[000:00:00;00] after all, germany will play the first violin in the issue of fighter jets . the united states of america will play. well, kyiv's request for the provision of more modern weapons will be discussed at the level of the leaders of ukraine and the united states. a conversation with the ukrainian leader when he spoke with journalists today, the political publication, referring to an unnamed high-ranking official from the usa, writes that there have not yet been serious discussions at a high level regarding the supply of combat aircraft to ukraine it was like that, journalists conclude that yesterday's answer of the american president is not final. how is the issue of fighter jets progressing now? what difference on the battlefield will the tanks that ukraine has already managed to defeat on the diplomatic front make? radio svoboda's correspondent in brussels zoryana stepanenko spoke exclusively about this with the former nato general who , together with the head of the office of the ukrainian

president, is currently leading an international working group on security guarantees for ukraine, so far listen to their conversation about fighter jets the question now lies in the plane when is it still in the plane if i eh ai-ai-ai i don't know at i would not come out i don't know but i would never rule anything out i don't think it's reasonable to tell putin that we we will not do it because it only gives him new room for maneuver in the development of his war in ukraine , so we should never cut off anything, but here and now i really appreciate the decision to supply tanks and urge everyone to speed up the supplies that we hear from different countries about different times

framework, for example, norway says that there will be tanks by the end of march great britain says that it is possible to get them by the summer and so i would like to ask you how crucial is the time factor now and what can happen on the battlefield before these tanks are delivered i think that this is an urgent matter i think that the tanks should be delivered as soon as possible the fact is that russia is preparing a new offensive and it may happen sooner than we expect, so i would call on the countries to speed up the decision-making process and deliver tanks as soon as possible this is where we will continue our conversation about fighter jets pavlo klimkin minister of foreign affairs of ukraine, 14-19 years old, joined our broadcast again, but by phone, mr. klimkin, i once again welcome him to our broadcast, and after all, let's return to the conversation, what is the main reason from your point of view for such categoricalness, as of now, between scholz and

biden no to the question about the possibility of supplying aviation to ukraine, and i do not see this categorically and ultimately they see the fixation of the position as of yesterday, i see the reluctance to actually announce the provision of combat aircraft at the same time as the decision to provide tanks, our allies believe that this will create a ghost for the maximum escalation, today the strategy is to er gradually tough decisive but gradually increase the pressure on putin and the logic is exactly such a decision was made on tanks er tp his as soon as mr. razmosov told your idea it is necessary

to quickly implement this not only emotionally, super positive. for us, this is not only a message to putin, it is a real opportunity for both attack and defense. well, i think that there is also a strategy for the further provision of the sbu and its qualitative expansion, this is primarily missile weapons, we need them critically, i mean 100+, and these can be aerial bombs with engines, they can be missiles for e-e attacks , that is, if there is a solution tomorrow, it can be used the day after tomorrow, the planes are critically needed, so getting them e-e requires work 24/7 but agree that there are necessary deadlines and time frames for training for technical support, so i think it is necessary

to look to the future and work on it and make this future achievable but get something that will help us on the battlefield literally tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, and these are tanks and missile weapons. and the day after tomorrow, before that, the planes must join again, so i don’t see a categorical answer. i see a strategy here , i see a strategy of consistent strategic pressure, and in fact, what our allies are doing today is, again, what i called the strategic successive pressure so strategic for the shmorg.

yes, in part, it is and we should be frank about it, because russia can use new missile weapons, it can also be a strike with hypersonic missiles, it can be strikes with ballistic missiles, in addition, our western allies have reasons that putin is using and supplying tanks, but in particular at the same time with airplanes for propaganda inside russia and in order to point the finger at us and nato and say that the west definitely wants to defeat us and we should switch to a people's war so called in quotation marks and you see what they are actually doing right now with what they have left from the battle of stalingrad and this logic is very clear from the conversations i have followed in the decisions of our

