AI doesn’t have to be superintelligent to cause serious havoc.
One of the hardest parts of the news business is striking a balance between covering stories that seem important in the moment and covering stories that you know will truly matter in the future. And it’s hard because the most consequential things happening right now are often boring or difficult to explain.
Artificial intelligence is a good example of this sort of challenge. The ongoing revolution in AI is unfolding so quickly that it’s hard to keep up, even if you’re trying. Chat GPT-4, for instance, was released in March of this year and it stunned almost everyone who used it. If this latest large language model is a sign of what’s coming, it’s easy to imagine all the ways it might change the world — and then there are all the ways it might change the world that we can’t imagine.
So what do we need to know about AI right now? What are the questions we should be asking? And how should we be preparing for whatever’s coming?
To get some answers, I invited Stuart Russell onto The Gray Area. Russell is a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and the author of Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. He was one of the signatories of an open letter in March calling for a six-month pause on AI training. We discuss the risks and potential benefits of AI and whether he believes we can build AI systems that align with our values and interests.
Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
Sean Illing
When you think about the state of AI at this moment, what feels most urgent to you? What excites you? What scares you?
Stuart Russell
I think it’s important to understand that almost nobody is saying that the state of AI right now is such that we have to worry about AI systems taking over the world, if you want to put it that way. They still exhibit many limitations, and at least the latest generation, the large language models like ChatGPT, don’t exhibit the kinds of decision-making capabilities and planning capabilities that you would need to take over the world.
You can try playing chess with them, for example. They’re pretty hopeless. They pretend well for a few moves, and then they’ll play a move that’s completely illegal because they haven’t actually learned the rules properly. There’s a lot of progress that we still need to make before we reach systems that are fully comparable or better than a human mind.
The things people are concerned about right now with this technology [are things that] we already have. Disinformation would probably be number one. The fact that these systems can be directed to generate highly targeted, personalized propaganda, to convince an individual based on everything the system can find out about that person. It could do that. Not just in a single email or blog post or whatever, but it could do that over several months. People are very worried about that being weaponized by nation states, by criminals, by unscrupulous politicians who would produce deep fakes of their opponents.
These are very real, and we’re starting to see them already happening and a bunch of other serious concerns. One that has surfaced recently is defamation. Systems making up crimes, not being directed to do so, but just because they hallucinate. They say things that have no basis in truth, but making up defamatory statements about real individuals. There are a couple of lawsuits happening already.
Sean Illing
Are you comfortable referring to something like GPT-4 as intelligent? Or is that not quite the right word?
Stuart Russell
For normal conversation, it’s a reasonable thing that it shows elements of intelligence. In fact, [in a] paper that Microsoft produced, a group of experts there spent several months with GPT-4 before it was released, trying to understand what it could do. The paper that they produced is called “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence.” And that’s a pretty bold claim, because artificial general intelligence means the kind of AI that exceeds human capabilities in every dimension, the kind of AI that does take over the world.
According to them, we are creating the kind of AI that does take over the world. We have absolutely no idea how it works, and we are releasing it to hundreds of millions of people. We’re giving it credit cards, bank accounts, social media accounts. We’re doing everything we can to make sure that it can take over the world. That should give people something to think about.
Let me give you an example of that one of my colleagues sent me. He was using ChatGPT-3.5 and he asked it, “Which is bigger, an elephant or a cat?” And it says, “An elephant is bigger than a cat.” You say, “Which is not bigger than the other, an elephant or a cat?” And it says, “Neither an elephant nor a cat is bigger than the other.” When you look at that second answer, you realize, “Well, it can’t be answering the question with respect to some internal model where there are big elephants and little cats,” but that means that it wasn’t answering the first question with respect to an internal model where there are big elephants and little cats. It wasn’t really answering either question in the sense that we think about answering questions, where we query an internal model of the world.
If I say, “Where’s your car?” you query your internal model of the world. You say, “It’s in the parking garage across the road.” That’s what we mean by answering a question. It’s really clear that in a real sense, these systems are not answering questions. They don’t seem to build a coherent internal model of the world.
