FROM
THE FIRES OF REVOLUTION, UKRAINE IS REINVENTING GOVERNMENT
Since
the 2014 revolution, Ukrainian activists have set about using
technology to prevent abuses of power – by building the world's
most transparent platform for government spending: ProZorro
20
Aug 2018
At
the gate of Mezhyhirya, the estate Viktor Yanukovych built with the
money he stole from the people of Ukraine, a stall is selling rolls
of toilet paper printed with the face of Vladimir Putin. Beside them
are three large, flat, plastic loaves of bread, painted gold. Viktor
Nestulia, director of innovation projects at Transparency
International Ukraine, taps one with his finger. “When they came
here after the revolution of dignity, they found a loaf made of solid
gold, so this is a copy,” he says. “That’s what it is here. You
will see.”
He’s
not wrong. Inside Mezhyhirya, we pass a yacht pier, a shooting range,
a boxing gym, an ostrich farm, a petting zoo, a man-made lake, a
greenhouse complex, a helicopter pad, several fountains, at least
five guest houses and a mansion where every surface drips with
decorative gold (although minus the two-kilo ornamental bloomer,
which was stolen in 2015). In the echoing concrete garage where
Yanukovych kept his vintage cars and jeeps, I count 36.
Yet
what makes the scene truly sickening is the fact that, until the
former President – who rented the 140-hectare estate for 314
hryvnia, or roughly £10, an acre – fled to Russia on February 22,
2014, no-one knew any of this was here.
There
were rumours, of course. Journalists interviewed staff and flew
drones over the site. (To refute the claims, Yanukovych took friendly
reporters into one of the guest houses and told them it was where he
lived.) But nothing was ever confirmed, so when, after months of
anti-corruption protests, Ukrainians finally saw Mezhyhirya for
themselves, they were astonished. Crowds took the half-hour drive
from Kiev to gawp at the luxuries their taxes had bought – although
Yanukovych continued to deny this was what he had done. Interviewed
by the BBC in 2015, he dismissed the idea as “political
technology”. The ostriches, he claimed, “just lived there.”
Four
years later, Ukraine is not cured of corruption. Bribery remains a
way of life. The President, the eleventh-richest man in the country,
talks regularly to Putin on the phone. But from the outburst of
modernising zeal sprung a radical reform to one of the most vital
functions of the state. A multi-award-winning digital system hailed
as the best of its kind in the world. “It’s the gold standard,”
says Henri Verdier, chief technology officer of France.
Called
ProZorro, after the Ukrainian word for transparency, the
volunteer-built system radically restructures public procurement. Its
motto? “Everyone sees everything.”
Public
procurement isn’t big business; it’s the biggest business of all.
In Europe, it accounts for an average 16 per cent of GDP, according
to the European Commission, dwarfing the contributions of finance
(5.1 per cent), say, or agriculture (1.5 per cent). There are
regional variations – the Netherlands is highest, at 20.2 per cent;
Belgium lowest, at 14 per cent – but, across the board, two
statements hold true. Governments spend a lot of money buying
everything from pens to motorways to architectural blueprints. And,
on the whole, they do it very badly.
To
see this in action, you only have to look at the news, which, on any
given day, will almost certainly feature the confusions and
inefficiencies of public procurement. On the sunny May morning I
visited Mezhyhirya, for instance, three stories were making headlines
in the UK, where public procurement is 14 per cent of GDP and 32 per
cent of government spending. One concerned the Home Office’s
decision to award the £490m contract to make the new “Brexit blue”
passports to a French-Dutch firm rather than British manufacturer De
La Rue. Another related to the 600 million disposable cups bought by
English hospitals in the last five years, a figure roundly condemned
as unacceptable. Yet no single story exposed the chronic procurement
crisis as nakedly as the implosion of uber-supplier Carillion –
which four months on, was still far from a resolution.
The
reason for the delay, perhaps even the crisis itself? Until Carillion
issued a huge profit warning in July 2017, almost no-one knew its
problems existed.
The
ignorance was so pervasive it resembled a form of psychological
repression. In March 2017, directors boasted of Carillion’s
“substantial liquidity”, and auditors and shareholders waved
through its accounts. A parliamentary investigation found “the
government was not aware of Carillion’s financial distress”,
despite “clear and compelling problems with the business.”
