Nothing Good Will Come of It: Ukrainian Cops to Learn From US Police

American taxpayers will be paying for police reforms in Ukraine. The goal is to make the Ukrainian police to match the US police standards.

"We will work together to develop a kind of government that would be free from corruption and respects human rights," the US Ambassador to Ukraine said while signing the document.

The only problem is that the police in the United States aren't as competent as one might think. Real US policemen are extremely trigger-happy: at least 1,700 people were killed in the United States over the past year. At the same time, most investigations into police shootings don't lead to perpetrators getting convicted.

Now imagine the work of US policemen in Ukraine. Who will they instruct? A lot of neo-Nazi youth and various sorts of former military personnel, who suffer from the Donbass war syndrome, might come into the new Ukrainian police force. According to Olga Bogomolets, the head of the healthcare committee in the Ukrainian Rada, there are over 5,500 soldiers with the syndrome. The arrival of these mentally unstable war veterans could lead to a "new bloodbath" in Ukraine, this time under the police jurisdiction.

Last year, Ukraine was ranked 142nd (tied with Uganda and the Comoros Islands) on the list of the most corrupt countries in the world, conducted by Transparency International (TI). Corruption exists in many spheres of Ukrainian public services, but the most corrupt are the legal system, the police and the health services, as well as the parliament itself, according to TI.

Most of the reforms recently introduced in Ukraine at the request of international donors have not led to any positive changes in the country since the authorities' dominant motivation in introducing the legislation was to get more money from the West.