit worried that's the law on open access to information on spending of public funds which basically says that there should be an open access portal on which all transactions going from the public budget should be recorded and should be available online to anybody this is very useful and it needs to be detailed so it's not like the budget where you couldn't be able to understand what it's all about so transparency is here the task for the civil society is actually to make sure that this is an instrument which can be used for advocacy which can be used for more accountability and for people's demand for knowing what the tax payer money goes for very useful let's see how it's implemented we do not know when it's going to become functional we do not know how it will function but it's there there are a couple of things which are also very important the very process of appointing or selecting let's say selecting the future director of the national anti-corruption bureau it's extremely educational you could see it online you could see the debates online the questions the interviews just today and tomorrow 21 frontrunner is going to be interviewed and people could actually watch it I do not know how many people actually watch it but the very fact that it's available and the very fact that it's transparent is a very important thing so in a few days hopefully by the 6th of March we will have three candidates and well then the process should be rolling another thing which I think is very important is the start of a reform which is understandable for a lot of people this is a reform of the road police and again the process matters so it's very important to show to the people that reforms can be done yes of course the Ukraine is living in a terribly difficult situation but a lot of reforms do not actually depend on whether or not Ukraine is suffering the armed aggression in the east so this road police in Kiev could be a model which the society desperately needs it needs to see something so that it could see that the government is actually moving ahead a couple of things which are not so wonderful and not so well show how difficult it is and the resistance is huge we can speak about the legislation adopted with the push from civil society but then with the push from the international community but then implementation is really offset by very skillful imitation or very skillful resistance a lot of it is here vested interests have not gone anywhere we've got the best parliament we've ever had but it's also full of vested interests and you could see that really just check how specific pieces of legislation which would really make a difference to the level of transparency of funds and the level of transparency of interests being implemented in practice just to give you a couple of examples where we think that actually there is well it shows that the legislation itself and the good will itself is not necessarily guaranteed that the whole process will go well fine so one is I mentioned public procurement of essential medicines is being extremely important thing and useful thing so you probably also could read this there is an effort of the new minister the minister of public health to have the public health procurement being handled by international agencies by UN agencies under the UN procedures to make them transparent and exclude the huge corruption opportunity it has always been quite a very problematic sphere let's say so well as of today there are six competing bills in the parliament coming from different groups trying to regulate the same situation trying to simplify the procedures and to make sure that the mechanism basically is not really working properly so the minister himself is very much in favour of the idea of having a transparent procedure but it's not going to be easy for sure then there is another example just to name there was an effort from the ministry of infrastructure to have for the first time in Ukraine's probably for the first time in Ukraine's history a very transparent process of hiring some top managers for very important and very potentially corrupt vulnerable corruption vulnerable areas one is being Ukrainian railroads another is being the Boryspil airport another is being the Lviv airport so the competition was announced there's very clear criteria online everybody could submit the proposals and they were supposed to have the results by now well one of the candidates who was not shortlisted and who happened to work for one of Ukrainian oligarchs before challenged the decision not to shortlist him at court so the court in his own town in Dnipropetrovsk blocked the entire thing so now the whole very transparent selection process has been stopped well the ministry said it would challenge the decision of the local court or the regional court higher court but still well stock so just a couple of illustrations the third one and again I'm saying this because there was a lot of effort of civil society invested in this area one very demonstrative issue for Ukrainian top leadership ability and readiness to address grand corruption and embezzlement of public funds would have been the stolen asset recovery during the previous regime well we can only imagine how much money was embezzled so we're speaking billions billion and a half that's the estimate I was hearing from the civil society colleagues and shortly after the revolution of dignity after the Maidan as you know the assets of a lot of Yanukovych cronies were frozen in Europe well they have been unfrozen because the office of the prosecution general never provided any proper evidence which would be used to extend the sanctions to continue this freeze I think it was a very bad message for the society in general and it brings us back to this general sense of impunity without which no efforts of civil society, no efforts to try and eradicate corruption would