Even
then, government departments continued to award major contracts to
Carillion, which persuaded its 30,000 subcontractors – for it was
effectively outsourcing the government’s outsourcing, acting as a
middleman for everyone from cleaners to engineers to catering staff –
to continue to work with it. Suppliers, who will now get back less
than 1p for £1 they are owed, could not make their own checks. The
parliamentary public accounts committee described the contracts as
shrouded in “great secrecy.”
Yet
although the scale of Carillion’s collapse made the evasion
extreme, it was hardly unusual. “A lot of local authorities don’t
know where all their contracts are,” says Ian Makgill. “Same for
central government. We asked DWP [Department of Work and Pensions]
for lists of contracts with certain suppliers. They said, ‘It’s
going to be too expensive to tell you, because we don’t know where
it is.’”
Makgill,
founder of public procurement platforms Open Opps and Spend Network,
has been collecting public contracts for over a decade. Altogether,
he has data on six million, as well as over 100 million transactions.
But in the absence of a standard database, acquiring them is a
complex and unreliable process involving Freedom of Information
requests, website-scraping and in-depth knowledge of the 200-plus
portals the government uses for procurement. The day after Carillion
collapsed, Makgill searched for its contracts on Contracts Finder,
the website created in 2015 to act as a single source of information
on contracts. He only found 20 out of 450, and still hasn’t tracked
down more than 30 per cent of the missing ones. Ministries and town
halls frantically checking their exposure to Carillion encountered
the same scary blankness.
In
Mezhyhirya, I tell this story to Nestulia and Andriy Kucherenko,
co-founder of ProZorro. We are walking past rows of steamy
greenhouses to the petting zoo, 50 metres away. Up ahead, the
peacocks squawk in the heat. How long would it take, I ask, to find
all the information on the biggest public procurer in Ukraine?
Kucherenko,
a slight, quietly-spoken 45-year-old who worked for six months
without pay to build ProZorro, pauses. Whereas UK procurement exists
in a confused mess of yellowing paper, PDFs and contradictory
databases, the Ukrainian system has a single compulsory entry point,
a standard data format, and open source code. “One hour,” he
says. “Fifty-five minutes to come to my computer, and five minutes
to search.”
“I
can do it now,” Nestulia pulls out his phone. “Within one
minute.”
“This
information is all publicly available,” Kucherenko continues. “At
first, we thought it was too extreme. I was afraid that business will
simply not accept it, they would say we are out of the game. But it
didn’t–”
“Done
it!” says Nestulia. He starts quickly reading off the results:
“KPIs, number of contracts, average competition, month by month,
average procedure...“ I glance at my phone. It has been one minute
and 30 seconds.
Why
doesn’t the UK, or indeed any other developed country, have a
procurement system like ProZorro? The answer, as ever, is complicated
– but the simplest reason is that it requires rebuilding everything
from the ground up. To find the political will you almost need a
revolution. Ukraine’s began on Thursday, November 21, 2013 with a
furious social media summons to rally in Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Kiev’s
central square.
Oleksandr
Starodubtsev was in court in the western city of Lviv when he saw the
anti-corruption, pro-European call. A former stockbroker who’d
founded and sold two financial technology startups, he was trying to
stop his company’s new owners stealing his money. “It was
absolutely obvious we should do something with the country,” he
says. That Sunday, he joined up to 200,000 protesters in Kiev – and
then, when the rallies continued, so did he, first after work, then
permanently. “I am on vacation,” he told his business partners.
“I need time to defend my country.”
Starodubtsev
is 188 centimetres tall, with broad shoulders and rangy limbs, but he
was a businessman, not a soldier – and, in any case, defending
Maidan meant occupying space rather than fighting. To pass the time
productively, he found a stage and, with friends from his MBA,
started a lecture series, hosting daily talks on everything from
politics to personal finance. They called it “Maidan Open
University” (today it is a free online course for civic education).
Despite the government threats and frightening cold – down to minus
17°C – Starodubtsev remembers it as a time of anarchistic freedom:
“very right, very correct, very natural.” Then, on February 20,
2014, with a barrage of water cannons, the notorious Berkut riot
police made their attack.
The
night before it happened, Starodubtsev was in his apartment making
Molotov cocktails. The situation was so dangerous he had sent his
family out of the country. “I had been very critical of the
government on Facebook,” he says. “I was afraid for them. Not so
much myself. I was going to stay.”