allies and yet do you think i understood you correctly, the fear and apprehension in the west is still certain about russia , have the tanks finally removed all these fears and apprehensions , uh, there is no fear, i don’t see it , that is, i saw it. many conversations ie fears some in the fall, the fears disappeared, of course, and the main thing is that the west does not want to allow uncontrolled escalation, it still wants to consistently implement a strategy for shmorg , that is, a strategy that would put the putin regime in a situation where

it will have no more maneuver and one part - this is what you and i are talking about, this is with the bv, and the other part is not just a sanction, but really setting the red proportions, what is working , the zabukhana of oil restrictions, direct from february 5 , the second and much larger phase should begin. capping the price of petroleum products and here circumventing sanctions and playing with the mixing of oil as they are trying to do now will be much more difficult, that is, the west is trying to strategically pressure on the one hand to raise rates , on the other hand they have lost the rate increase due to economic pressure and at one point they must meet exactly this strategy is pavlo klimkin minister of foreign affairs of ukraine 14-19 years and from his point of view, this is a no from joe biden - this is not a final no. we will monitor the development

of these events regarding aviation for ukraine, thank you ukraine has risen in the ranking of the index of acceptance of corruption, which is published every year by transperience international, this is an international anti-corruption organization , so according to the results of 2022, ukraine took 116th place out of 180 countries, having risen several positions compared to the previous year, when it was in 122nd place for the last 10 years. has improved its position by seven steps and now has 33 points out of a possible hundred. currently , ukraine shares its place in the rating with such countries as mongolia, algeria, angola and zambia , while the researchers note that the report did not include the anti-corruption scandals that took place in ukraine in the first month of the new year, well, probably expensive eggs for the ministry of defense and the bribery of the generator, for which the deputy minister of community development of the territory of the infrastructure, vasyl lozynskyi, was detained, will affect such a similar study already according to

the results of 2023, but returning to the perception index corruption from transference international that tea 116th place for ukraine, here we will talk about it now , the executive director of transference international ukraine andrii borovyk dobriy joined the broadcast evening good evening, according to the results of the 22nd year, ukraine took 116th place out of 180 countries , rising by several positions , please explain to people what this means, what this indicates to intex accepting corruption, here it is important to understand that this is the index, that is, the number of countries not in the ranking can change from year to year , it has been stable for the last few years - it is 180 countries , it can change depending on it . it depends on how many sources provide information for assessing the country, so here is the second important clarification that international by itself, that is, our offices in different countries of the world do not evaluate the level of perception of corruption in one or another country

, the methodology consists in the fact that there are 13 identified sources, you can open the information, you can see what kind of sources these are, they are different international e-e streams and different international reports and for each country it is necessary to be in the rating that at least three sources give their assessment of this for ukraine, for example, this year there are eight sources, all previous periods there were nine sources and in fact these are eight sources they put their assessment from zero to one hundred zero is actually corruption cancels the state and 100 is a country absolutely free from corruption is not perceived as corrupt at all even though this has not happened yet, then these points are given and then the average is taken and that's how ukraine is this year i got plus one point, more than 33 points. listen , well, that’s not enough, could i have gotten more or why is this all the same? well, it seems to me that this is a low indicator ,

well, it’s very far from the european democracies. the short answer is that the average score for the european union is 64 points. you can also see that hungary has the lowest score among the countries of the european union, which is 42 points. and we know all the problems with hungary, at least those that go beyond its borders, and the score is low but let's remember where we were in 2013. in 2013, ukraine had 25 points, it was the last year of the er government, if you can call that yanukovych , unfortunately. here again, the main thing is the points, not the place in the rating, because somewhere someone adds , somewhere someone loses, and that's why there is also a certain movement. 33 points from the average of 64 in the european union. this is a rather distant result, but 8 points in 10