Sean Illing
You focus a lot on the “alignment problem” or the “control problem” and this question of whether AI might develop its own goals, separate and apart from the goals we program into it. How worried are you on this front?
Stuart Russell
The alignment problem is simpler than the one you described. You suggested the alignment problem is about systems developing their own goals, which are different from the ones we program into them. Actually, the original alignment problem is about systems pursuing the goals that we program into them, but the problem is we don’t know how to program the right goals.
We call this the King Midas problem. King Midas programmed the goal into the gods that everything he touched turned to gold, and the gods gave him exactly this. They carried out his objective, and then his food and his drink and his family all turned to gold and he dies of misery and starvation. There are many legends and lots of cultures have stories very similar to this, where you get what you ask for and you regret it, because you didn’t ask for the right thing.
What people have observed is that when you’ve got a sufficiently capable AI system, and you give it even a very innocuous-sounding goal like, “Could you fetch me a cup of coffee?” When a machine is sufficiently intelligent and it has a goal like, “Fetch a cup of coffee,” it doesn’t take a genius to realize that if someone switches you off, you’re not going to succeed in fetching the coffee. As a logical sub-goal of this original goal, you’ve now got the goal of, “Preventing myself from being switched off,” and possibly taking other preemptive steps to avoid interference by human beings in the achievement of this goal.
Sean Illing
You can have fun imagining all the ways that could go wrong—
Stuart Russell
Yep. There are many science fiction stories that do exactly that. Sometimes in the literature you’ll see the phrase, “Instrumental goals.” These are goals like self-preservation, like acquiring more power over the environment, acquiring money, acquiring more computing resources so you can do a better job of solving the goal that you’ve been given. These instrumental goals are just derived automatically from the original goal.
With a human being, if I say, “Fetch a cup of coffee,” it doesn’t mean “Fetch a cup of coffee” is now the only goal that you should care about and your entire life’s mission is to fetch that coffee. That’s not what we mean when we say it to a human being, but that’s how we have been building our AI systems for decades and decades. The objective that we put in is the objective of the system and nothing else. That’s fundamentally a mistake. We can’t build systems that way, because we cannot specify completely and correctly all the things that human beings care about, so that the system’s behavior is actually what we would really want to have happen.
My book is about a different way of building AI systems, so that they understand some things about what humans want, but they know there’s a bunch of other stuff that they don’t understand and they’re uncertain about. And that actually leads to systems that behave much more cautiously and usefully.
The other thing that you mentioned, the possibility that these machines would develop their own goals — obviously that would be much worse. It’s bad enough that we give them specified goals. If they’re able to develop their own goals, then there’s no reason to think that those would be aligned with our goals.
Sean Illing
I often hear people say that we’re still only talking about narrow AI at the moment. We’re not talking about artificial general intelligence, which you mentioned a minute ago, something that is actually self-teaching and can develop its own goals, and that’s the thing we really have to worry about. But I don’t know, that seems wrong to me, or it seems like it misunderstands how progress in AI works.
But setting that aside, it’s not like we need some AGI superintelligence to wreck our world. As you said a few minutes ago, when I start imagining all the havoc AI could cause merely through the creation and distribution of misinformation, it makes my head explode. Deep fake tech is already here, but it doesn’t feel pervasive enough yet to be a major concern. But the lines between fact and fiction are already suicidally blurred in our society, and the post-truth world I can imagine in that future is infinitely worse than our situation today.
Do you think we’re even close to ready for this?
Stuart Russell
No, I think if it’s not regulated, we are in for a huge amount of pain. As you say, in terms of still images, we are already at the point where they are indistinguishable from reality and they are coupled with the large language models. In other words, you can ask the language model to give you an image of anything you want and it’ll do it.