At
8.30 the next morning, Starodubtsev entered the square, and saw
protesters sprinting through burning tyre smoke. The Berkut had
broken through their barricade. Amid the fug and panic, it was hard
to understand what was happening. When he finally grasped the
situation, Starodubtsev raced towards the barricade, piled metres
high from tyres, bricks and debris. Wounded protestors were being
carried back. In total, 21 were killed that day, some by snipers
firing from the roofs of nearby buildings. Speaking from Stanford,
where he is one of three “Ukrainian emerging leaders” studying
under Francis Fukuyama, Starodubtsev recalls how he joined the human
chain passing material to reinforce the barricade: first tyres, then,
later, Molotov cocktails. “I saw bad things, things I’ve never
seen before,” says Starodubtsev. “Dead bodies. But that gave me a
personal commitment to carry on after it was done.”
After
Yanukovych fled, two days later, a “kamikaze” interim government
took office, and the new Minister for Economic Development and Trade,
economist Pavlo Sheremeta, announced his priorities. Two of them –
deregulation and healthcare reform – didn’t interest
Starodubtsev, but the third, public procurement, intrigued him. Not
only was it central to corruption, but it reminded him of his career
in finance. “I knew you just had to create some kind of exchange,”
he says. He put out a call for help on Facebook. And that was how he
met Andriy Kucherenko.
Andriy
Kucherenko, co-founder of ProZorro, at its offices in Kiev, Ukraine
Unlike
Starodubtsev, Kucherenko steered clear of the Maidan protests. In
2004, he had been actively involved in the Orange Revolution, which
forced a rerun of the rigged presidential election. But even though
Viktor Yushchenko recovered from disfiguring dioxin poisoning to win
on a liberal platform, the protesters went home, and the reform
movement dissipated. Disillusioned, Kucherenko didn’t believe a
second revolution could succeed. Now, he felt, “not guilty, but
responsible”. He says: “I just wanted to contribute somehow to
this effort.”
A
senior manager at accountancy firm EY, Kucherenko didn’t have any
experience with government policy, but he had managed software
systems for private procurement – and, this time, he was determined
not to let that experience go to waste. When he met Starodubtsev,
they agreed on one principle: “you can’t trust politicians to fix
the country.” If you wanted change, you had to make it yourself.
At
first, the pair focused on reforming Ukraine’s procurement law,
which had been hollowed out to facilitate corrupt deals. Rather than
making firms go through a tender process, Yanukovych created 43 legal
exemptions that allowed contracts to be awarded directly to a single
supplier. All the contracts for Euro 2012, for instance, which
Ukraine hosted jointly with Poland, were doled out in this way.
Opposition politicians estimated that between 30 and 40 per cent of
the funds for the tournament were stolen by officials, a sum of £3
billion.
Yet
even when a new law was passed in April 2014 to eliminate most of the
exemptions, it was clear to Kucherenko and Starodubtsev that
procurement was far from fixed. “When you change the law, you are
playing on civil servants’ field, with their game, their rules,”
says Starodubtsev. “Our idea was we should create something
absolutely different.” The question was: what?
They
may have been two volunteers pushing one idea at a time when
thousands sprouted, but already Starodubtsev and Kucherenko were
facing the fundamental dilemma of procurement: what to buy, and what
to make yourself? In political debate, this choice is almost always
reduced to private or public. In reality, the range of options is far
wider.
One
option was to buy a procurement system from a large IT supplier. But
from his time at EY, Kucherenko knew such systems came with limited
functionality and even more limited control. So the pair looked at
other countries for inspiration. “To our surprise, we didn’t find
any best practice,” says Starodubtsev. That was until a student
volunteer introduced them to David Marghania and Tato Urjumelashvili,
two Georgian activists who had just finished transforming their own
country’s procurement system.
The
four men met in Kucherenko’s office at EY. Whereas other companies
showed PowerPoint presentations, Marganya demonstrated the Georgian
system on his laptop. As soon as he began, Kucherenko and
Starodubtsev knew they had their model. Not only was Georgian
procurement now completely electronic, its data was also open; a
weapon against corruption. It wasn’t perfect: it committed the
government to either making the interface, or relying on a single
monopoly supplier to provide it. But it was something they could work
with. Then, just as they were preparing a draft law for parliament,
their political support evaporated.
On
August 21, 2014, Pavlo Sheremeta resigned, saying he could no longer
fight “yesterday's people”. With elections approaching, the
entire project was
in limbo. On
the verge of giving up, Starodubtsev sought advice from a
revolutionary colleague. One day, during the protests, he noticed a
man quietly sweeping up around the Open University. Recognising
Dmytro Shymkiv, general manager of Microsoft Ukraine, he invited him
to speak – now as recently-appointed deputy head of the
Presidential Administration, Shymkiv gave Starodubtsev three
suggestions. First, don’t wait for politicians; if you can’t do
this without them, it won’t happen. Second, trial the system on
low-value goods, which don’t come under Ukrainian procurement law.
