World Bank “Ukraine Improving Higher Education for Results Project” aims to improve efficiency, conditions for quality, and transparency. International help is needed to form autonomous world class universities in Ukraine, but the World Bank faces the challenge of corruption and war emergency. This will be a lengthy process that would involve reconstruction, reform and development. The World Bank should take a leading role in Ukraine’s educational sector recovery, restoration, and rebuilding.

This is a book project on corruption, corporate raiding, and failed state in Ukraine. This project is at the early stages of development, including primarily data collection and data analysis and extensive fieldwork in Donbas and Bukovyna. Peaceful Euromaidan, armed uprising, overthrow of Yanukovych’s kleptocratic authoritarian regime, annexation of the Crimea by the RF, and, finally, Russian military intervention and a full scale hybrid war in the East, which echoed in other regions, have changed my initial book plans drastically. I placed much more emphasis on empirical field work and the comparison of Eastern and Western Ukraine, introducing a stronger component of a failed state. Theoretical and conceptual framing of collected factual materials may be completed within the fellowship period. My plan of collaboration with researchers and scholars at New Europe College is to bring different perspectives to recent events in Ukraine.

A full-length study is available here.