INVESTIGATION OF DIFFERENT NATURE OF ILLEGAL TRANSACTIONS IN UKRAINE (Vyvchennia riznoi pryrody nezakonnykh transaktsii v Ukraini)

Challenging the main reports that see corruption as an evil to eradicate in Ukraine, this article proposes that it would be beneficial to analyze and treat petty corruption that helps people to survive rather than enrich citizens, within the framework of gift exchange proposed by Marcel Mauss. To do so, this paper thus focuses on the three alleged most ‘corrupted' places in Ukraine: a university, a hospital, and a police control post, in order to develop a detailed analysis of the meanings of these transactions. Furthermore, it examines the particular role that social actors take within these arrangements to propose the recognition of a grey zone between corruptions as evident in the examples analyzed over the course of the paper.