actually be fruitful regardless of how well the legislation is written and how well it's presented anywhere so I'll probably step here and we'll be glad to answer your questions. We have a long list of what we are trying to support and what we are doing but I know the time is short Thank you Anna, thank you very much we'll get back to that later Professor Orton Thank you very much for having me It's a great honor to be part of this panel and of course you did hear such inspiring action on the grounding key of so I wanted to step for my presentation something a little different wanted to step back and try and analyze analytically the question why has Ukraine made so little progress so far in combating corruption over the last year and of course the first question when looking at it from the perspective of an outsider is of course a major progress and so on one hand you see a lot of activities like we just heard there's also the idea that perhaps a lot is happening but it's just not apparent yet to people who measure things like transparency international so there might be a lot of good things happening slowly on the ground and of course the other way to look at it is that if you look in different parts of society you see more or less progress so more progress in areas like energy reform, judicial reform tax service reform, customs some of the key areas where there's big issues everyday policing education and medicine you might not see as much progress there but you do see some progress for example in military reform as the fighting goes on in universities where you have some good leadership at the top now and in some aspects of the media you see a lot of differences over the last year and of course the appointment of a new prosecutor is going to make a big difference Mustafa Naim who was here in Washington a few days ago said that now it's much easier for a legislature to go and talk to the prosecutor and get some action so you start to see some progress there so clearly there's been some progress but it's not nearly enough so I wanted to look at what are the obstacles what are the problems that are holding this progress back and I wanted to point to five things so the first thing is what might be described as a poor connection between what the civil society and the media are doing and the root of the problem inside the bureaucracy in Ukraine and so I think that we see a lot of activism obviously with the protests and the Euro Maidan we see a lot of activism from civil society groups and a lot of discussion of corruption in the media but it's not necessarily putting a huge amount of pressure on the vested interests that are inside the bureaucracy so you have a lot of energy you have a lot of interest in this but it's not necessarily getting at the real sources of corruption inside the bureaucracy and so obviously some of the journalists who are now members of parliament are looking on this issue trying to make it trying to make the political action much more effective and we see some progress from groups like Nashi Groshi our money whose founder says that if you can describe the corruption problem very precisely then you can get support from members of parliament who are interested in fighting corruption and you can pass laws to try and take action against that you start to see more of a connection between bringing in the civil society and having it directly affect the corrupt officials so a second problem I think is that there's not enough social approbrium against corruption in Ukraine and as we heard many people are not aware of the laws against corruption many people themselves use corruption to avoid obeying these laws so it's necessary to raise the costs of corruption for the people who are involved in corrupt activities and so on one hand there's a lot of angst and unhappiness with the level of corruption in Ukrainian society you can see that obviously with the different protests but on the other hand it's very difficult to change attitudes at the popular level and so some of the key problems I think are populism which is blocking change particularly in the energy sector where some of the key reforms would be raising energy prices and so it's very difficult to explain to people why they need to pay more money for their energy when obviously in our country we lack our energy as cheap as possible so with the Ukrainians you need to get beyond that kind of thinking another problem is that the ownership of the media remains in the hands of the same oligarchs that owned it under Yanukovych basically there's a few new media sources out there promosky tv and radio for example but in general the media structure is the same although the content of what their broadcasting has changed a little bit and here Poroshenko himself is not setting a good example because he has refused to sell his own tv station although if you look at the reports of the media monitors in Ukraine it's Poroshenko's television and the state controlled television that are more objective than the oligarch owned television but it's a question of the structure in the sense that it doesn't look good to have the president owning a tv network and then as was brought up earlier there's lots of money floating around from the oligarchs in the elections and so there was a lot of problems with election finance reform so those are some of the key problems that make it difficult to get popular attitudes to change and that's something that needs to be addressed a third problem for Ukraine is that it's very easy for the corrupt networks to reproduce themselves even after the revolution and so one of the most obvious efforts being made to interrupt those networks and to try and tear them apart is hiring foreigners as ministers as deputy ministers placing them throughout the administration so that's a good idea in the sense that these foreigners are not necessarily