James Freeman Clarke’s famous statement, “A politician thinks about the next election, while a statesman thinks about the next generation,” is a good way to describe the situation in Ukraine today. The country is nowhere close to successfully completing its many reforms and it’s burdened by substantial public debt that it needs a major injection of capital to refinance over the next two years. And these are not the only national-scale problems Ukraine is currently facing. Its statesmen have barely begun to cope with the challenges—except that Ukraine has no one of that caliber to handle them. It’s establishment is largely politicians and not statesmen. As elections draw near, they are busy operating on the political surface, like the cheese on Rocky the Rat in the Disney cartoon Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangersworking to hypnotize and discombobulate voters. Politicians are starting to get hung up on ratings and are completely ignoring the country’s myriad of complicated problems, leaving an administrative vacuum. This threatens to turn Ukraine’s modest achievements of the last few years to dust.
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