Third, work with commercial marketplaces, such as internet grocer
EVO.
The
first two pieces of advice pushed Starodubtsev forward. The third
changed the nature of his project. With the involvement of the
marketplaces, he realised, he could create a centrally-controlled
database, but leave the interface to be managed by competing private
companies – just like the brokers on the stock market. (“We had a
joke in our team,” he says. “That whatever I'm trying to build,
at the end we receive a stock exchange.”) He persuaded EVO to come
on board, along with five other marketplaces, (there are now 23), and
secured $35,000 (£26,281) from them in seed funding. The name
wouldn’t come until after a crowdsourced competition in February
2015. But ProZorro was now in its final form.
A
country which had experienced the very worst of Soviet suppression
and oligarchic exploitation was moving towards a private-public
hybrid, in which commercial companies were incentivised with a fee
(between £5,000 and 57 pence, depending on the size of the contract)
per tender to take responsibility for marketing and consumer
innovation, while the state set the rules and, by keeping control of
the data, retained ultimate ownership.
The need was growing
desperate, because a new, deadlier threat had been added to the
turmoil of the revolution. As the fall of Yanukovych was playing out
in Kiev,
Russia
took the first steps to annex the southern Crimean Peninsula and then
supported separatist uprisings in the eastern Donbas region. By
September, its forces had crossed the border in the east and were
pushing the Ukrainian army back from the frontline. Over a million
people fled the annexation and the fighting, according to the United
Nations. But for those in government, the crisis wasn’t just
political, but also logistical. With its antiquated procurement
system, the Ukrainians simply couldn’t buy the equipment they
needed.
The
head of procurement at the Ministry of Defence was Nelly Stelmakh. A
cheerful 55-year-old with a dark bob and a taste for colourful
dresses, Stelmakh was responsible for getting the army everything
from uniforms to food to petrol to medical supplies. During the whole
of 2014, she only took six days off work. “We had a war, therefore
we needed to work,” she shrugs.
On
December 30, Kucherenko, who had been working on an EY project at the
Ministry of Defence, showed Stelmakh his half-finished ProZorro
prototype. As soon as she saw it, she says, she went, “Oooh, I want
to use it, I want, I want.” Two months later, when the minimum
viable product launched to a small set of central government
departments, she had it – and very quickly, began to put it to the
test. By June, it was the ministry’s main procurement system.
Instantly, it reduced costs by 25 per cent.
Through
an interpreter, Stelmakh explains how she persuaded the military to
go along with the idea. Then, in halting English, she speaks to me
directly: “We understood some resistance, but we still worked. And
I can say that ProZorro helped to save our country.”
Today,
more than three years since its launch, ProZorro holds more than
1,500 online auctions a day. In 2017, it completed 870,060 with an
estimated value of £11.4 billion. Given the state of Ukrainian
procurement before 2015, assessments of its impact aren’t exact,
but comparisons between old and new contracts suggest that is has
saved the government £1.2 billion, or 1.4 per cent of GDP. According
to a 2017 survey, 29 per cent of businesses believe the system is
corrupt. In 2016, 59 per cent did.
At
a time when promises of technological “democratisation” feel very
hollow, it’s easy to overlook the sheer novelty of this
achievement. Without digital data, it would simply be impossible.
“Usually efficiency and transparency are opposite directions in
public procurement,” says Starodubtsev. “The steps which are
directed to efficiency, they are against transparency, and vice
versa. An electronic system was the only way to do both at the same
time.”
Not
just any data will do. ProZorro was built using the
internationally-recognised open data standard designed by US
non-profit Open Contracting Partnership: this gives each new
contracting process a unique identifier, making it simple to
organise, even across proliferating government databases. One result
is that it’s easier to build tools using ProZorro’s data, in the
same way that, for instance, Citymapper was built using Transport for
London’s. (ProZorro’s apps include corruption monitoring and risk
management tools; one large supplier has a programme that lists every
tender according to likelihood of winning.) Another, more radical
outcome, is that it makes it possible for the government to automate
procurement.
Each
contract in ProZorro is decided by an anonymous online auction
conducted in four rounds. First, suppliers submit their initial
price, based on their assessment of the contract. Then the prices and
the number of bidders is revealed, and the suppliers can bid again,
with the highest bidder starting first (a game theory tweak to
discourage conservative pricing). This happens three times, until the
lowest price wins. It’s eBay, only in reverse – and, just like
sellers on eBay, buyers on ProZorro find the whole negotiation
happens automatically.
