Governance, measured from where the country started

Assessments of Ukrainian governance tend to be written to prove a point. A more useful exercise is to list what a person actually dealing with the state can now do that they could not twenty years ago, and what remains the same.

What genuinely changed

Public procurement, which moved from closed to fully published, with every tender and every contract searchable by anyone.

Registers: property, companies, beneficial ownership, court decisions — all open, all online, all consultable without an intermediary.

Administrative services, from a tour of offices to a single counter and increasingly a phone.

The banking system, cleaned up at enormous cost, with the surviving institutions supervised and with disclosed owners.

Energy pricing and the gas market, which removed the largest single source of rent in the economy.

What did not change enough

The courts, which remain the reform where progress is slowest and the stakes highest.

Customs, reformed repeatedly and still the institution businesses complain about most.

And the enforcement of judgments, which turns a legal victory into a recovered debt or does not.

The pattern

Reforms that replaced discretion with a published system worked. Reforms that required changing the behaviour of people inside an institution went slowly.

That is not a Ukrainian pattern; it is a general one, and it suggests where the next effort is best spent.

The fair conclusion

Substantial, uneven, real progress, achieved while under extraordinary pressure, and incomplete in exactly the places that are hardest everywhere.

That a fair measure starts from the starting point is right; I compare my own companies against last year rather than against a sector average. I have no intention of issuing a political verdict in this archive and I am not issuing one here. The only thing I can say is that as a foreigner my dealings with the administration have got easier over twenty years — an observation rather than a judgement.