Ukraine at War Must Deal with the Threat of Strategic Corruption

The Russo-Ukrainian war demands that Ukraine and all nations that support it concentrate all available resources and put forth maximum effort to fight and win the conflict. An important part of this effort is a crackdown on corruption in the public sector. Since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this “strategic” side of corruption has become especially threatening for the efficacy of Ukraine’s government.

Explaining the Concept 

Corruption in domestic government encompasses many forms of misuse of public posts for personal gain. Conflicts of interest, nepotism, money laundering, fraud, kickbacks, bribery, embezzlement, and extortion all come under the rubric of corruption in government. 

These forms of corruption refer to the behavior of actors domestically. However, corruption can be used in international relations. It can become a tool to influence the public institutions of other nations to change their power dynamics, and can be used to alter strategic geopolitical balances regionally. Also, internal corruption can provoke such political or economic dynamics that it harms a nation’s security to the level that international balances change. Thus corruption can be called strategic when it affects the exercise of legitimate power in a nation by undermining or strengthening particular persons or groups, which in turn affects national and international security. 

Experts at the Basel Institute of Governance define three types of corruption: endemic, captive, and strategic. Endemic corruption weakens the government’s ability to serve citizens and thus leads to distrust in public institutions, an increase in poverty, and an erosion of security institutions’ performance. 

In certain cases, endemic corruption evolves into state capture. In such cases the state institutions start serving the power elites with impunity and repressing other social strata. This situation in turn enables discretionary control of society by the security apparatus and radicalizes the oppressed groups. 

Such power dynamics often affect the captured state’s foreign policy and behavior in the international arena. An internal power elite group or a foreign government may weaponize the situation to achieve geopolitical goals. Such actors can destabilize the political order in a given country and considerably contribute to internal cleavages by polarizing the populace and provoking internal conflicts. Corruption becomes strategic when it fundamentally changes the political regime in a country, supports radical, populist, or autocratic groups that take over the government, and supports other nations’ geopolitical, usually malign, aims.

Strategic Corruption as a Geopolitical Tool

Whatever its source, strategic corruption refers to corruption in a transnational, geopolitical context whereby governments of different states, in pursuit of their own strategic interests and geopolitical objectives, seek to divert other nations’ resources. 

This type of state behavior is not new. For example, the European empires commonly used strategic corruption in competing for global or regional dominance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What is new about strategic corruption today is its scale and the rational planning behind it, as well as its impact on human lives here and now.

Today’s international security scholars emphasize that strategic corruption has become an instrument of the national strategy of many countries, including China and Russia. From being a feature of their political systems, corruption was deliberately transformed into “a weapon on the global stage.” Thus international relations, which have become more and more antagonistic in recent years, now include an asymmetry between the toolkits of kleptocracies and those of democracies. 

Examples of strategic corruption have been described, for example, by experts at the Center for Strategic International Studies in Washington, D.C. They have published three reports (so far) under the series title The Kremlin Playbook on the Russian government’s “malign economic influence and how it translates into political influence in parts of Europe.” These materials explore Moscow’s use of corruption to undermine the political and legal orders in Ukraine and other European countries. 

Strategic Corruption as a Tool to Undermine Democracy and the Rule of Law 

In addition to its geopolitical effect, strategic corruption undermines a government’s ability to serve its citizens and govern according to formally sanctioned law and the rule of law principles. Instead, it supports and spreads informalities, patronal politics, and nondemocratic politics. For example, the endurance of the autocratic belt in Eastern Europe and northern Eurasia demonstrates how strategic corruption can create transnational personalist power networks from Minsk and Moscow to Baku and Ankara. 

In general, as the OECD strategy for public integrity states, corruption is a corrosive process that “wastes public resources, widens economic and social inequalities, breeds discontent and political polarisation and reduces trust in institutions.” Even in its endemic form, corruption hugely limits the population’s trust in government. But when applied strategically, corruption promoted by autocracies threatens every democratic government with serious damage to its legitimacy and opens the path for nondemocratic ways of change of authorities. 

Strategic Corruption as a Threat for Ukraine 

So far, the G7 countries, the United States, and the EU have mounted different reactions and at a different pace to the challenge of strategic corruption. Unlike Ukraine, they have time to reflect and prepare wise policies to combat and prevent it. As a country at war, however, Ukraine must act fast to decrease the threat of strategic corruption to its defense sector.

Ukraine has firsthand experience with the harms strategic corruption can inflict on national defense. In recent history, strategic corruption can be detected in the unusually rapid sign-off on the Kharkiv Accords in 2010 or in the corrupt commercial schemes under the Poroshenko presidency when the Donbas war got underway in 2014–2015. 

The effects of strategic corruption are also evident in the context of the current, ongoing war. Strategic corruption can be connected to the unexpectedly easy trespass of Russian troops across the defensive line in southern Ukraine in 2022 and to the numerous cases of corrupt officers and medical doctors helping draft dodgers evade conscription.

How to Deal with Strategic Corruption 

So far, there are two sets of proposed reactions to the issue. 

The OECD proposes to fight different forms of corruption holistically. First, the anti-corruption strategy should go beyond the executive branch and aim at the legislature and judiciary. Second, the anti-corruption measures must deal not only with the public sector but also with the private sector, down to the individual level. Third, corruption should be addressed not only at the national level but also transnationally and at local levels. Finally, the OECD insists that “transparency is not enough”: public information tools should be used in line with the tools of “scrutiny and accountability mechanisms.”

Another approach has been proposed by experts who try to evaluate common responses to strategic corruption’s threat to democracies and link the provision of Western aid to those responses, especially in countries under pressure of kleptocracy. 

For example, Josh Rudolf has proposed a fourfold approach to fighting strategic corruption:

• Link governmental policies and aid with local political analysis. Such analysis of patronal politics should provide information on the most corrupt institutions and “networks of wealth and power span.”
• Connect the aid provided to partner states with their government’s responses to corruption and kleptocracy.
• Coordinate the aid at regional and global levels, mirroring how “grand corruption operates across borders through transnational networks of actors and tools.”
• Integrate anti-corruption programming into “traditional sectors of assistance, particularly health, infrastructure, energy, climate, and security.”

Another idea popular with experts is that Ukraine should not only fight misuse of resources within the country but should also highlight corruption in the Russian Armed Forces to undermine the latter’s efficacy. The new Russian minister of defense, Andrey Belousov, seems to have started dealing with corruption in the military, perhaps anticipating opportunities for Ukraine’s efforts in this sphere. 

Whichever methods and aims are chosen, Kyiv should act fast in dealing with the threat of strategic corruption.