“As
an introvert, it’s rather interesting that a person like me could
efficiently work as a chief procurement officer, because I almost
have no negotiations with some deals,” says Oleksandr Nakhod, head
of procurement at national postal service Ukrpost. “My job is to
create transparent conditions for all economic agents, and then just
watch the auctions.”
The
principle has been been extended into sales of government assets.
ProZorro Sale was initially used to sell off the assets of the 90
banks – more than 40 per cent of the banking sector – which went
bankrupt after the revolution, but before long it expanded to other
areas, from scrap metal to hotels. In June 2017, the team showed the
system to economist Roger Myerson, who won the Nobel prize in 2007
for his work on auction design. “I was very impressed,” Myerson
tells me over email. “It was good to see a major public institution
in Ukraine taking the right steps to make sure that its auctions
should be designed so as to serve the interests of the public, rather
than just a few well-connected individuals.”ProZorro
is far from perfect. It struggles with complex, subjective decisions:
insurance contracts, for instance, or legal services. “It's like a
ready-made suit. There may be guys for whom it fits, but there will
definitely be guys for whom it is wrong,” says Maxim Nefyodov, the
charismatic first deputy minister for Economic Development and Trade,
who is ProZorro’s chief political defender. Although tenders can be
listed with criteria other than price, according to Kyiv School of
Economics, less than one per cent do so.
The
reason for this omission? Ukraine simply doesn’t have professional
procurement officers capable of formulating complex contracts. Of
1,900 contracting authorities surveyed by Kyiv School of Economics,
over 80 per cent said procurement was a “non-paid off-hour job”.
“What is difference between ProZorro and UK?” Nefyodov says. “UK
has a manual system. You employ relatively skilled, relatively
professional and relatively motivated people, and they do their job.
Ukraine is the absolute opposite. Public procurement is not even a
job. You have to employ idiots or crooks.”
Still,
in its range, power and simplicity, ProZorro hints at a future in
which citizens can access the most basic information about their
country, and decisions are based on evidence rather than habit and
supposition. In Moldova and Belarus, reformers are exploring the idea
of adopting ProZorro. Could the UK do the same? Nefyodov sighs. Given
the problems he faces, the difficulties of rich nations seem trivial.
“No,” he says. “For the same reason you can’t just borrow
laws from other countries. You have to make it yourself, to fit your
situation.” Then he brightens:
“I
read an article on the Guardian about
NHS procurement, which showed that prices of same items fluctuate up
to 35 times, and overspending is over £1 billion. This specific
problem can be solved by technology. What you need for this is a
finite register of all medical supplies and all data of procurement
in the same format… It's not that easy, but it can be done.”
Will
it be? In 2016, the UK adopted the Open Contracting data standard for
Contracts Finder, its central registry of contracts. “Alas,” says
Gavin Hayman, executive director of the Open Contracting Partnership,
“it’s not compulsory for the many different UK authorities to
file data with it, so many government agencies don’t. Our hope is
that the Carillion disaster is a wake-up call for more systematic
reforms and finally helps it make the jump from documents to digital.
But, at the moment, the UK is only timidly, cautiously, taking little
mouse-steps.”
ProZorro
may be futuristic, but its immediate future is far from secure. As
public frustration at the slow pace of post-Maidan reforms grows, its
political opponents see a chance to take down its greatest
achievement. In February 2017, populist politicians hid
ProZorro-killing amendments in a services bill; in May, they did the
same thing to a bill on cybersecurity. “There is a footnote in
small script on page 48, on a bill unrelated to ProZorro,” says
Nefyodov. “We routinely have to search hundreds of draft laws to
scrap it out.”
Behind
this subterfuge lies a vision of society in total opposition to the
pro-market Maidan revolution: a vision that could be summed up,
simply, as “Ukraine First”. In December 2017, Viktor Halasiuk,
another populist, called for ProZorro to “buy Ukrainian, pay
Ukrainians,” presenting a bill that allowed domestic manufacturers
to win bids if their price was less than 43 per cent higher than
foreign competitors. The government fought it off, but the idea is
gaining momentum – not just in Ukraine, but across Europe, and
beyond. This
is the trouble with data: staying loyal to it is hard. In the UK,
both parties favour a form of preferential procurement: the
Conservatives want contracts to go to SMEs; Labour to local
businesses. “Politically people always go for protectionism,”
says Nefyodov. “But then you create disturbances in the system.
