NYT breathlessly reported[1] that Ukraine lost $1.2 billion to corrupt or mismanaged defense procurement in 2024. But the article never once stated the total defense budget. As best I can tell, Ukraine's defense budget in 2024 was ~$65 billion. So this supposedly pervasive corruption cost about 2% of it's budget. That's a rounding error in pervasively corrupt countries, and I'd be surprised if corruption in Russia was less than 5x or maybe even 10x than in Ukraine.
I think the chatter about corruption in Ukraine is partly a function of the fact that it's democratizing. People don't really talk much about corruption in corrupt countries, not as much as they do in less corrupt countries. Everybody knows it's there; it's a given. But without transparency and a steady flow of concrete data and admitted examples, there's not much to talk about. You just assume such-and-such was a corrupt deal. Only when a country is capable of combating corruption do you see robust, public debates about it, as you see in Ukraine.
I think the chatter about corruption in Ukraine is partly a function of the fact that it's democratizing. People don't really talk much about corruption in corrupt countries, not as much as they do in less corrupt countries. Everybody knows it's there; it's a given. But without transparency and a steady flow of concrete data and admitted examples, there's not much to talk about. You just assume such-and-such was a corrupt deal. Only when a country is capable of combating corruption do you see robust, public debates about it, as you see in Ukraine.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/world/europe/ukraine-war-...