Thread by @a_rozenas

Among many narratives used by Russia’s apologists, a persistent one is that Ukraine is corrupt; as if this somehow justifies the war. This 🧵lists some facts about this narrative.
cc: @PopovaProf, @j_a_tucker, @brik_t, @TomilaLankina, @SergeySanovich, @sgehlbach, @oonuch

Ukraine scores poorly on corruption, but let's be clear: Ukraine is not being invaded by Denmark. Here is how public sector corruption in Ukraine and Russia look like historically (data from @vdeminstitute).

In Ukraine, it has declined precipitously since the fall of the pro-Russian government in 2014; in Russia, it has been stagnant. Russia now scores 30 positions worse than Ukraine.

And here's how political corruption has evolved in these two countries. Same pattern: the ousting of the pro-Russian government in 2014 is followed by a sharp decline in corruption. Russia remained pretty much stagnant and now scores more poorly than Ukraine on this measure too.

In fact, political corruption in Ukraine started to fall already in 2005 -- after pro-Russian Yanukovich was ousted for the first time in Orange Revolution. But once he was elected back in 2010, political corruption started going up again. Make your own conclusions.

So where does this excessive emphasis on "Ukraine = corruption" might be coming from? Let's look at how this narrative was crafted at its likeliest initial source -- Russian state media.

I took two decades of transcripts from Russia's main TV channel, Channel One, from 1999 to 2019 (unfortunately, no access to more recent data). Here I'm showing the percentage of reports on Ukraine that mention "corruption" relative to all reports on Ukraine.

The coverage of Ukraine as a pit of corruption has ebbs and flows, but these do not coincide at all with the actual dynamics of corruption in Ukraine that I showed earlier.

Instead, the narrative "Ukraine = corruption" is conspicuously related to Ukraine's political dynamics. We see three bursts of attention to corruption in Ukraine colored in light blue (these are above-the-average years).

The first burst occurred in 2005, after the Orange Revolution and after pro-Western Yushchenko was elected as president. The second burst was after Euromaidan and another election of a pro-Western leader. The last one: after the election of Zelensky in 2019.

Notably, there was no increase in corruption coverage in 2010 when Yanukovich was elected - even though this was precisely the moment when corruption increased. As soon as Ukraine gets on a track of normalcy, less corruption, Russian media begins to insist the opposite.

In the next installment, I will be looking into how this narrative propagated through Russia's international media outlets like RT and through social media.
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