‘Why did you overpay? But I favoured the SME!’ And then how can
you compare?” His theory, he explains, is that a more open system
benefits smaller businesses, or underrepresented groups – and on
ProZorro, 80 per cent of suppliers are SMEs (compared to 24 per cent
in the UK in 2015-16).
Then
there is the question of political will. “I treat myself not as a
revolutionary, I treat myself as a manager,” says Nefyodov. “But
we had this window of opportunity. Plus our system was so shitty, we
had the luxury to build from scratch.” Yet although the Carillion
crisis might seem to provide that in the UK, in many ways it is
simply the latest, most drastic manifestation of a crisis that has
been going on for decades, running through the railways, the
Olympics, on to nuclear clean-up and disabled benefits claimants. A
recent book by a group of University of Manchester academics painted
a picture of state and outsourcers locked together in a relationship
of blame-avoiding co-dependence: “[this] explains why it is so
difficult to stop the advance of outsourcing on the grounds that
things are going wrong, because things going wrong for somebody else
is part of the design.”
Yet,
for ProZorro, perhaps the greatest threat is not political, but
cultural: the endemic corruption that lurks behind every corner, so
that even the simplest transaction can become an opportunity for a
bribe. The day before I go to Mezhyhirya, I visit the team
responsible for the day-to-day operation of ProZorro works out of the
old Public Procurement Office, a 1960s Soviet block in downtown Kiev.
In his bright, whitewashed, first floor office, CEO Vasyl Zadvorny –
an energetic 35-year-old with a thick black beard – runs briskly
through its current priorities. For 50 years, this building’s heavy
manual presses printed the official journal used to announce news of
government contracts. Now, Zadvorny explains, its 53-person staff
maintains an API to deliver “backend as a service.”
Whereas
ProZorro’s founders emphasise its reformist potential, Zadvornii, a
former project manager at offshore development firm Luxoft, speaks
the language of business and operations. “My position looks much
more like the CEO of a product development company,” he says,
adding that “the golden idea is to make public procurement as easy
as private.” His 2018 targets include predictive analytics for
suppliers and an Amazon-style catalogue for procuring basic goods and
services. Only a looming mural of a figure in an Anonymous mask and
the slogan, “People shouldn’t be afraid of their government.
Governments should be afraid of their people,” gives any indication
of the high political stakes.
Before
showing me out, Zadvorny takes me on a tour. A few doors down the
corridor, past a Post-It sprinkled whiteboard, is the office of the
old Public Procurement Office’s CEO. Unlike the other rooms, it has
been kept in its original state: heavy pink and brown curtains;
upholstered wooden chairs, diamond patterned beige carpet. Next to a
laminated map of Ukraine and its neighbours, the wall is lined with
dark teak cabinets.
Zadvorny
opens the middle one. “But it's not the only interesting thing.
Here
you also have a secret room.”
Behind
the cabinet door, there is a small, dim chamber, decorated in the
same fashion. “It looks a lot better than it did before,” says
Zadvornii, wryly. “I’m not sure what they really used to do here,
but they used to call this, ‘rest room’. And here” – he opens
another door to a cupboard-like, beige-tiled bathroom – there is a
real restroom.”
The
space is clean and empty of personality or possessions, yet it is so
seedy I find myself shuddering. “It was like this in Yanukovych
times. The man can just hide himself here,” Zadvorny says. The only
furniture, he explains, was a big, white leather sofa. “Specific
secret room, I would say.”
In
the staff kitchen next door, two young women are eating their packed
lunch. The contrast between this everyday activity and the cave-like
secret room is gross and jarring. “We call that room a corruption
museum,” Zadvorny says, as he leads me through. The next day, I
hear Mezhyhirya described the same way. As if the corruption they
represent is now only a memory, safely confined to the glass cabinet
of national history.
Ukraine
is a long way from that future. As we walk around Yanukovych’s
manicured grounds, I ask Nestulia how far he thinks ProZorro has
come. “It is just a start,” he says. “We have shone a light in
a dirty room. My boss at Transparency International always says, ‘We
have the most transparent corruption in the world.’”
Updated
22.08.18, 11:20 BST: This article has been corrected to reflect more
accurately the geography of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The
frontline is not in Crimea, as originally suggested, but in Donbas,
where Ukrainian troops are fighting Russian-backed separatists and
Russian troops.