embedded in the corrupt system they're outsiders, they can probably take action against the people who are involved in these networks the downside though of course is that there's detailed knowledge necessarily of how those networks function and as possible the networks can reconstruct themselves around the foreigners and then the people who many of these new administrators are coming from places like Georgia, Slovakia and people in those countries are questioning whether these are the right foreigners to be carrying out these tasks but obviously it's going to be a hard job for anybody to do this but so that's another area that needs a little more attention and then a fourth issue is the connection between corruption and organized crime groups and so obviously under Yanukovic organized crime was allowed to flourish particularly in Crimea and in the Donbas areas so those areas which are closely connected to Russia have an extensive amount of organized crime and that those organized crime links I think are still there, there's still some connections connected into people in Kiev so what's crucial here is to try and raise some of the costs in people's mind associated with corruption by making it very clear that the corruption that you see is facilitating not just getting things done for ordinary people but facilitating organized crime networks to keep working in Ukraine and so that making that connection between organized crime I think will be a very good way to address some of these issues and the fifth issue that I wanted to address is the idea that you can fight corruption by creating state agencies and so you know in October 2014 the RADAC created this new National Anti-Corruption Bureau and a new agency that's supposed to change the culture of corruption which are obviously good ideas and good initiatives but the question as we heard from Kiev is in the implementation and so it's going to be very difficult to hire a specific individual to run this organization and then that individual obviously will be targeted by many of the corrupt groups that he's trying to fight against and so it's going to be very difficult to maintain the integrity of such an organization and it might to some extent demobilize civil society in the sense that people think well okay now there's a state agency that's supposed to fight corruption so it's not necessary for me to get involved and so the key here is to keep society actively involved so obviously it's good to have a government organization that's fighting against corruption but it needs to make sure that that's done in an effective way that keeps civil society engaged just lay out some of the problems I'll try to go through quickly so we have a chance for conversation and questions Colin asked me as the U.S. government rep to address three issues how the U.S. government evaluates the current anti-corruption challenge prospects for reforms which I think has been touched on by most and then the assistance that the U.S. government is providing in this area I think Ambassador Taylor in Kyiv some of his thoughts I will share I think we do believe that the Ukrainian government has an ambitious reform agenda and our concern is the pace of implementation as Ina I think mentioned our very active ambassador currently in Kyiv Jeff Pyatt gave a long interview to arguably the Ukraine's leading journalist Julia Mostova several weeks ago and it was about the reform agenda and a couple of his quotes was reform is a matter of national survival and then later on reform can be a matter of life and death and I think going back to this issue of the two front comment reform domestically obviously is a way of increasing resiliency and Ukraine's efforts to counter the challenge posed by it militarily going back to Ambassador Taylor's comments I think Ukraine faces a three ring circus you've got the ring of military and war you have the financial crisis and then you have the reform agenda and I think it is not a coincidence that after you get a government that comes in wanting to reform a lot of the action are in the shall we say the war and financial rings where a lot of the attention is there all the meetings are happening and yet you have this fundamental challenge which is reforming the state that was inherited five years ago from the Soviet Union and within the state section at least even as societal attitudes changed the structures of the state did not and I think this is the second grand chance for Ukraine to address that issue to modernize the state and to change the way of governance to meet the needs and aspirations of the Ukrainian people and that goes across governance it's a lot of that is connected with anti-corruption efforts it's in the area of justice perhaps most directly affiliated with the ability to ensure not only rule of law but to fight corruption we already talked about energy which I think everyone will agree is the biggest challenge security if a country's security institutions are corrupt and weak that makes them unable to defend territorial sovereignty and integrity which is what we're seeing now in Ukraine health and education and then the overall as I say system of governance one of the package of reform efforts that's going on even this week and I think there was some initial bills passed this week is on decentralization this is not the federalization agenda that Russia is trying to impose on Ukraine this is the agenda of the reformists that came in after the Euromaidan a year ago understanding that again the Ukraine state as inherited from the Soviet Union needs to be modernized and changed and I think that's a lesson learned looking at its neighbor Poland local governance reform at the very beginning of the 90s was one of the most successful reform efforts in Poland and I think the broadest speaker Grasman is leading this effort and he's been talking to his Polish