The war in Europe – Political earthquake in Ukraine

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The second question is what the fired Ivan Bakanov has done wrong, apart from accepting a job for which he was hardly qualified, since he had no intelligence work experience in the first place. His main qualification seems to have been that he was the president’s best friend and closest friend from kindergarten, school, university and professional life. And the trust that often lies in a particularly long and strong friendship.

Before we go in on the course of events itself, let’s just state that this says a lot about – let’s call it – Ukraine’s state of administrative health. Or – more precisely – it says a lot about how unhealthy the Ukrainian political system is in the first place. Because it tells about Byzantine structures in the state apparatus, where personal relationships and personal loyalty are much more important than the institutions, which are weak.

This story tells of an administration that is light years from what the EU expects and demands for the membership Ukraine is promised. There is nothing new in this, because Ukraine is fundamentally as Byzantine in its administration as Russia, or many other former Soviet republics. The new thing is that a war forces Ukraine to simultaneously come to terms with its Byzantine past and administration.

Simultaneously with Bakanov then the state prosecutor Iryna Venediktova also got fired last weekend. And then we are back to the question of what the chief of intelligence and the public prosecutor have done wrong. According to President Zelenskyj, the reason the two were fired was that there had been a number of intelligence officers and people in the prosecution who had defected to the Russian side in the occupied areas in the east and south, where Russia has conquered land.

Now it is no wonder that intelligence and the prosecution are precisely areas where there is rotten fruit in Ukraine in wartime. Both parts are structures that before 2014 had represented and managed the values ​​of the existing – including the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych.

Especially the intelligence was – at least before 2014 – characterized by close ties to their Russian colleagues, because both Ukrainian and Russian intelligence sprung from the Soviet spy organization KGB, where many knew each other well across the new borders, and where loyalty was initially non-existent the new countries, but to the late Soviet Union – in many ways to Moscow. And both the intelligence and the prosecution were both before and after 2014 characterized by widespread corruption, without Zelenskyj being able to do much about this, even though he probably had a greater will to clean it up than some of his predecessors.

Which is nice in this case is that Zelenskyj did not fire his childhood friend until last Sunday. A number of people have been fired or suspected of treason following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s February 24 invasion. The most spectacular defection was when General Andriy Naumov fled Ukraine on February 23, a day before the Russian invasion. Just a few months earlier, Naumov had been given the job of head of domestic intelligence by Zelenskyi’s childhood friend Bakanov.

Naumov was handpicked by Bakanov. It was he who was supposed to weed out moles and corrupt officials and women in intelligence. Instead, Naumov escaped to the Balkans in the hours before the invasion started, and is said to have been arrested on the border between Serbia and North Macedonia with more than seven million kroner in cash, in euros and dollars. Naumov was, by all accounts, mole number one, and is now accused of high treason in Ukraine.

So Zelensky waited for the longest time with firing his friend. Presumably the lifelong friendship counts to explain this, because it was quite obvious from the beginning that Bakanov had to be sacrificed. But this story also tells something about why reforms and clean-up are so difficult in today’s Ukraine. Because cleaning up institutions with people who have the president’s unreserved trust but no professional experience has its limited value. Because an administration characterized by Byzantine structures has its obvious limitations. Kindergarten friends Zelenskyj and Bakanov are about to become adults.

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