ABSTRACT
Editorial introduction: This chapter is an authorized reprint of a section from the 2023 “New Front Lines” report of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC). 1 In a patronal democracy, politics is dynamized by the competition of informal patronal networks, which are at this volume’s center of attention. But the lack of a single-pyramid network that would centralize and monopolize corrupt activities and persecute “private banditry” means that in the multi-pyramid setting of Ukraine the full range of illegal activities can exist—from grand to petty corruption and from state capture to low-level bribery and ordinary criminality. As a result, Ukraine’s criminal ecosystem, meaning the community of systemically interacting illegal public and private actors, 2 does not reveal the pattern of a strong criminal state with moderate unauthorized illegality (as in Hungary), nor the pattern of a “parasitic symbiosis” between an adopted political family and criminal elements (as in Russia). 3 The multipyramid patronal network leaves wider room for maneuver for illegal actors: just as there can be autonomous oligarchs (economic actors seeking to secure corrupt, illegal support for otherwise legal economic activities), there can also be autonomous criminals (economic actors operating illegal economic activities like drug trade, prostitution, smuggling, and racketeering under illegal conditions). The latter are an integral part of Ukraine’s patronal system and, as the chapter points out, it is common that “local criminal kingpins work in sync with high-level corrupt officials”; thus, anti-patronal transformation must also necessarily involve tackling the realm of criminality that has been shaken by the war.