years. the result, although we are moving quite slowly, why is it a good result, because, again, in view of the methodology, any changes in the indicator by less than four points are considered statistically insignificant, that is why we are talking about a period of 10 years, it is not always correct to compare three up to a year but nevertheless, we still look at how it was evaluated before and how it is evaluated after , and here is another important point that the events that are included in the evaluation are not the events themselves . the world economic forum is conducting a survey of the top 100 a-a businesses present in the country, they are asked how much they had to give bribes in the country a-and somewhere there are just experts who conduct an overview of ukraine there for

a certain period and this information takes two years, that is, 2022 and 2021, and that’s roughly the timeline in which this data is selected. and where do the sources come from? well, it clearly gives there december 31, 2022, it’s more likely somewhere in august, august, august, september, a month plus or minus, and therefore i would all these details, they say exactly that ukraine scored 8 points and this is not a bad result considering all the events that we had and how much we had to fight for and the creation of anti-corruption infrastructure and many other reforms. we could definitely do better if there were more at different times this one of some kind of mythical political will, if all the plans that we drew for ourselves as a country after the revolution of dignity, we implemented them immediately , instead of dragging it out for years, and we like to drag it out for years, let's remember the importance of the sap prosecutor, which finally happened in july, if i'm not mistaken

year and 2.5 years this mega competition was held. only after that we were able to assign, if all these processes moved faster, i think we could move faster their such comparative indexes as the index of perception of corruption or of any other research, m.m. and tell me, andrii, with what emotions do your colleagues, european anti-corruption experts, read the news, maybe then share with you their impressions about expensive eggs in the ministry of defense, about bribes when purchasing generators, well, there is no court decision, but the suspicion sounds exactly yes, because it is actually about corruption during the war . what do all your western colleagues think about it ? well, let's see. so we westerners discuss it a lot. i can say that what your fellow journalists ask the most about this and that is how how how do you look at corruption during the war how could this happen and what does this say

ah my answer is actually always divided into two parts there is a good example and there is a not so yes well directly a very bad but not very good example is when we have a conditional corruption scandal of the deputy minister of infrastructure. why a conditional corruption scandal because there is no scandal ? so that they do what they did as a deputy minister. and what is positive about this is that we prove that even during the war there are anti-corruption bodies in the country, there are anti-corruption law enforcement agencies that are ready to count on any manifestation of corruption and they they are actually doing their job, the second good part of this is that the political reaction, the reaction of the minister and the actions that were immediately implemented, yes, that is, an hour later , roughly speaking, after it became known , there was immediately a message what we are raising

the question of the dismissal of this deputy and the next day he is a story with eggs, yes, it is already like that. i think that after a while we will all call these stories some stories with eggs, it had the absolutely almost the opposite effect, yes, that is, at first we saw reactions that you did nothing they realized it was a technical error. and in general, the sbu needs to figure out whether this is not a planned slander, then they had er closed , of course, yes, the calls of the ministry of defense were first to one committee, then to the anti-corruption committee, it turned out that already there are quite a lot of such mistakes, and it turned out that the sbu is not responsible for the journalists, who stole this story, but it is connected with something else. hmm , this reaction was completely inappropriate. but again, what i look at positively here is the fact that the work of the investigative of journalism, she actually, as for me, she probably got some members of the pro-government team of the ruling team with such a certain

bubble that friends, the problem of corruption should be left at the top of the gendy's priorities and then solved because of course , the number one priority for the country is the fight against the enemy now to win a war with russia, but how far from that is the priority regarding, for example, the start of negotiations on joining the european union, which, by the way , there has been a lot of talk in the last few days, and mr. shmyhal said that we want to be there already, it seems, in two years, in the summer of last year, in six months i think we should be ready for the european union in two years , if we really want to do it, then we need to overcome the problem of corruption right now, without putting it off for later, exactly with soapy steps.