DALL-E and these other image generators are coupled to language models. You can already say, “Give me a 22-second video showing such and such and such and such,” and it will do it. It’s not great right now, but three years ago, face generation wasn’t great. There would often be weird things with the ears. Or it’d be like the same pair of earrings occurring over and over again. Just glitches. But those have been ironed out and now it’s pretty much perfect.
And that’s going to be the case for video very soon, if not already in the lab. You can say, “I need a video of Donald Trump receiving a suitcase full of cash from some mafioso,” and it’ll produce it for you. And it’ll be very difficult for anyone to prove that’s not real. We really need regulation. Just like we have regulation around counterfeit currency. We can now produce counterfeit currency that’s indistinguishable from the real thing to a non-expert shopkeeper, for example.
As a result, we have very stringent regulations and enormously long jail sentences for counterfeiting and a lot of security around the designs. This idea that digital technology is completely safe and should be unregulated in all circumstances is just extremely outdated. The two things people are proposing, one, that all output for AI-generated content should be labeled indelibly. There are methods called watermarking, which work for images and sound and video, where it’s cryptographically encoded into the content and there’s really no way to pull it out.
You can recognize that that’s generated by such and such a model on such and such a date. And then, you also want the platforms, the social media platforms, necessarily have to make that absolutely apparent to the user. They could, for example, give you a filter saying, “I don’t want to see artificially generated content. Period.” Or if you do see it, it should have a big red box around it. Maybe a red filter, so that it just doesn’t look like ordinary, natural video.
And then, you also want to have ways of watermarking real video. When I have a video camera and I’m out there in the real world, it’s producing an indelible cryptographically secure time-stamping and geocoding and all the rest, so that that’s globally recognized. So that we know that this is real video.
Those two things together will go a long way. Plus, the regulations on the media platforms go a long way to making us safe. Is that going to happen? I don’t know. An interesting article in the New York Times yesterday was saying, “On average, it takes [decades] for a regulation to catch up with technology.”
Sean Illing
A lot of these conversations about AI seem to imply that we actually have the power to control something that will be far more capable than we are. But I don’t see any reason in nature or history to believe that’s the case—
Stuart Russell
There are no historical examples and no examples in nature that I’m aware of where that happens. Although, actually, there are weird things that happen in nature. There are fungi that control the behavior of animals by literally getting into their nervous systems and causing them to behave in weird ways. Causing mice not to be afraid of cats, for example, so that the mouse gets eaten, and then the fungus gets into the brain of the cat. Some complicated lifecycle story like that.
There are these weird exceptions, but basically we don’t have a good model for how this might work. The way I think about it, if I go back to the question I said at the beginning, “How do we maintain power forever over systems more powerful than ourselves?” That sounds pretty hopeless. If instead you say, “What’s a mathematical problem such that no matter how well the AI system solves it, we are guaranteed to be happy with the outcomes?” That sounds maybe a little more possible.
We can make the AI system as intelligent as you want, but it’s constitutionally designed to be solving a certain type of problem. And if it does it well, we are going to be happy with the results. The way I’m thinking about this is, as you said, not three laws, but actually two laws really. One, the AI system’s only objective is to further the interests of human beings. And the second principle is that it knows that it doesn’t know what those interests are.
Sean Illing
At what point does AI innovation become the most consequential event in human history?
Stuart Russell
Good question. I think certainly when we have something resembling AGI. AGI means AI systems that match or exceed human capabilities along all relevant dimensions, but because of the massive advantages that machines have in speed, memory, communication, bandwidth, intake bandwidth, there’s no doubt that they would very quickly far exceed human capabilities.
That would be the biggest event in human history, in my view, because it would in some sense basically switch to an entirely different basis for civilization. Our civilization is based on our intelligence, and now that would no longer be true. It might also be the end of civilization, if we don’t figure out how to control such a system.
To hear the rest of the conversation, click here, and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Some unanswered scientific questions loom out in the universe. Others reside in our homes.
