The oligarchs now survive, thanks to the west. We're not engaging with them in political games inside Russia, we're engaging with them in financial games, outside Russia.

The oligarchs absolutely have affected the development of Ukraine. They've lived with the basic business model that wealth and power are fungible: wealth gives you political power, political power makes you rich. And what this does is to create a severe constriction on political competition. The oligarchization creates a huge cutaway tool so the ordinary person feels they're powerless: you can't get your point across the media, because the media is oligarchy, and you can't engage in political competition, because the oligarchs who back candidates have all the money, you can't go to court because the oligarchs will bribe the judge. And this creates a very unlevel playing field, in which there are several options that are all bad for the country. One is that people emigrate, which leads to the reduced economic and demographic potential of the country and deculturalization. Another one is the internal immigration where people just give up, they say politics is completely hopeless, which aggravates the original problem and makes things even easier.

It's not just terrible for Russia, Ukraine and other countries that these people are looting countries, and perpetuating corrupt bureaucratic structures and the expropriation of natural resource rents, and all the other things that keep these countries from realising their full potential. But it's also terribly bad for the West because this money isn't just laundered. It creates a class of people who are the ‘enablers’, who are there in order to make life easy for the oligarchs to make their problems go away. And they also buy respectability by helping them to endow charities, universities, art galleries, etc. So they become seen as philanthropists rather than robber barons. They also silence their critics.

One of the major reasons why the oligarchs have been able to survive is because they're not illogical. So whoever comes into power, they can adapt. They are not pro-Western or pro-Russian, they are pro-themselves.

The turning point would be if one of the big guys went to jail. Because Ukraine and Russia still do have that Soviet legacy that the elites are untouchable to some degree. And one of the things that the West should be looking at is that you want to break that kind of psychological problem.

In Putin's system, potential targets for corruption are defined as an opponent or an enemy. In most cases, including inside Ukraine, people are opponents: they can be bought, just a question of negotiating the price. You can't negotiate with an enemy, you have to destroy them. And the problem is that there are many opponents who do have a price tag above their heads, both inside countries like Ukraine, in Europe, and in the West.

The problem with Ukraine’s ‘systema’ (Ukraine’s crony capitalism) is that it prioritizes rent-seeking over wealth creation, for the benefit of society as a whole. And what you find is across the state sector, there is a vast supporting structure of people, who derive a direct benefit from the preservation of a system and therefore have an interest in maintaining it. Also, this system functions. It functions badly for the great part of the population, and it functions extremely well, for a small number. But it functions. And finally, it creates a permissive environment for corrupt practices within the state bureaucracy.

I would stress that Ukraine is far from unique in having a system of this kind. But what makes it different from many other countries is that it, firstly, has genuine democratic credentials, and secondly is facing a variety of pressures that are increasing the need for changing the way the system functions.

For 30 years, the United States has ignored kleptocracy. For 30 years, we have wished that this problem would simply disappear, and that these financial links would simply help repair relationships and build bridges, and create the kind of democratic resilience and democratic ties in countries around the world. It's taken us 30 years to realise that has not happened at all, and the problem has only gotten worse.

In so many ways, we are the problem. We created and incentivize this problem of oligarchic kleptocratic governance, these oligarchs themselves, these kleptocratic regimes, these rising dictators and autocrats are using Western financial systems in this almost symbiotic relationship in order to succeed and entrench their power back home, and to continue ruling and pillaging and effectively destroying local populations, local environments, or local industries.

What is very important is to have more transparency around the world about the property and assets of oligarchs, because when we know how much everything they have, we can understand how powerful they are. And this is the way to fight with them.

As a journalist, I see building a strong public broadcaster as one of the ways to support civil society and to fight corruption and oligarchs. When we're talking about a strong investigative team around the world, it's almost always public broadcast.

But I think the best way the West can support Ukrainian civil society is to change itself. The West has to implement existing laws and anti-money laundering, where there are public registries, beneficial ownership. Because of such closure of information, because of lack of transparency in most of the Western jurisdictions, there is not enough understanding of urgency. What the EU is lacking is the understanding that corruption is a threat to national security and to the security of the EU. There has to be a dramatic reform of the sanctions regime or an alternative way of imposing restrictions for people engaged in corruption.

