Source UN Environment Program (UNEP)

Source: Russia Today (First Half of 2019)

Methodology

Corruption has long been regarded as Ukraine’s major problem and the subject of much debate, both nationally and internationally. According to the 2018 Corruption Perception Index (CPI) published by Transparency International drawing on surveys of businesspeople and expert assessments, Ukraine is ranked 120 out of 180 countries. And although Ukraine’s ranking keeps improving every year, such a state of affairs is still far from being acceptable. According to numerous analytical reports and surveys, it is corruption that poses the biggest problem for both foreign and domestic businesses.

Author: Dan McLaughlin, Attorney-at-Law

The U.S. Constitution gives an open-ended definition of impeachable “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” that covers a variety of abuses of official power, including conduct that is not criminal. But it also recognizes that impeachment is a political remedy, and abuse of office is the most political of all grounds for impeachment.

Source: U.S. Congressional Research Service

There currently are multiple views on the question of whether the United States under the Trump Administration is changing the U.S. role in the world, some of which are outlined briefly below.

Some Observers Believe the United States Is Changing Its Role

Year 2017

The U.S. lobbying industry raked in $ 3.42 billion in 2018. Among the rules laid by Trump in 2017, former lobbyists are barred from working on behalf of the U.S. government on the same specific issue for which they had previously lobbied for a period of two years; a lifetime lobbying ban is imposed on anyone from his administration lobbying the U.S. government on behalf of a foreign government; and  there is five-year “cooling off” period restricting those employees from lobbying the agency they worked for. 

The House of Representatives has launched an impeachment inquiry into President Trump’s latest and most egregious abuse of power: his request that the Ukrainian government investigate a rival candidate in the 2020 election. Free and fair elections are a core feature of U.S. constitutional democracy, and they are only possible if those who hold office do not use their powers to gain unfair advantages over those who seek their office.

Back channel diplomacy essentially means creating a channel of communication with another government or with representatives of another government, that is discreet, that doesn’t go through the official channels of diplomatic cables, of using ambassadors and more formal methods of communicating

The think tanks here below do represent the dominant mainstream of the Russian foreign policy expert community with relevance for both policy and public debate. Think tanks beyond this selection usually (still) lack political relevance and critical mass, study foreign policy only in passing, or focus on concrete world regions with a dominant domestic policy perspective. Finally, some think tanks that have been active in the past have either been shut down or reduced their activities to a minimum.