In March 2021, Vox launched Unexplainable, a podcast focused on unanswered questions and everything we learn by exploring the unknown. One hundred episodes later, our producers have scoured the land, the sea, the animal kingdom, the human body, the solar system, and the universe to explain the blank spaces in our collective knowledge.
In this process, we’ve learned a lot: about how questions get answered, who sets the scientific agenda, and the hope that resides in a great question. Unanswered questions matter because they help us imagine the future; all progress starts by asking questions, and all questions come from reckoning with what’s not known.
But perhaps the biggest, most exciting lesson Unexplainable’s producers and reporters have learned is just how many unanswered questions there are! We’re 100 episodes in, with no signs of running out of topics for stories.
These mysteries exist in all sizes — literally. From huge mysteries that involve the area of the entire universe to mysteries that reside in small spaces, like in the crevices of our homes, on the starting line of a track race, or tucked away deep in a forest. It’s delightful to learn that, sometimes, these little mysteries are no more resolved than the cosmic ones. So here are some of our favorite big mysteries, and our favorite smaller ones (which are still big in their own way).
(Have a great mystery for Unexplainable to explore? Email us: Unexplainable@vox.com)
Biggest Mysteries
What is the universe made out of?
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NASA
It’s a simple question that’s also bafflingly unanswered: What makes up the universe?
It turns out all the stars in all the galaxies in all the universe barely even begin to account for all the stuff out there. Most of the matter in the universe is actually unseeable, untouchable, and, to this day, undiscovered. It’s called dark matter, and despite searching for it for decades, scientists still have no idea what it is.
How might they find it?
Further reading: Dark matter holds our universe together. No one knows what it is.
How will everything end?
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NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO
In the early 1900s Henrietta Leavitt, a Massachusetts-born “computer” who worked at the Harvard College Observatory, published a discovery that may sound small but is one of the most important in the history of astronomy: She found a way to measure the distance to certain stars.
Over time, scientists kept building on Leavitt’s ruler to measure the universe. As they used these measuring tools, their understanding of the universe evolved. They realized it was far bigger than previously thought, there are billions of galaxies, and it’s expanding: Those galaxies are moving further and further away from one another.
Astronomers also realized that the universe had a beginning. If galaxies are moving away from one another now, it means they were closer together in the past — which led scientists to the idea of the Big Bang.
It also led them to realize that the universe may, eventually, end.
Further reading: How scientists discovered the universe is really freaking huge
Where the heck does our moon come from?
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HUM Images/Universal Images Group
Before the moon landings, scientists thought they knew how the moon came to be. But then, Apollo astronauts brought samples back from the lunar surface, and those rocks told a totally different story.
“Geologists had found that the moon was covered in a special kind of rock called anorthosite,” Unexplainable senior producer Meradith Hoddinott explains on the show. “Glittery, bright, and reflective, this is the rock that makes the moon shine white in the night sky. And at the time, it was thought, this rock can only be formed in a very specific way: magma.”
The indication there was magma means the moon must have formed in some sort of epic cataclysm: “Something that poured so much energy into the moon that it literally melted,” Hoddinott says. Scientists aren’t precisely sure how it all played out, but each scenario is a cinematic story of fiery apocalyptic proportions.
Further reading: How Apollo moon rocks reveal the epic history of the cosmos
How did life start on Earth?
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DeAgostini/Getty Images
For decades, scientists have been trying to recreate in labs the conditions of early Earth. The thinking is, perhaps if they can mimic those conditions, they will eventually be able to create something similar to the first simple cells that formed here billions of years ago. From there, they could piece together a story about how life started on Earth.
This line of research has demonstrated some stunning successes. In the 1950s, scientists Harold Urey and Stanley Miller showed that it’s possible to synthesize the amino acid glycine — i.e., one of life’s most basic building blocks — by mixing together gasses believed to have filled the atmosphere billions of years ago and adding heat and simulated lightning.
Since then, scientists have been able to make lipid blobs that looked a lot like cell membranes. They’ve gotten RNA molecules to form, which are like simplified DNA. But getting all these components of life to form in a lab and assemble into a simple cell — that hasn’t happened.
