Now, as Congress reviews assistance programs, a chorus of voices in Washington questions just what U.S. taxpayers are getting for their money in Ukraine. Backsliding on Reform. Despite the billions in aid and soft loans, the country appears to be backsliding on both economic and democratic reform. Diplomats complain that the new breed of apparatchiks, or communist-style bureaucrats, is increasingly brazen in dishing out the nation's meager wealth to cronics. Bureaucrats from competing political clans have even been gunned down in drive-by shooting from passing police cars.
Aid is meant to help the people of Ukraine.
The Clinton administration has tooted Ukraine as one its main foreign policy successes. The country plays a crucial role in European security as a buffer between Russia and its former client states in Eastern Europe. Unlike Moscow, Kiev supports the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Ukraine has dismantled the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal, half on its soil after the collapse of the Soviet Union. President Clinton's point man on aid to the former Soviet Union, Ambassador Richard Morningstar, arrived in Kiev this week bearing strict marching orders for the Ukrainians to clean up their act or face funding cuts.