Throughout the war against Russia, Ukraine has been periodically accused, often by its own disgruntled citizens, of rampant corruption, say Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart on The Rest Is Politics. And the accusations are absolutely true. Kyiv’s struggle with corruption stems partly from the fact that there was so much of it in the past that “almost everybody in the system” is tainted. But over the years, Ukrainians have had little choice but to break certain rules. Back in the 1990s, there was a three-year period when Ukrainian soldiers received no salaries at all, forcing brigade commanders to chop down whole forests and sell the wood to buy bullets or commandeer factories to get enough cash to carry on.

When Russia invaded in 2022, the country was plunged into full emergency mode. Almost immediately, the government and military “threw all the procurement rules out of the window”. To protect their thousands of men, brigade commanders naturally set about doing deals with close contacts, writing their own cheques for drones, and sourcing uniforms from any old factory they could find, including in China. Most could defend this as being “for the right reasons”, but some “chancers and criminals” in Kyiv’s military built up questionable pots of cash and even moved funds to foreign bank accounts. Things are improving, and Russian propagandists who claim Ukraine is a “failed state” should be ignored. But there’s no denying Ukraine’s deep corruption problem. Still, they’re a West-facing democracy under attack by an authoritarian dictator. They deserve all the help we can give them.

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Earlier this summer, says Christian Drogan in The Telegraph, I found myself racing past sunbathers on a French beach with a single mission: to become the first known Brit to board a migrant dinghy across the Channel. The preparations for my undercover journey had been gruelling. After finding a people smuggler prepared to take a risk on a white Englishman (I claimed to be a criminal on the run) I paid my €1,400 and the games began: “go here, go there, wait a few days, go back to where you started”. I slogged across miles of sand dunes and kipped in filthy, sprawling migrant camps ruled by shadowy smugglers with semi-automatic weapons and terrifying dogs. “You do not mess with these people.”

On one attempt, I ran through ranks of gendarmes “standing around doing nothing” and on to a tiny, crowded vessel, but the engined spluttered and died. Just 24 hours later, I was sprinting into the sea agin. There were just 36 of us in the dinghy, a fraction of the usual load. (One joked: “VIP Britain, Inshallah!”) The driver had fallen out with his boss and was refusing to take more. They shouted at each other over the phone in Kurdish Farsi, meaning they were likely from Iran. It was a chilling thought – gangsters from a hostile state ferrying undocumented males into Britain. Then I witnessed something extraordinary – once the smugglers had confirmed only paying customers were aboard, they radioed a nearby search-and-rescue vessel asking to get off. Minutes later, a French police boat duly drew up and ferried them back to dry land. As we approached the English coast, we were intercepted by bellowing British Border Force officers, who spotted me a mile off: “You’re on the wrong boat, mate!”

“If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.”
Dolly Parton

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