cases, you are waiting for a solution already in this 23rd year, but look at us, when we analyzed the data, every year we always make certain recommendations about what would be good for ukraine to do in order to achieve a certain anti-corruption post and every time this is quite such a problematic story . and what will we focus on, because there are certain anti-corruption issues that are necessary, and there are a lot of them. that is, there are dozens of specific points. this time, we decided to focus on those stories that ukraine has already shown its progress and that to a greater extent it is necessary to simply return to the normal work flow, what i am talking about first is the electronic declaration, the declaration of officials was suspended after the start of a full-scale invasion, and for certain reasons , let's first defeat the enemy and then we will declare. good but almost a year has already passed and, er, quite a large number

of officials can declare themselves and of course, it is possible to discuss what information to enter, what information should be public, but the process the declaration must be resumed because it was done before that for years, we can do this again and again especially considering all the many stories about deputies buying houses and about deputies who updated their fleet and other stories that have been in the last three months, i think this is a good reason to show the ukrainian society in the whole world that we are ready to add transparency to this process and systematically monitor this history, friend - this is the reform of the constitutional court, which in our country is conditional on 80% fulfilled and is a recommendation of the venice commission, it is necessary to fulfill them in full and literally yesterday, this topic was also raised by the government that they are conducting consultations, i hope that the parliament will finally be able to bring all this into line and

it will be possible to say that the selection of judges for the constitutional court is taking place in our country in the best way, we can still show ourselves as an example to others, and the third question, again , it is more or less technical, these are competitions, and everyone remembered very well how we appointed the head of the sab for 2.5 years. well, in fact, six months appointed a competition that lasted for 2.5 years, i really don't want this story to repeat itself, in fact, two competitions are taking place now , one is for the head of the nabu, the other is for the head of the asset management search agency. let's finish the competition in a week, which is actually impossible to go to 22 finalists , the information about which should be thoroughly checked, thorough interviews should be conducted and already then choose three candidates to propose to the cabinet of ministers asset management search agency, the situation is a little worse, and today it seems that there was a commission meeting where, of the 19

candidates who applied, they approved at least 16, and in a month and a half there will be only the first stage of testing . the asset management search agency is an agency that does not have a permanent manager with in december 2019, this year as well, a competition for the head of the national academy of sciences should be held because the mandate of the current leadership ends in january of next year, so we will have another competition waiting for us to hold competitions quickly. we can do it, we have already proved it on the same example of the head of the nazk, and we can take such steps, and it seems to me that they were quite eloquent and quite a good consequence of these political e and e changes in the face of the dismissal that have now taken place with such next systemic steps, you just talked for the constitutional court and you are already taking bread from our next speaker , now we will talk about it andrii borovyk executive director of transperience international ukraine we talked about

corruption in ukraine thank you very much thank you well, now about the court, who is slowing down the judicial reform in ukraine, two days before the ukraine-eu summit, the question is particularly relevant, because judicial reform is one of the demands of the european union to ukraine, on the other hand, the venice commission officially refused to appoint members to the advisory group of experts that should participate in the selection of judges of the constitutional court until ukraine implements the recommendations of the venice commission and changes the law on the constitutional court this is specifically stated in the letter of the chairman of the venice commission to the name chairman of the verkhovna rada of ukraine, ruslan stefanchuk, made the november announcement public on wednesday, january 25, and it specifically states that the number of members of the advisory group of experts should be seven, not six, and this became a cornerstone, because ukrainian deputies say that six experts is enough 3x3 and the venice commission says no, friends, it should be four to three, and four should be established by international experts, why are we

going to talk now? the procedure for selecting candidates for the post of judge of the constitutional court, and even then, at the stage of the discussion of the law, ukrainian experts in the field of judicial reform warned the deputies that the number of members of the advisory group of experts should not be six people, but the deputies did not change the law, they voted for it as they voted, the venice commission passed a week ago published an updated opinion and asked to change the law after all . on december 20, president volodymyr zelenskyi signed the law without changes. well, now the venice commission said that it renounces participation in the selection of constitutional judges for the constitutional court, the ball is in kyiv's court. well, the deputies seem to be in no hurry to change the law, or, according to the good old tradition , they are simply waiting for the green light from the bank, but now we will discuss all this, stepan berko joins us -

