IN THE later part of the 16th century, Henry Navarre, the first French king from the house of Bourbon, wanted to ascend to the throne. Henry was a Huguenot, a Protestant, nearly assassinated in the Saint Bartholomew day bloody massacre of Protestants by Catholics in Paris.

The pope, backed by the Spanish monarchy, opposed Henry’s accession. Henry then decided to convert and when asked why the conversion, is supposed to have shrugged his shoulders and said: “Paris is worth a mass.”

Volodymyr Zelensky desperately wants Ukraine to be accepted into the European Union. However, Ukraine is universally characterised, and perennially ranked, as one of the most corrupt countries in Europe, so Zelensky, in an attempt to further Ukraine’s candidacy, is supposedly cleaning house, proclaiming new reforms that “will change the social reality.”

Ukrainian police and prosecutors recently searched the homes of a former Zelensky backer, the billionaire Ihor Kolomoisky suspected of embezzling funds in a key petroleum company, and the ex-minister of the interior Arsen Avakov who resigned in a scandal over a “mysterious” Airbus helicopter crash that killed the then-current interior minister, two other ministers, and 15 children.

The EU has demanded corruption reform and apparently Zelensky has, as did King Henry, as he now seeks to indict former backers like Kolomoisky, shrugged his shoulders — figuring “Europe is worth a search.” Europe though has not crowned this monarch and instead, in a new report, claims that corruption in Ukraine “remains unchanged.”

This is a key question not only for Ukraine but also for the West which is shipping, largely untracked, huge supplies of weapons and materials, much of which may never reach the battlefield.

In August of last year, a CBS documentary claimed that of the $23 billion the US was supplying to Ukraine, only perhaps in some cases 30 to 40 per cent were making it to the front lines.

The initial report was attacked and then censored not because it was inaccurate — but because it did not promote the war. Likewise, the president of Nigeria recently reported that weapons in the hands of armed terrorists in his country came from Ukraine.

Of course, Zelensky himself is no paragon of virtue. He was elected on a platform of peace and halting corruption. As a peacemaker, he recently revealed that like Angela Merkel in Germany and Francois Hollande in France, he had no intention of ever implementing the Minsk Accords which would have afforded partial autonomy to the Donbas region and halted the drive to war.

As for pilfering the state coffers and corporate malfeasance, for almost three years he delayed implementing his proposed anti-corruption “bureau for economic security,” and, in that time, being judged on the side of the oligarchs, his initial popularity plummeted from 57 to 29 per cent before the war.

There is a “let he who casts the first stone” element to this as well. The EU, thoroughly captured by a bourgeois ruling elite, is no paragon of honesty. A female prosecutor in Greece, Eleni Touloupaki, initiated an investigation into bribes from the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, which has led to a claim by the government against the company for €214 million.

In response, the subsequently installed conservative regime charged the prosecutor with “abuse of power” and suspended the office of anti-corruption from which she had launched her investigation.

This is overt corruption — but the systemic, covert, kind is rampant in the EU also. In France, its emperor Emmanuel Macron, who passes laws in the assembly by decree rather than by vote, continues to propound his pension “reform,” claiming there is no money to support the system while the profits of the French equivalent of the Fortune 500, the CAC 40, have never been greater.

Likewise, he freely gives €100m to Ukraine and announces French spending on arms and weapons will increase by one-third from now until 2030, a time when he claims the pension fund will be under pressure and running dry.

The other Western European bastion of honesty is Germany, complicit by its silence in what Seymour Hersch alleged was the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines by the US and Norway, the result of which has enormously increased the price of energy in German factories, some of which have closed, and in German homes, some of which are now freezing.

While the country’s industrial might is diminishing, its Chancellor, the Social Democrat Scholz, has approved the shipment of Leopard tanks to Ukraine and so once again, as with the Panzers of the Nazi era, a newly rearmed Germany will send its forces across its border into the East.

On second thought, maybe Ukraine does belong in the EU — not because it has reformed its level of corruption but because the rest of Europe is sinking to its level; “birds of a feather...”