TV and credit cards
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How should west respond to potential (likely) Russian invasion of Ukraine?
- Thread starter Harry Bosch
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Ford
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DrZoidberg
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Putin, the worlds first antisemetic anti-Nazi
DrZoidberg
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FYI, Ukraine has the same problem. Both Ukraine and Russia are preposterously corrupt
bilby
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For sure, nobody has waved a magic wand and made Ukrainians into paragons of virtue, and certainly before the war the corruption in Ukraine was much like that in Russia (as it all originated from the same Soviet system).
But there's something about being at imminent risk of death, displacement, and/or replacement by another regime, that makes even the most corrupt officials think twice about stiffing the front line troops.
Quartermasters have been corrupt in all armies since the beginning of warfare. But they're usually prepared to relinquish their ill-gotten goods and treasure when their lives are on the line.
Few Ukrainians, no matter how corrupt, imagine that a Russian victory wouldn't strip them of their livelihoods at the very least, and quite possibly their lives too. So they will likely think twice before fucking over the people who are defending their criminal activities from the neighbouring gang.
Russians who screw the troops aren't at risk of being arrested and shot by the Ukrainian authorities, or usurped by Ukrainian criminals, or even inconvenienced by a change of government. Corrupt Ukrainians are very much at risk of these things from the Russians, should they prevail.
So I would expect issues on both sides, but I would expect them to be far worse for Russia, than for Ukraine.
Copernicus
Industrial Grade Linguist
Americans are no strangers to corruption. It's hard to be a Trump supporter and not support some forms of corrupt behavior in public officials. There were plenty of examples of corrupt behavior in his administration, and Republican senators couldn't even bring themselves to impeach him for trying to extort Zelensky in return for weapons that had been authorized by Congress for delivery to Ukraine. Democrats have one of their own senators facing charges on corruption for a second time. We just don't see our system as "preposterously corrupt", because corruption doesn't always go unpunished. We are even slowly, and very reluctantly, coming around to the position of making Donald Trump face consequences for his corruption, the most recent example being the New York state judgment to clamp down on his businesses in the state after decades of publicly known scandals going all the way back to his father's financial shenanigans.
I have experienced corruption in action in Russia in the past, and Ukraine certainly suffers from similar endemic corruption. It came as no surprise to me that Russian invaders have stolen just about everything in Ukraine that they could lay their hands on. However, Ukraine has been making progress where Russia has not. In particular, we have the fact that Zelensky was elected in large part because of the expectation that he would do something to end the corruption in high places. And it is undeniable that he has taken some actions to curb it, primarily to assure his foreign allies that their foreign aide will not get siphoned off to enrich people in power who are charged with getting it to troops and others who need it.
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Putin ran on that same platform. He put an oligarch in the stocks, so to speak. Other oligarchs asked Putin how to avoid the same fate. Putin said give me 50 percent of your take.
Copernicus
Industrial Grade Linguist
The difference, of course, is that Putin did not star in a popular TV show that featured him as President fighting corruption and influence by oligarchs and the politicians they corrupt. Putin did not name his party anything like "Servant of the People"--the name of Zelensky's popular TV series. Rather, "United Russia" (Единая Россия) somewhat resembles the Nazi Party of Germany in ideological orientation. One of its main goals is to unite the "greater Russia" that includes "Little Russians" (Ukrainians or "malorusi") and Belarusians. This is similar to the Nazi Party's tribal obsessions regarding German speakers in Austria and the Sudetenland. The idea behind Putin's popularity is nationalism and ethnic unity as a basis for nationhood, not freedom, equality, and lawful government. So there are differences between Zelensky and Putin that are worth noting.
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Ukraine-Russia war: Russian air defences shoot down one of its most advanced fighter jets
Russian air defences have shot down one of the country’s most advanced fighter jets in a friendly fire incident, according to reports.
www.telegraph.co.uk
Against a drone you could probably use an ultrasonic system. Furthermore, it would be very low power, hard to lock the seeker onto a specific emitter--and no confidence that you were locked onto a real system rather than a decoy. With big radars you have big power sources etc, but against the sort of thing I'm picturing a decoy would be cheap.
DrZoidberg
Contributor
Ehe. Whataboutism. USA is among the least corrupt countries in the world. Yes, compared to countries like Sweden, Switzerland and Japan, US corruption is rampant. But the slippery slope of corruption is very long. Ukraine has amongst the worst records of corruption in the world. The government itself is part of the problem. Ukraine has a very long way to go before its on par with USA
Elixir
Made in America
At least it's not an honored establishment in the US like it is in Russia or Venezuela.
