Corruption: Ukraine's deadly enemy within
With war spreading through Ukraine, single mother Valentyna decided to fight - that is, to save her son from conscription. And in this corruption-riddled country, a quiet word in the right ear was enough.
The going rate to bribe the Ukrainian draft board to remove a young man's name from the list is about 2,000 (1,580 euros), or more than seven times the average monthly salary, according to several sources familiar with the system.
In Valentyna's case, in the Black Sea port of Odessa, her contact in the army commissariat "had pity" and agreed to push her only child Igor's file to the back of the queue free of charge.
"I wanted to do it so that he would be taken entirely off the list, so that he didn't exist anymore, but he said what he would do instead is put him where he wouldn't be seen," Valentyna, who did not want her family name published, said in her cosy Odessa kitchen.
As Ukrainians vote in Sunday's parliamentary election, the problem of corruption is seen on a par with the dismemberment of the country through a pro-Russian rebellion in the east and seizure by Russia of Crimea.
The merging of the two challenges, as they do on a small scale in Valentyna's anguish over Igor, and on a huge scale in the thievery and mismanagement afflicting the armed forces, has left Ukraine staggering.
Not only are the cash-strapped forces badly coordinated, but soldiers at the front rely on charity organisations for items as basic as flak jackets and sleeping bags.
Valentyna, a single mother, says her main fear is losing her son, but outrage at the chaos adds to her half-Ukrainian, half-Russian family's sense that this is not their war.
"The soldiers are told to defend the state, but the state cannot even defend them," Igor, a soft-spoken man who works for a security firm, said.
President Petro Poroshenko, one of Ukraine's handful of billionaires, pushed through sweeping anti-corruption laws earlier this month and has made the issue a cornerstone of his party's platform in the election. Corruption is "paralysing" the economy, Poroshenko said during a visit to Odessa on Thursday.
Andriy Marusov, Ukraine chief for the corruption watchdog Transparency International, says Poroshenko's initiatives could be a final chance. In their latest anti-corruption rankings, Ukraine comes 144th out of 177 countries.
"If there aren't any real breakthroughs," Marusov told AFP, "we risk going back 10 years into a black hole, where we'll be in a place that's called Ukraine, that has all the symbols of Ukraine, but which in fact is a failed state."
Embezzlement, kickbacks and bribery are nothing new in Ukraine, although they reached epic proportions under Poroshenko's Moscow-backed predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych, who lived in eye-popping opulence until he was ousted in February and fled to Russia.
But the old problems have taken on a lethal new focus during six months of conflict in the east, where Ukraine's military faces a well equipped pro-Russian insurgency and, Ukraine says, regular Russian units operating from across the border.
"All previous governments underestimated the role of the military," said Leonid Polyakov, a former deputy defence minister.
"So, by the time Yanukovych left... the Ukrainian military was in bad shape and had to be rebuilt, as we say, 'from the wheels up'."
The flip side is a remarkable effort by ordinary people to make up for the failures of their dysfunctional state.
At every level of the military campaign, it is volunteers who are filling the gaps. Where the army is having trouble getting young men to obey this year's ramped-up draft, private militias have done much of the fighting. Where the army says it cannot afford to provide troops with gear such as Kevlar helmets, charities have stepped in.
There are countless stories of grandmothers sewing camouflage netting, prison inmates making body armour, donors at blood banks, and people with no military experience joining privately funded units. Millions of dollars have been funnelled directly to the defence ministry via a text message campaign of five hryvnya (40 US cents, 0.3 euro) donations, while a grassroots charity on Facebook focuses on purchasing special gauze bandaging for combat wounds.
On Maidan Square in Kiev, site of the huge demonstrations that toppled Yanukovych, a trickle of supporters came earlier this week to leave money with a volunteer from the private Donbass Battalion.
A flier issued by the battalion listed their needs - everything from gloves and sleeping bags to soap and garbage bags.
Asked why he had the begging bowl out, Oleksandr, a bearish figure in camouflage who would not give his last name, said: "Because the government doesn't have money, there's no organisation, and there's corruption."
Corruption, he said, is Ukraine's "internal enemy", as dangerous as the more obvious foes across the frontline.
The 30-year-old volunteer was surprisingly understanding of those avoiding conscription.
"When the state doesn't provide basic equipment, even warm clothes, when it's a state that steals - then that state is committing an even bigger crime," he said.
Back in Odessa, Valentyna is worried that the fighting, still confined to the east, will spread and prompt mass mobilisation.
For now her son is safe, but she knows his name is still somewhere in the bowels of the military commissariat.
"I pray to God he won't be called up," she said, sitting under a portrait of her father wearing rows of World War II Soviet medals.
"I'll pay all the money in the world not to let that happen." - AFP
