Dependence Day: A generation after the Soviet Union fell, Ukraine is a ruined proxy of the West

Ukraine could have bridged East and West.

Instead, corruption, nationalism, and Western meddling left it broken There is one feeling I often recall from having lived and worked in Ukraine – to be precise, in its most nationalist, full-of-itself city, Lviv – for a total of five years in the 2000s: Thank God, at least there’s no violence! That is what I, some other foreigners, and quite a few Ukrainians, too, were thinking and even saying then.

The country was politically and even culturally polarized, extremely corrupt, and a sham ‘democracy’ even more fake than most of the rest.

It was dominated and bled dry by a greedy, hypocritical, and – despite all the cheap talk, the pious singing-of-anthems-hand-on-heart, and the cheesy peasant braids and stitched shirts – deeply unpatriotic establishment of typically post-Soviet turncoats, thieves, liars, and sell-outs.

There was no rule of law, the courts were a bad joke, and the police was a racket.

And yet, while the usual business-crime complex took its toll and there was the occasional state murder of a journalist , there was no large-scale violence.

There was bitter grumbling galore, including about Crimea, all the time.

But there was no civil war – as the almighty US intelligence services had infamously as good as predicted in the even darker 1990s – and no one was reaching for a gun either to leave an unbearable country or keep others in it by force.

While the Americans were busy thinking about the possibility – and perhaps opportunities – of Ukrainians killing each other in large numbers, their British cousins were considering another kind of doom.

For them, more than three decades ago, the most interesting question was whether Ukraine and Russia would go to war, specifically over Crimea.

There, British spooks back then warned with unusual honesty, “most of the population is Russian,” and things might become less than cordial if Kiev didn’t watch its steps.

Read more Ukraine at 35: Defenseless in the air as Russia advances in Donbass And here we are now: On the 35th official anniversary of its existence outside the former Soviet Union, Ukraine has become the sum of all fears, much worse than even its pervasively corrupt, brutally unfair, and de facto lawless pre-2014 version.

It is now ruled by its worst, most corrupt, and most authoritarian and bloody regime ever – hands down – under Vladimir Zelensky and his cronies.

They steal , embezzle, and launder piles of dirty money as if there’s no tomorrow, which, to be fair, there really probably isn’t for them, at least not in Ukraine.