Copernicus
Industrial Grade Linguist
I wasn't making a whataboutism argument to minimize the corruption problem in Ukraine. If they didn't have a rampant problem, Zelensky's show would not have become so successful and popular. I was merely making the point that Ukraine today may not be as bad as it was in the past, especially when compared with corruption in Western countries. I think you are making a very facile judgment about a complex situation. Things have changed drastically for Ukraine since 2014, and I think that Zelensky's influence so far has had a net positive effect on the progress the Ukrainian government has made in reducing the level of corruption. I certainly do believe that corruption in Ukraine pales in comparison with Russia, which has only gotten worse under Putin's poisonous influence. I wouldn't lump those two countries together in terms of corruption, although they certainly started out in the same place after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
T.G.G. Moogly
Traditional Atheist
Corruption in Ukraine vs Putinstan? Let's see.... How many people fall out of windows in Ukraine?
Case closed.
Case closed.
steve_bank
Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
Maybe they need to upgrade building codes.
DrZoidberg
Contributor
The corruption in Ukraine before 2014 was worse than in Russia. Way worse. After 2014 foreign aid started flooding into Ukraine. That NEVER makes corruption go down. The influx of new money will instead only hide the corruption.
Copernicus
Industrial Grade Linguist
First, please explain why you say that the corruption in Ukraine before 2014 was "way worse" than in Russia. On what factual basis can you make such a claim?
Second, reconsider your facile claim that the influx of new money necessarily made corruption go up. The fact is that those giving the aid were well aware of the corruption and attached strings to the aid that had the opposite effect. That is the historical origin of the manufactured Hunter Biden scandal that currently has an entire Republican-dominated Congressional committee devoted to it. If you want to talk about corruption, think about why that committee even exists. Joe Biden had a prosecutor fired that was suppressing the investigation and prosecution of corruption cases, one of which happened to involve Burisma. In fact, it is that much larger flow of aid today that has been driving Zelensky to make some very public anti-corruption firings of top officials in his cabinet and in the military.
I'm on another board where there's someone who lives in Kyiv has posted many times. They say that Ukraine was very corrupt until the Russian invasion of 2014 and they did a major shape-up after that and are no longer nearly so corrupt. I have no way of verifying this but neither do I see any reason for them to have lied.
Copernicus
Industrial Grade Linguist
Well, the chief corrupter was sent packing in that year, and the Russian one launched an invasion to express his displeasure.
On my trip to Russia in 1997, corruption was rampant, and most of the Western automobiles on Russian streets seem to have been stolen in Europe and North America and imported into Russia. Russian auto makers could not produce the same quality or sell their cars competitively, yet a great many Russians still bought them rather than pay for what they knew to be stolen vehicles. When my wife and I visited St. Petersburg, we met with a large number of Russians that I had come to know online in a virtual worlds environment as the caretaker of so-called Activeworld's "Russian World". They formed a caravan of over a dozen vehicles to go to a park where we had grilled Shashlyk and Georgian wine for a picnic. As guests of honor, we were put in the lead van, which was a current model SUV complete with television for passengers and all the latest gizmos. A number of vehicles were obviously like that, because some of our hosts were likely connected. I remember that some of them were a bit chagrined, but it was considered "normal". Not a few had been using stolen credit cards ("kreditka") to pay for their subscriptions to Activeworlds, and the banks had been threatening to shut down their business if they didn't stop it. So we had mounted a campaign to stop the use of "kreditka", complete with signs in the virtual world imploring people to only use valid cards. Many subscriptions had to be cancelled by Activeworlds. The problem, of course, was that many of the Russians had no way of getting credit cards that were usable online, so they had to buy stolen numbers that had been validated by the criminals. (They had a system of generating numbers and checking them to discover if they were legitimate credit lines in the West.) It wasn't that they actually liked the idea of engaging in such corruption, but they had few alternatives, if they wanted to purchase Western products.
SLD
Contributor
2022 Corruption Perceptions Index: Explore the results
How does your country measure up in the 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index?
www.transparency.org
Transparency International does a respected ranking of countries. 100 is the least corruption possible. Denmark is #1 with a score of 90. The US is #24 with a score of 69. Smaller democratic countries are harder to corrupt. Ukraine has a score of 33 and rank of 116. Russia is worse with a score of only 28 and a ranking of 137. Somalia is the worst with a score of 12.