So what’s standing in the way? What would it mean if scientists actually succeed and create life in a bottle? They could uncover not just the story of the origin of life on Earth, but come to a shocking conclusion about how common life must be in the universe.
Further reading: 3 unexplainable mysteries of life on Earth
What killed Venus?
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NASA
“Hellscape” is the most appropriate word to describe the surface of Venus, the second planet from the sun. At 900 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s the hottest planet in the solar system, thanks to an atmosphere that’s almost entirely made up of carbon dioxide, which generates a really strong greenhouse effect. Clouds made of highly corrosive sulfuric acid are draped over a volcanic landscape of razor-sharp volcanic rock. The pressure on the surface of Venus is about 92 times what you’d feel at sea level on Earth.
Yet some scientists suspect Venus was once much like Earth, with a liquid water ocean like the ones that support life on our planet. This prompts an existential question for life on Earth.
“Venus and Earth are planetary siblings,” says Robin George Andrews, volcanologist and author of Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal about Earth and the Worlds Beyond. “They were made at the same time and made of the same stuff, yet Venus is apocalyptic and awful in every possible way. Earth is a paradise. So why do we have a paradise next to a paradise lost?”
There are two leading hypotheses. One is that the sun cooked Venus to death. The other is that volcanoes did. Figuring out which one occurred might help us understand the eventual fate of the Earth.
Further reading: Venus could have been a paradise but turned into a hellscape. Earthlings, pay attention.
Small and surprising mysteries
What insects live in our homes?
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Getty Images/Mint Images RF
In the 2010s, a team of scientists went into 50 homes around Raleigh, North Carolina. Their mission: to scour the homes and find as many insect species as they could. What they discovered was quite surprising (and a bit gross): The average house was home to around 100 species of insects. These weren’t “dirty” homes or ones located deep in the woods with the windows left open.
Instead, the findings illustrated that the typical human dwelling is an ecosystem for more creatures than we’ve realized. Which provokes another question: What are they doing in there? And what can we learn from them?
Further reading: The dozens of bug species that live in your home, in one chart
Can plants … see?
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Ernesto Gianoli/Trends in Plant Science
More than a decade ago, scientist Ernesto Gianoli made a remarkable discovery. He found a little vine in the forests of South America that had the ability to mimic the shape of other plants around it. The biggest and most provocative question is how.
“Plants have no brains or eyes,” Vox’s Benji Jones reports. “So how do they sense the shape of leaves around them and then copy it?”
Scientists still don’t know. But each possible answer — one being somehow these plants are “seeing” their surroundings, another being they are somehow influenced by the genetics of plants around them — could drastically alter our understanding of what plants are capable of.
Further reading: The mystery of the mimic plant
How fast can a sprinter start a race?
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Ezra Shaw/Getty Images
In July 2022, TyNia Gaither lined up in the second lane for one of her biggest races of the year: the semifinals of the 100-meter dash at the World Athletics Championships in Eugene, Oregon. The 29-year-old Bahamian sprinter crouched down into the starting blocks. The crowd grew quiet. She waited for the sound.
“I heard the gun go off, and I took off,” Gaither says. “And then I heard the gun go off again.”
That second “bang” meant officials had stopped the race. Someone had false-started, and Gaither was surprised to find out it was her.
Per the rules, Gaither was immediately disqualified. When she tried to contest the call to the race official, he showed her a replay. It didn’t show a visible false start. But then he pointed to a number, lit up in red: 0.093 seconds, the amount of time it took for Gaither to start after the gun fired. Yes: She had started after the gun went off, and was still thrown out of the race.
According to the logic underlying the rules, Gaither had started faster than humanly possible. Scientists say that’s likely wrong: We don’t know the fastest possible start to a running race.
Further reading: Runners can be disqualified for starting after the gun. What gives?
What is ball lightning?
