Removing high officials in Ukraine on the basis of corruption no longer even raises an eyebrow. No one pretends that the anti-corruption agencies (NABU and SAPO) are perfectly clean in a country rife with corruption. More often, it is simply a question of the agencies being used to selectively target those whom the West prefers to remove, and to discipline those it would keep in office.

However, as the money and weapons flows dry up, there have been signs of the crooks turning upon each other—such as the SBU and HUR security/intelligence agencies having a shootout in the streets. Yesterday, after the NABU/SAPO combo had exposed the Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko and his underlings in a systematic protection racket (taking monthly payoffs for looking the other way on the lucrative ‘call center’ scams), Kravchenko returned fire, posting his counter-charges that the head of NABU, Semyon Krivonos, had been, among other things, “forging official documents” and “receiving unlawful benefits on an especially large scale.” The implication there is not that Kravchenko was accepting bribes, but that Krivonos was getting much larger amounts.