Urgent actions have to be done in regards to corruption and autocracies because corruption is used by autocratic regimes, to damage democracies, to challenge democracies, and it's already happening. The fight is not happening in Ukraine. It is only happening in the West.

The fundamental prerequisite to fight corruption and oligarchs is building strong independent state institutions. It is possible when there is a synergy of civil society and international partners, and when conditions of partnering are being embedded in the documents. Specific and precise conditionalities embedded into the agreements between Ukraine and Western institutions, either financial institutions, or political institutions, is really a present for civil society in Ukraine to push and demand authorities to deliver.

What could really boost very hard and complex reforms in Ukraine is the clear conditionality for Ukraine in NATO approximation. There are annual assessment plans for NATO, but it's a very broad 100-page document, it has to be very precise. And what the West could do to support Ukraine’s drive for reforms is actually to make a very clear, detailed plan or conditionalities, or expectations of their reforms, which will lead Ukraine towards NATO.

The civil society in Ukraine is the strongest democratic element of all other governance elements in our country. So the actions that the civil society does, sometimes substituting the functions of the state, like investigation and other items, that is impressive, that is immense, that is a huge contribution. And this is what has to be supported.

100 years ago, the country said that the rule of law had to be established for the elites, first of all - that was one of the doorstep conditions to move to the open social order. Then, in order to do that, we need more collective mobilisation. Additionally, civil society needs to incentivize those people in the political system who already support the rule of law, and who support open consultations.

The pull factor from the grassroots is ultimately necessary for any of the sanctions or other mechanisms for their legitimacy. Because then any politician can just say that it's a group of Western-funded NGOs that want that. So how this pull can be supported is to engage the small and medium enterprises as well as large enterprises, that are not part of the extractive rent-seeking economy in the focus, in any automatic advocacy on respective policy issues.

The legal framework, which is needed for the security of foreign direct investment and independent judiciary rule of law, is the main obstacle, which is closely linked to the oligarchy structure to the power of a few. And this will keep Ukraine definitely small, and we'll have everyone in the grip if Ukraine cannot manage to find a way out there.

Most of the anti-corruption fighters are mostly people in the civil society and maybe also in some parts of the judiciary felt very lonely, when they actually discovered how little the interest was in the West to support them to improve the system, to destroy the structures.

The European Commission cannot shy away from the lacking willingness of the decision-makers in those countries like Ukraine to go ahead with serious reforms, and instead of bringing the real reforms, they come up with a really ridiculous anti-oligarchy law to actually distract attention from the real problems. And this is also very unfortunate that the European Commission does not speak up that this is actually the opposite of what we have expected.

And of course, this gives Zelensky and his people the impression that they are on the right track. For me, the entire direction of the governance and of ruling the country is extremely disappointing.

The issue is actually that the EU and the collective West in their foreign policies aim to promote democracy, rule of law, and the resilience of Ukraine. But if we look at the domestic structures in the EU and in the West, which enable kleptocrats to flourish, we see that they come into conflict with these foreign policy objectives into which a lot of money is invested, a lot of assistance programmes are directed at, and so on.

There is room for improvement in terms of EU policies towards Ukraine when promoting reforms, but a lot has to be done also domestically in the EU to eliminate this discrepancy between foreign policy objectives and resources and the support of the kleptocrats inside the EU.

The judiciary is one of the pillars of rule of law. And we see how kleptocrats use the courts for their benefit. In 2014, the EU imposed misappropriation sanctions on 22 Ukrainian officials. And by now only seven of these officials are in the sanctions list. They managed to hire expensive lawyers and to win in their Court of Justice of the European Union the case against the European Council, and have the sanctions lifted.

Something that we might overlook is also trade relations. Because when you think about liberalised trade with the European Union, and countries like Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine in the context of those Association agreements, and if you look at that from the macro level, it's always great because trade volumes increase.

However, the research shows that when you look at who actually benefits from those trade flows, it’s companies that often belong to certain people that are then linked very closely to oligarchic networks. This is especially the case in Georgia, and to a lesser degree in Ukraine and Moldova, just due to the export and structure of those countries. But it's something that is sometimes overlooked, something that we consider to be positive like free trade can have unintended negative consequences.