colleagues so I would say and looking at the prospects of reform the political will is clearly greater than it was 10 years ago going back to again a couple of our speakers and talking about the existential crisis that is met political will is necessary but not sufficient and I think what we're seeing now is agents of change that are being appointed not just at the ministerial level but at the deputy minister level where you have to have people who act as these agents of change and I would just mention a couple of names I think the one that has gotten the most attention is Ekaz Guladza in the Ministry of Interior Ina mentioned her without by name I don't believe she is the one who's implementing the patrol police reform they're going to do away with the hated Gai or Dai in Ukrainian the road police that sat there as an element of control and bribe taking and the idea is to implement a patrol police under the protect and serve model that has existed in the west since the Prussian state in the 1870s but which has not yet come to the former Soviet Union with the exception of Georgia and I think this is going to be a fundamental revolutionary change as Ina says they will show people that when they see somebody in a newly designed uniform in new cars they're there to protect and serve respond when there are accidents respond to emergencies they're not there to extort bribes they opened up the with US support solicitation for new applicants over 30,000 people applied in the first month 40% of those were women and 2,000 will be selected we're currently training the trainers who will then start training later this month hopefully and on the 1st of June the IE will be fired just like they were in Georgia 10 years ago and the new patrol police will take over and that will probably be the first fundamental reform to show that it's possible to not just pass a law but create a new institution with a new ethos that changes the nature of the relationship between citizen and person and government and this will be hopefully the first step in reforming the police and it will be police with a P opposed to militia with an M and that again is a the difference between militia-polizia we often times those of us students of Russian have translated militia as police but that forgets that difference between a militarized organization and a protect and serve organization the idea is that then they will look to roll it out in big cities like Odessa, Kharkiv, Lviv and so on so this is not just a pilot project it's the start of trying to fundamentally reform the police that routinely extorted bribes I think there are other agents of reform which we can talk about later I think in the economic area the American minister and Lithuanian minister as I think it was earlier referred to the minister of finance Yuresko, minister of economics Abramovicis are leading the efforts to try to change regulatory form, simplifying taxes, licensing passing changes in transfer pricing land reform and re-competing their own staff the ministry of economics came out of the old Gosplan system it's not what a modern economy needs the new minister understands that and so he's having all of his staff re-compete and if they don't have the knowledge and skills needed in a much more slim down ministry they will no longer be meeting at the ministry so I think this is the sort of steps that are necessary there are these people taking more institutional transformational efforts than ever happened 10 years ago I talked about civil society that has to be a continual source of energy and oversight I think the people in office understand that from the very beginning last spring people were talking about the possibility of a third Maidan the first one having happened in 2004 the second one last year and it's not going to be 10 years before Ukrainians come out to the streets to defend their rights and I think that is a good reminder again that people came into office not just to enrich themselves but to serve people's interests and so I think that pressure is there I think there's also a reference a number of those civil society leaders from a year ago decided to go formally into politics and are now sprinkled around various parties in the government and that's also important there's not just one party of reform there are reformists scattered across the parties and so I think that's also very important and they can push the agenda of reform from within I already mentioned decentralization and changing the nature of governance I will certainly also mention I think we agree and are concerned that the entrenched schemes are deep and they exist in many ministries health, defense tax and customs service just had its top three officials suspended last week for potential suspected corruption so there needs to be continued deregulation use of e-governance for transparency as Ana said this law on publicizing all the procurement actions maximum transparency reduction in ministry staff and understanding that old habits will die hard and so it's a good question if you fire all the road police in Kiev what next, where do they go and I'm not sure anyone has a clear answer yet briefly in terms of what the US government is doing to support these efforts I think currently we have about 38 million that we could describe as programming for providing advice and training of government entities as well as working with civil society one of the main elements as I described is working with the Ministry of Interior to reform the patrol police that's going to be a three year $15 million effort we've been working with the teams that have been designing the anti-corruption bureau which has not been established it's been a law has been passed a team has created a template but it really does depend on who is selected as the new head and we're ready to work with the new head as they stand up on human resources