@mafketis
... and still, Russian corruption is orders of magnitude smaller than Ukrainian. One way to know this, is looking at what companies the countries have managed to attract. IKEA has a famous policy of not facilitating graft, and true enough, it had some difficulties with Russian municipal authorities early on and threatened to leave, but then the situation was resolved. Ukraine meanwhile, could not convince IKEA to open in all thirty years.
Ukraine had a thriving automobile sector in 1980s, and now produces less than 3K cars a year, as recently as early 2000s it was 400K. Russia meanwhile has attracted every single automobile manufacturer to open plants in Russia, and produces in excess of 2M cars a year. This includes Volkswagen, Daimler, Ford, Renault, Mitsubishi, etc. Right before the war, Renault had plans to export cars from Russia to Europe.
Ukraine had one of the newest power generation networks in the USSR. In thirty years, it did not manage to attract a single foreign investor into its nuclear plants, coal stations, dams, etc. As a result there is a catastrophic level of underinvestment, and a good chance of overall collapse. Russia, meanwhile, has privatized its entire power generation sector, with the plants now belonging to companies like E.On, Fortum, Uniper, and them investing billions into refurbishing them.
Bottom line: The people called Ukrainians have turned out to be poor custodians of the country called Ukraine.
