{"id":12061,"date":"2015-05-29T00:00:50","date_gmt":"2015-05-28T21:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/frishberg.yakimaxim.site\/?p=12061"},"modified":"2026-03-24T18:54:30","modified_gmt":"2026-03-24T18:54:30","slug":"frishberg-and-brown-wrote-the-book-on-doing-business-in-ukraine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/frishberg.com\/uk\/frishberg-and-brown-wrote-the-book-on-doing-business-in-ukraine\/","title":{"rendered":"Frishberg and Brown wrote the book on \u2018Doing Business in Ukraine\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

The best place to find Alex Frishberg now is off the Miami coast, relaxing on a boat in the Atlantic Ocean. His law firm, Frishberg & Partners, is still up and running in Kyiv, as it has been since 1991, the year of Ukraine’s national independence.<\/p>\n

Frishberg has written three books about his 24 years in Ukraine, including \u201cDoing Business in Ukraine,\u201d an encyclopedic guide with partner Scott Brown; \u201cThe Steel Barons,\u201d a not-so-fictional account of the gangster era in Ukraine; and \u201cThe Foreigners Guide to Ukrainian Women And Other Stories.\u201d<\/p>\n

The books never made money, but they did bring in new clients.<\/p>\n

He was born in Kyiv and returned in 1991, so he doesn\u2019t exactly qualify as an expat. But he can trace the evolution of an independent Ukraine better than most people.<\/p>\n

His current view is not optimistic. \u201cUkraine is completely drained of everyting,\u201d Frishberg said. \u201cEveryone who can is leaving.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ukraine may have reached the point of no return after missing its chance to join Europe in the 1990s and 2000s. \u201cIt\u2019s reached its \u2026 breaking point, plus we have a war in the east that\u2019s going to pick up speed,\u201d Frishberg said. \u201cWhat the next cycle is nobody knows.\u201d<\/p>\n

How did we get here? Frisberg can trace it from the beginning.<\/p>\n

When he got to Kyiv in October 1991, he recalls a dark, sleepy provincial town with few restaurants, hotels or nightclubs. Soon, the gangster era was in full swing, instilling fear everywhere, with shakedowns and assassinations were common.<\/p>\n

Nothing improved under the first Ukrainian president, Leonid Kravchuk. \u201cEvery one had their own bandits,\u201d he said, in describing what he calls the \u201cfirst stage of corruption.\u201d<\/p>\n

Frishberg said the best times may have been during the first term of the nation\u2019s second president, Leonid Kuchma, who took power in 1994.<\/p>\n

Kuchma got rid of the street racketeers and created the first institutions of a nation.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe told the KGB we\u2019re not going to be doing a Sicilian economy. \u2018If you stop, you can live, if you don\u2019t, leave the country. \u201cEveryone loved Ukraine and Ukrainians loved Ukraine,\u201d<\/p>\n

The problem is that Kuchma institutionalized corruption as well, and many of the bandits \u201cbecame members of parliament.\u201d After his reelection in 1999, Kuchma \u201cwent rogue,\u201d Frishberg said, becoming accountable to no one.<\/p>\n

Fortunes were made overnight on dirty privatizations that made people like Kuchma\u2019s son-in-law, Victor Pinchuk, wealthy. The Georgiy Gongadze murder took place in 2000. Many other murders or mysterious deaths took place.<\/p>\n

Frishberg lays blame on the Harvard Kennedy School of Government types who came to Ukraine and preached that privatization is the answer to everything. The problem, Frishberg said, is that the oligarchs snapped up all the \u201ccrown jewels\u201d in Ukraine cheaply, never let them go and never let a market economy with rule of law develop.<\/p>\n

That leaves today\u2019s situation where \u201cyou have a handful of oligarchs and everyone else is poor.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Viktor Yushchenko era from 2005-2010 is another wasted five years, with Frishberg describing the ex-president \u201cas a complete incompetent idiot.\u201d<\/p>\n

But what came after Yushchenko proved to be even worse. The Viktor Yankuovych years, from February 2010 to February 2014, \u201cwere a disaster on so many fronts I don\u2019t know if Ukraine will ever recover.\u201d The Yanukovych-era of greed was off the charts, even by Kuchma standards, with out-of-control kickbacks \u00ad 20 percent of value-added tax refunds \u201chad to go in his pocket\u201d \u2013 and corporate raids.<\/p>\n

While every country has corruption, Frishberg said, Ukraine never developed any institutional checks and balances to eradicate it, as other nations did.<\/p>\n

\u201cNothing much has changed\u201d since 1991, Frishberg said. \u201cIt\u2019s not so much law, but who you know.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\n\n

\n
Also read on kyivpost<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The best place to find Alex Frishberg now is off the Miami coast, relaxing on a boat in the Atlantic Ocean. His law firm, Frishberg & Partners, is still up and running in Kyiv, as it has been since 1991, the year of Ukraine’s national independence. Frishberg has written three books about his 24 years…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[70,123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alex-frishberg","category-other"],"yoast_head":"\nFrishberg and Brown wrote the book on \u2018Doing Business in Ukraine\u2019 - Frishberg & Partners\u200b<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/frishberg.com\/uk\/frishberg-and-brown-wrote-the-book-on-doing-business-in-ukraine\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"uk_UA\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Frishberg and Brown wrote the book on \u2018Doing Business in Ukraine\u2019 - Frishberg & Partners\u200b\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The best place to find Alex Frishberg now is off the Miami coast, relaxing on a boat in the Atlantic Ocean. 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