hiring and firing disciplinary issues, investigative guidelines and training and equipping the new anti-corruption bureau I think on the prevention commission it's likely that there will be enough other donors particularly from the EU that will support that but we're ready to work with them as well on asset recovery we've been one of the leading partners along with the UK in working with Ukrainian investigators on the asset recovery we share the disappointment that was expressed before that the former team at the prosecutor general's office did not manage to open a single serious case corruption against the old regime in which everyone agrees was one of the most corrupt countries in Europe that inactivity in the loss of year because European courts are not just waiting for EU decision a British court released the frozen assets a month ago of former minister of environment Slachevsky an Austrian court yesterday released the assets of the Kluyev brothers and so unfortunately after a year of non-action the rule of law in other countries may limit the ability to recover assets taken out of Ukraine but there is a new prosecutor general David Sakvar Lidze who has had the same position in Georgia and again has said he wants to be like Ekaz Gulads at the Ministry of Interior someone who will reform the institution with a short term agenda as a Georgian Ukrainian not in it for the long haul or for the money we will continue to work with civil society media as Inna said this is a critical component of if you will societal involvement and control and I think she also put her finger on the other issue is not just in Kiev where there are a lot of activists but also out in the regions in the cities because I think provincial activists need help and support in carrying that sense of reform and transparency deeper into Ukraine so I will stop there and I think we can then open up for conversation and questions Thank you George thanks everybody so if we can take questions maybe we'll take two or three at a time if you have them we have microphones I believe around so if you'd like to raise your hand you're glad to hear from you how about the lady in the front Garrett how about the thank you my name is Eid Maris Pansky I have my own company I just returned from Poland and I have nothing to do with the Ukraine and I have nothing to do with energy I was repeatedly asked by my prospective clients why is the US government so afraid of the Russians so when I listen to each of your presentations what comes to my mind is number one who are the members of this civil society two if one of these journalists reporting on corruption is killed what is the recourse because in essence what we're doing is we're sending out these young kids to do some work and three we have Hungary we have Mr. Putin just offering a huge energy package to the Hungarians without issues concerning accountability and transparency and the Hungarian government is telling its populace it's telling its people well the Russians at least are helping us to keep the lights on so my question is why don't we have a more robust foreign policy vis-a-vis Russia vis-a-vis the Ukraine why is it that we send Angela Merkel to talk to Mr. Putin as was beautifully summarized by Anne Applebaum in a recent editorial in the Washington Post and I'm sorry I'm very emotional about this because so much work has gone into this part of the world so much money so much effort and to see this is just a disappointment for retired foreign service officers such as myself thank you very much thank you and we'll take just one more so we can group a couple together Garrett do you want to have a gentleman here hi okay Ernie Robson my question is directed more towards Mr. Chow sorry my question is directed more towards Mr. Chow it strike it has always struck me from the beginning back in February of last year that the real reason for Crimea and everything that happened there had to do with the energy resources in the sea of Izov and the Black Sea and yet I see very little going on maybe it's going on below the surface but it strikes me that that's a huge amount of resources that have been taken from Ukraine and if you look at the timetable it went you know Crimea taken over within two weeks and within that time or maybe a week longer the energy ownership of the assets in Crimea and my question is why aren't we doing something around basically the theft of potentially I mean I've seen different estimates and you probably know way better than I but the energy potential in the sea of Izov and the Black Sea is something like the North Sea oil strike so that's my question I should say that if you're interested in more details about our policy about Ukraine and Russia our assistant secretary, Toria Nuland will be up on the hill tomorrow before the full House Foreign Affairs Committee and she'll talk about this for two hours so I think if you want a full two-hour version it's an open hearing and you can hear that in great detail with many congressmen that probably share your concerns I would say in brief we don't fear Russia we have put in place a pressure of an approach that in part addresses the question about Crimea which is a series of sanctions part directed towards Crimea and part directed towards Russia which is intended to hold individuals and those involved both in the takeover of Crimea and the assets as well as actions in the eastern Ukraine accountable now there is a lot of criticism that that policy isn't enough we are combining that with firm support for Ukraine the amount of assistance dramatically increased in Ukraine Vice President Biden made three visits to Ukraine my guess is it's the only country that he visited three times last year it's very rare for someone of that level to go the same country more than twice in a year and so I think there has been a commitment as well as frequent high