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For millennia, people have been telling stories about mysterious spheres of light that glow, crackle, and hover eerily during thunderstorms. They’ve been spotted in homes, in rural areas, in cities, on airplanes, and even passing through windows.
They seem out of this world, but scientists believe they are very much of this world. These apparitions are called ball lightning, and they remain one of the most mysterious weather phenomena on Earth.
Ball lightning usually only lasts for a few moments, and it’s impossible to predict where and when it’ll show up. You can’t hunt ball lightning and reliably find it. Ball lightning finds you.
It’s rare, but many people have seen it. Scientists don’t know exactly where it comes from, but that hasn’t stopped them from trying to make it themselves.
Further reading: Ball lightning is real, and very rare. This is what it’s like to experience it.
Why do we have anuses — or butts, for that matter?
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Getty Images
This is a question we never even knew we wanted to answer — until we heard the Atlantic’s Katherine Wu explain that “the appearance of the anus was momentous in animal evolution.” Before the appearance of the anus, animals had to eat and excrete through the same hole. The anus allowed for a more efficient system, and allowed animal life on Earth to grow bigger and take on new shapes and forms.
But scientists don’t have a complete picture of the evolutionary history here; they don’t know which creature developed the anus first, and when. “It’s so hard to study something that must be millions and millions of years old and doesn’t fossilize,” Wu says.
And then there’s a whole other question: Why is the human butt so big, compared with other mammals?
Further reading: Katherine Wu’s “The Body’s Most Embarrassing Organ Is an Evolutionary Marvel,” at the Atlantic.
And so many more …
In between the biggest and smallest mysteries: You guessed it, there are only more mysteries. From the beautiful mysteries of love, to how our senses work, to the frustrating questions about a health condition like endometriosis, to whether animals can grieve, or if scientists understand the AI programs they create, our world is still beautifuly haunted by mysteries. What else is out there for us to discover?
The removals come two weeks after the removal of the defense ministry and as Ukraine seeks to shore up global support.
Ukraine is shaking up its defense ministry, removing all six deputy ministers, as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy travels to the United Nations and Washington to shore up support and aid.
The purge comes after Zelenskyy replaced Ukraine’s defense minister Oleksii Reznikov earlier this month. That was a very visible upheaval, arriving in the middle of Kyiv’s ongoing counteroffensive, and came amid ongoing allegations of corruption and financial mismanagement within the military.
The latest Ministry of Defense dismissals are likely a continuation of that attempt to clean house, although the ministry did not give a reason for the removals, nor did it directly connect it back to Reznikov’s dismissal. (Reznikov himself was not directly implicated in any scandals.) Some outlets have pointed out that staff changeovers are not unusual when a top official leaves; the new Minister of Defense was likely going to put in his own team anyway.
Still, these latest shake-ups are likely a message that Ukraine is taking any hint of corruption or mismanagement seriously and wants to signal renewed leadership at the defense ministry. The removal also comes at an inauspicious time: as Zelenskyy seeks to assure partners, including in the United States, that Kyiv is responsibly managing billions in military, security, and economic assistance.
The graft allegations previously swirling around the defense ministry shake-up haven’t directly implicated misuse of Western aid, and past oversight hasn’t found any evidence of misuse. But Ukraine has previously struggled to root out high-level corruption and bolster the rule of law, despite Zelenskyy promising to do so when he was elected in 2019. Ukraine’s backers in the United States and Europe had put pressure on Kyiv for nearly a decade to deal with these issues, especially as a condition for Ukraine’s invitation into Western institutions.
Russia’s full-scale attack last year shunted some of those corruption concerns aside as the urgency of Ukraine’s war effort consumed Zelenskyy’s government, its Western backers, and even some of Ukraine’s watchdog organizations.
The problem of systemic graft, however, never fully dissipated. And as the war goes on — and it may go on much, much longer — it is a reputation that Ukraine is very much trying to avoid, especially as it relies on uninterrupted Western aid and as it continues to make the case that it belongs in institutions like the EU and maybe even NATO.
