Yes, I think that's right. There is a tendency on the part of reformers to cast it that way, because it's a better sell to the opposition, rather than saying that we have to deal with this because of this neighbour who is stronger. That worked early on, and I think they really made a mistake in selling the reforms as “this is our path into western institutions”, as opposed to “this is our path to being a sustainable, effective country that Russia would not have been able to invade if we had done this earlier”.
I've worked most closely on security sector reform and I found there is just so much opposition from within to cleaning this stuff up, to doing these things. We talk about vested interests, but vested interests aren't just at the top. It isn't just that there are people making a ton of money. There are people making very small amounts of money, but it's still money that they need. They're the folks in the defence contracting world who have their relationships and it works for them. If all of this goes away and gets cleaned up, then that goes away and gets cleaned up too. How do they continue?
They have a system that they know is not effective. It's an incredibly inefficient system. It's a system getting young people killed in east Ukraine, but it's also paying the rent and paying for the household, and people are very frightened of it. In part because of the failure of reform in the past, reform now is really difficult. They don't have a gas meter, which means that when you raise the prices for gas, electricity is not efficient and people are asked to pay on the basis of the square footage of their homes, or some such, and they get frustrated and they get angry. Older folks on pensions can't scrape the money together, and some of them get subsidies and some of them don't, so again you have this vicious cycle.