level conversations between the president and President Poroshenko and Prime Minister Yatsenyuk so the US government is deeply committed to the independence territorial integrity and the success of Ukraine on its own merits and will continue to work with them and support actions which Ukraine has to take I first met Ed Chao 10 years ago in the embassy in Kiev when he started coming in and trying to give advice which unfortunately successive Ukrainian governments have been ignoring for a decade and so we're ready to work with Ukrainians inside and outside of government on reforming and transforming the country and its systems but we can only do so in a supporting partnership role so when it comes to advice we can give advice on the laws that need to be changed but the changing of those laws and the implementation of those changes have to be done by Ukrainians and so I think that's the nexus but I don't think anyone is shirking or being afraid of Russia I think there is a healthy debate ongoing about how to approach this fundamental challenge to the international order as it has existed since World War II and how best to support our Ukrainian friends I think that we've heard in two questions encapsulated the scale of the challenges that Ukraine faces and paradoxically the scale of the reorientation that the United States and Europe have to undergo as well in order to meet those challenges Ukraine is a state which has been attacked by another state part of its territory has been taken over it is now facing an economic war that Russia is waging also using military means using terrorism using a range of including asset stripping including asset appropriation and I think that everyone is in a sort of a state of shock the Ukrainians as well are trying to adapt but I do think that one of the things that the civil society and the public processes and think tanks and responsible citizens should be involved in this precisely raising those kinds of questions I do think governments are moving in the right direction generally under this kind of discourse and pressure but here's a sort of paradox why has the Ukrainian government dropped its strategy of litigating for the loss of resources the loss of revenue this was an agenda that was announced immediately after Crimea was taken over and then the issue was dropped it seems to me that when Ukraine is requesting sanctions from the west but is not playing its part and I don't think that the argument is that they have too many fronts to address there's a huge group of talented international lawyers you know Kyiv State University international affairs is of a very high caliber and international law is very well known Ukraine is not doing a lot of the things that it should be doing in its own interest one just last minor point on journalists the interesting thing is that journalists in a society when investigative journalists investigating corruption a society where corruption is being punished or actually protected because killing a journalist actually brings more attention to the corrupt scheme it's only in a place of impunity that journalists are killed because bringing attention to a scheme in which the government isn't doing anything exposes too many vested interests so I actually think that Ukrainians are relatively journalists are relatively safe in this environment of more assertive investigation and prosecution let me try to stay within my competence in in energy it's not true that the Hungarian deals are not under question I mean the EU has already raised on the nuclear deal the Hungary violating public procurement rules of the EU so that deal may suffer the same fate of South Stream in Bulgaria in terms of being blocked by EU rules similarly the gas deal as reported that Putin and Orbán struck which in essence has a destination clause in it that would actually require Hungary not to resell any gas that it takes to Ukraine also violates EU rules and just last week we heard the EU new Vice President for Energy Union saying that the investigation on gas prompts anti-competitive practices will be forthcoming very very soon so we've been waiting for this for over a year now but the articles of objection are supposed to come out in a matter of weeks so it's not completely true that this thing will go forward on Crimea and energy I take Adrian's point that why they didn't litigate the nationalization of General Ramo naphtha gas which was taken over but the gas production there was not very big it was significant for Ukraine but it was not world class the exploration which is what you're talking about which Exxon and Shell and ENI were supposed to be involved in exploration as exploration in my almost 40 year career in the oil industry and a lot of North Seas that were supposed to have been discovered but never came about including those of us old enough to remember the Falkland walls that there was supposed to be a lot of oil and gas around the Falklands that no one ever discovered so we'll see whether that is true or not but right now it's a little bit speculative we're going to try and get ENI back in any more questions how about would you mind the lady in the Ukrainian shirt that's a I am I'm trying to get even with male-female I'm Lida Kent and I'm here just because I care about Ukraine and I'm a teacher in Hello I hope you can hear us, we're piping you back in aren't you joining us again just to hear some questions I grew up in the Soviet Union in a very corrupt country as a person as a regular person with kids corruption was everyday phenomenon so you go to school you cheat on your exams you talk to your teacher she fixes your grades you go from school to university you get a test to get in you pay money to do everything so it's basically it's not like big how do you call it you talk about all those big corrupted people up top in the government or even police but it really