In most cases, these American priorities align with domestic efforts long under way, like those in the Czech Republic. It hollows out institutions and corrupts key decisionmakers, leaving a country less capable to assert sovereignty and control over its territory.” Support for anticorruption projects “We do have concerns that corruption does make countries vulnerable. “We see corruption as something that not only affects democratic governance and limits economic prosperity, but poses a threat to regional stability,” Mr. When Viktor Yanukovych fled the country in February 2014 and security services temporarily collapsed, Ukraine was left “more vulnerable to Russian aggression,” he says. George Kent, the senior adviser on anticorruption for the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs at the US State Department, says that corruption exposed Ukrainian vulnerabilities in the country’s political upheaval in early 2014. The US diplomatic corps doesn’t name names, but Russia is its clear focus, especially since the crisis in Ukraine. There are nations, and we’ve seen it recently, that exploit corruption to exercise malign influence and undermine the very sovereignty and independence of their neighbors.” US Vice President Joe Biden, during a visit to Romania in May 2014, called corruption “a clear and present danger, not only to a nation’s economy, but to its very national security. Such efforts reverberate across the Atlantic, especially since Victoria Nuland, assistant secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the US State Department, assumed her post in the fall of 2013 and pushed the issue to the forefront. Though even there, the country’s National Anticorruption Directorate has made great strides, with its chief prosecutor, Laura Codruta Kovesi, rooting out scandals at the highest levels, including in the prime minister’s office, on an almost daily basis. Romania, on the other hand, is the lowest-ranked European Union country on watchdog Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. Estonia leads the wayĮstonia is held up as a leader in democratic transformation, widely embracing e-governance, which has essentially eliminated bureaucratic middlemen – and opportunities to extort bribes. They are also issues of security.”įrom Estonia to the Czech Republic and Hungary to Romania, the status of the fight varies. “There is a greater recognition that these issues of good governance, transparency, and rule of law are not just issues about fairness. “Some have described corruption as the wormhole through which malign forces can work their way into countries and hollow them out,” says US Ambassador to the Czech Republic Andrew Schapiro. Particularly since Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea, anticorruption efforts have been on the “shortlist” of every US ambassador in Europe. They’ve trained judges and prosecutors, and awarded grants to everyone from investigative journalists to techies to number crunchers.Ĭan a Democrat win over rural Ohio? Tim Ryan gives it a shot. As Russia and the West have come into increasing conflict over international affairs, the US has turned its gaze particularly toward the vulnerability of post-Soviet states to financial pressures – both licit and illicit – wielded by Moscow.Īmerican embassies across this part of Europe have worked on democracy-building and good governance since the fall of the Berlin Wall. That puts him, unwittingly but not unwillingly, on the front lines of American strategic goals in the region. With public data, he runs analyses for his nongovernmental organization, Econlab, that help him detect sources of party financing – including whether it’s Russian or not – and how municipalities and ministries are spending public money. Today he serves as the statistical backbone of the Czech Republic’s leading anticorruption fight, Reconstruction of the State, which aims to upend the cronyism and corruption that has permeated post-Communist Czech society. It took him two weeks, and ultimately set him on a new course. The 30-something was ensconced in his doctorate, mapping exchange rates between real-world currency and the video-game currency of World of Warcraft, when a colleague asked if he could build similar software to track public tenders. Jiri Skuhrovec, a programmer and economist in Prague, Czech Republic, seems to be an unlikely protagonist in the power struggle between the United States and Russia.
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