lawyer, advocacy manager of the stepana de jure foundation. good evening. i congratulate you . how should this whole story be resolved now? you are not a woman who said that she refuses to participate in the selection of judges of the constitutional court and who should now decide the issue. is on the side of the ukrainian government, e.e., amendments should be made to the law on the constitutional court. yesterday , the prime minister even made a public comment, the western media said that consultations are currently being held, we expect such a bill to appear in the near future, i think that its adoption will be the same stop precisely to ukraine, the eu, which will be in the near future, i generally had to hear such a thesis that this discussion about the law on the constitutional court will almost become central at this ukraine npp summit, and here i have a question that i i think it occurs to everyone who looks at us like that. why couldn't it be passed right away? the law that the european partners demanded and demanded , and not to act out these dances, they hoped that they would not place a roller coaster or what

they hoped for. so i think that there was hope that the european the partners will not be so simple and in the conditions of war will give, let's say, the green light even for such a draft of the bill, who should admit that the position of the venice commission was key, e.e. ukrainian civil society has been active in recent weeks communicated with the venice commission and sent our positions. and actually managed to get a clear no from the venice commission regarding the version of the law that was adopted. in fact, there is very little room for maneuver. the ukrainian authorities must adopt the changes recommended by the venice commission because this will threaten our membership prospects . in the european union why did the authorities not immediately want to do this

because the authorities are always those who end up in the constitutional court, this body is very important because the body is very influential and very difficult to get rid of such influence and the procedure proposed and recommended by the venice commission has every prospect of doing everything to ensure that the constitutional court is truly independent , you know, i talked about this with denys maslovy , he is the head of a specialized committee in the verkhovna rada, so he generally referred to the constitution and he says that to make decisions about how the selection of judges of the constitutional court should take place is up to the ukrainian people through people's deputies. and the fact that the venetian commission comes up with some recommendations is already saying why is it itself takes over such functions, we can decide here how many of these experts there will be who will elect judges of the constitutional court, so what can you answer, well, you can

agree with the pva, but then we do not need to rely on our gears in the european union. so everything is very simple, they are recommendations of the entire commission we can take it into account or not, but now it is said that these recommendations of these recommendations are a key condition for the continuation of the process of ukraine's accession to the european union, the first, the second, there is a very a serious manipulation in the fact that if international partners delegate their representatives to a brotherly group of experts, then ukraine will lose sovereignty over the procedure for selecting judges of the constitutional court, this is not so , the law does not require that all members of the group of experts delegated by foreign partners be foreign citizens, we are our own conditions for yura and other civil society organizations, we believe that the fourth, i.e. seventh, member of the group of brothers, who will be nominated by international

partners, should be a ukrainian from among civil society experts. thus, the majority of this commission will be ukrainians. but the most important thing is that this commission will only select candidates, the final decision on the appointment of judges of the constitutional court belongs to the president of the parliament and the congress of judges, no one can force these bodies to appoint someone they do not want appoint a judge of the constitutional court that is, the sovereign right to form a constitutional court will belong to the ukrainian authorities, however, as proposed by the venice commission, the verification of candidates for compliance in accordance with the requirements of the constitution and the law, it should be carried out by independent bodies for a temporary period. by the way, a group of experts with the involvement of foreign experts . well, i understand that you also have no doubts that already during the ukraine eu summit, which will be held in early february, these issues should be removed and resolved at the very least, there should be a clear signal from the ukrainian authorities that

it is ready to make these changes, and there should be no discussions about the fact that some recommendations that are not so good will no longer be applied, in general, it would be very good if the text itself appeared a draft law that could have been analyzed and still given here . well, let's pass another draft law. let the verkhovna rada pass it. they didn't pass it the first time, but i 'm putting three dots here because it means that we're on this issue. what will we return to on our broadcast ? stepan berko - lawyer , advocacy manager of the foundation before yura, was on radio svoboda, thank you very much, well, traditionally , i encourage you to subscribe to the pages of radio svoboda on the internet, and svoboda life will be back on the air tomorrow, movies, television,