goes everywhere my children kind of learn that you don't have to cheat you need to achieve but where I grew up we lived in Ukraine you could see Ukrainian children I wish they could grow and learn like a next generation would actually be honest and they would know that that's the way of living so who is responsible and who will implement or do something about actually teaching those children this new generation who would come later to be a policeman or come later to be a member of parliament or doctor or teacher or whoever and actually know that corruption is bad and cheating is bad and I don't know where do you start there so I don't know who is perhaps Ina would like to address that one so is it to me yes it's to just to give you an example many years ago the international renaissance foundation piloted a thing which is now known as the independent external knowledge testing which effectively took a lot of corruption out of the university entry process you pass this independent external test and it's mandatory now if you want to go to university for the school leavers and then depending on how well you do you actually do not have to pay a bribe to get in well it doesn't mean that corruption is totally out of the system and it has just pushed corruption to the levels of passing tests and exams during the university unfortunately in many cases but still that showed that things can be done so who is responsible and who is supposed to teach children you know in Ukraine we talk about like anywhere it's supply side corruption and demand side corruption we're talking about demand side corruption and here I do believe that the kind of corruption we really urgently need to address it's grand corruption it's really like if you start with petty people in local office who take small bribes of course it's very bad that they do it but first you eradicate corruption at the top of the supply side corruption I would say that it is very much to the families and to the parents to actually teach their children that corruption is bad and not to show an example I actually would disagree that it's not possible to live in Ukraine without paying bribes the problem is and I would acknowledge this the problem is that bribes in Ukraine are very often paid for not something which is illegal but you cannot get it something which is legal but you cannot get it on time or in a decent quality or in a decent setting like the healthcare services which are perfectly here you still have to drive to get whatever medical personnel treats you properly but I do believe if you talk about children it's extremely important to talk to them as to future adults talk to them as to participants of this supply demand potential participants of this supply demand equation and the importance of developing zero tolerance to corruption really starts at the very beginning and it's in the hands of the families I don't really trust a lot in the ability of the educational system here but they also can do a lot like showing good examples and there are all reasons why they should do that because I was speaking earlier about the sense of impunity it seems that the sense of impunity is becoming less and it will be growing less as the law enforcement and anti-corruption bodies actually do their job we didn't mention or perhaps we did mention the other agency anti-corruption instrument which is supposed to be put in place later this year and this is the national bureau national agency for preventing corruption it's fundamentally important that we do not have just the penalty side which is the anti-corruption bureau but we also have the prevention side it's more in term it's more difficult but it will be here and we hope we will have it operational well let's say optimistically it would say by autumn, mid-autumn there's less attention to it compared to the anti-corruption bureau which is about grand corruption but definitely it will serve a very important function if it's organized properly and does its job have I answered thank you Anna, that was great so yes please one or two more sir my name is Juan Asensi from Georgetown University my question is are there any plans to develop a national civil service that is going to be capable of carrying out the reforms that we have already developed in congress and other institutions maybe we will kick it to you in a national civil service reform how does that look the national civil service reform another fundamental thing which doesn't seem to be on the top priority list for the government initially the part of it which is administrative reform and civil service reform was even not in this long list of 62 priorities which were there in Ukraine 2020 it was not initially in the government's plan it also took quite a lot of efforts to put it on the agenda and I honestly do not feel that it still became a priority so it's part of the conditionality the international partners have been mentioned at time and again that the national civil service needs to be reformed otherwise what's the point of having all these new institutions if they are going to be populated with the same people which will be also produced by the same schools of training old style civil servants because this is actually another big issue and to reform the national civil service it requires a complex approach so it's not just about cutting down the stuff it's not just about having the re-appointment which also will be important but also a principle of educating future civil servants and part of the national civil service reform is indeed the salary the different approach to paying these people who are going to be re-appointed because otherwise if you have a judge who gets what I'll bring home $250 a month that is probably a little bit difficult to expect a very good high quality person to occupy this position if you have a police officer who brings a hundred months