This shake-up sends a message, but Ukraine’s corruption issues are still a challenge
This is not the first major personnel change since the war began, and graft accusations had lingered around the defense department for some time before the departure of Minister Reznikov earlier in September.
Back in January, allegations that the Ministry of Defense had overseen inflated prices for food contracts led to a major personnel shake-up and arrests. In August, Zelenskyy fired the heads of the military recruitment offices over allegations that these officials had taken bribes to enable draft dodgers. Ukrainian media and anti-corruption activists have continued to expose scandals related to the military procurement processes, including a recent investigation from ZN.UA that the Ministry of Defense ordered overpriced jackets for the troops from a company tied to a member of parliament’s nephew.
But the departure of these deputy defense ministers comes as Ukraine is at a bit of a crossroads militarily and diplomatically.
Ukraine is waging its counteroffensive, which is making slow progress. Kyiv has made some key gains in recent days, though the operation is largely still an attritional battle. A breakthrough could still happen, but Ukraine will continue to need sustained military, security, economic, and humanitarian support.
The United States and many of its Western partners have continued to provide, but there are some quiet cracks in that assistance. The US has maintained bipartisan backing from Ukraine, but a very vocal wing of the Republican Party — including some running for president — has questioned that level of aid and investment in Ukraine. Some US Republicans have used examples of past corruption to challenge the Biden administration’s support for Kyiv. European support for Kyiv is very strong, but divisions over things like the transport of Ukrainian grain could also threaten its solidarity. This is why President Zelenskyy is making the rounds at the United Nations — and making an essential pit stop in Congress.
Along the way, Kyiv wants to make it very clear that aid is being allocated effectively, responsibly, and appropriately. It wants to make the case that as countries continue to invest in Ukraine — including putting resources into ramping up production for weapons and artillery — this is also a long-term downpayment on a democratic Ukraine.
This is a case to make to outsiders but also to those within Ukraine. Daria Kaleniuk, the executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center in Ukraine, said that across Ukrainian society, support is high to expose corruption, even if it poses a risk of breaking trust with Ukraine’s partners. “People believe in and [are] encouraging the exposing of corruption even during wartime. People have very low tolerance to corruption. People see Ukraine as an EU and NATO member — and this is what we’re fighting for.”
As Kaleniuk pointed out, the Ministry of Defense will oversee the procurement of lethal and nonlethal aid as this war continues, and it needs to be able to make effective and sound decisions. The military operations run through Zelenskyy, so any personnel changes shouldn’t affect the day-to-day operations of the counteroffensive, but ministry responsibilities — like buying food and supplies and equipment — can influence the battle. Those jackets for Ukrainian troops did not just have inflated prices, they were also apparently supposed to be for cold-weather wear, but ended up being lightweight coats, according to Ukrainian media reports.
So yes, Ukraine wants to make it clear that it is stamping out corruption. But there are still a lot of questions about exactly how Ukraine is approaching its anti-corruption campaign. Firing or replacing officials is one thing, but Zelenskyy has proposed making wartime corruption a treasonous offense. This would put more power in Ukraine’s security forces, which some critics and watchdogs fear will diminish the authority of the independent investigative bodies. This could potentially backfire, undermining the rule of law and independent judiciary, and create lasting damage to the institutions that Ukraine (and the West) sought to build up. The president’s office also oversees the security services, which could lead to Zelenskyy consolidating power, with the security services potentially used to shield the president’s allies and tamp down scandals that may be embarrassing for Zelenskyy.
War, no matter who is doing the fighting, tends to be fertile ground for corruption. The chaos of conflict — lots of rapid procurements, an influx of funds, and supplies moving through many hands — increases the potential for graft. Ukraine is no exception, but it faces the additional challenge that corruption permeated its government institutions even before Russia’s invasion.
There’s still a lot unclear from these shake-ups, but it does hint that Ukraine’s corruption problem — and the perception of that corruption problem — still threatens to undermine Kyiv’s war efforts, within Ukraine and without.