Of course, being an American and living in the 21st-century United States of America, with its unparalleled levels of corruption, I have no room to lecture on that. In this case, it is my money that is being sent over there, which does give me license to be able to complain about it.
I haven’t been to Ukraine in nearly twenty years, but at that time my friends there told me that everything was run by what they called “the Mafia”. They believed that that word for us in America stands for any powerful criminal organization not just the Sicilian mob.
I prefer to make a distinction between informal power structures, the ones who are really running things, and the formal power structures, the elected officials. Both are corrupt, as corrupt as Russia.