that also is quite a challenge so how that is going to be addressed I honestly do not know but well it's somewhere on the agenda I am a little bit cautious about getting and giving the forecasts of how fast it's going to go ahead okay we have time for one last question yes in black please you might want to use a mic just so we can hear it and Ina wouldn't be able to hear you my name is Julia I'm a journalist at Voice of America and you all named all these major issues and problems in terms of corruption but the question is still here how to battle all these in this war conditions so is it really possible it's a question for all of you can I start with war conditions yes please do go ahead actually I would say that tackling corruption is exactly the reform which needs to happen regardless of the war conditions so it is really made more important now especially if you look at public procurement for the army needs the national security needs but also for the needs of keeping the country intact addressing the problems of well officially it's 1.1 million IDPs unofficially it's 1.5 1.7 and if public money is embezzled there that's a very very ruining message to the level of trust of the people in the government and the country which is shrinking already so the time is now obviously the armed conflict is not really an excuse and on the other hand it should be used as a stimulus for this realistically there is quite it's quite possible to start implementing the legislation perhaps the difficult part would be finding the money for the salaries that's understandable so that's where the international support will be needed and that's where the thorough planning facilities will be needed but there are many things which do not require huge investment on the other hand they would save money for the budget and that's the things which need to be started with could I just build on a couple of things that have already been said one I think Adrian's point of prosecuting demonstration cases is really really important that the government needs to send a signal that business as usual is no longer acceptable all kinds of public personalities in Kiev right now who are engaged in past corruption that the government has not gone after and we can all think of specific examples the other point in this point of strict conditionality on the part of the donor community which I absolutely agree with if Ukraine is going to have a chance of getting the 40 plus billion dollars that it needs to put a ship back in order the only way is going to get that scale of external assistance if the government start acting on some of the promises that have been made and ultimately repeating the point that I made that civil society being engaged is the ultimate tool it just seems to me at the end of the day the Ukrainian civil society that will keep the Ukrainian government accountable for its actions it's not going to be a bunch of foreigners if I can just add an example of US wartime reform during the civil war Abraham Lincoln in Congress were able to pass the land grant act which fundamentally revolutionized agriculture in the US and the agriculture minister in Ukraine came out today with a comprehensive plan agriculture is one area that Ukraine the Chornosome is an incredible resource and opportunity for the country and if it's going to survive and thrive those sorts of reforms have to take place during this time and so I think there is the possibility so again going back I think there's the intent you've got young reformists with energy and ideas the question is can they carry that through to implementation and I think all of us if we can is to support them support those agents of change but they are there and I think they are now starting to take the actions not just passing the laws but carry those through and as I think one of the panelists said the implementation will be spotty it won't happen at the same speed everywhere but I think our role is really to support those that are pushing forward now and just for the record I know that George Kent did not mean to invoke a civil war analogy with referring to Ukraine that was just an example of a wartime fundamental reform I just wanted to make one final point which I think the key here is to show the cost of corruption to society in a very simple way that people can understand and I need to mention one example which was that medicine costs three times as much as it should another example might be the number of road deaths that occurred because you have a police force that's not enforcing proper traffic safety procedures so that just sort of shows what the human cost of having that kind of corruption is well that's the end I think we can all agree on one thing that we probably don't want to be driving in Kyiv until June because I imagine the guy here are going to be out for their last bit of money but I want to thank the panel for joining us thank Ambassador Taylor for inaugurating our discussion thank you all for coming it's a big question and really is up to Ukraine to answer to change the corruption equation it's an enormous challenge and something that comes from so many I think is some of the questioners so many different directions but I think the answer is they could do it and hopefully with the help of others and their own strength they will do it so thank you all very much for coming there may still be coffee out there if you want to have a cup and there will be on I should mention one final thing some brand new polling that's been done and if you check our website it should be posted I haven't or will be if it hasn't been but it's going to be a real sense of the very current sense of society from a very eminent pollster so you might want to take a look at that or at least read the blurb and then maybe Ambassador Taylor has a final sounds okay good work Colin thank you very much thank the panel here