Technical assistance and its limits. However, the majority of these technical assistance projects suffer from known and predictable problems. First, most of the EU’s assistance is focused on existing institutions and often even the projects aimed at capacity building struggle because of a lack of ‘absorption capacity’ in state institutions. Extensive technical assistance targeted at inadequately paid civil service results in a ‘brain drain’ from public administration and further weakens absorption capacity. Therefore, it could be argued in fact that having too many projects aimed at weak state institutions contributes to the weakening rather than strengthening of this capacity, at least in the short term. Civil servants are hired as local experts with significantly higher remuneration than they get in their civil service posts. It could be argued that there is too much simultaneous technical assistance offered in Ukraine, where the government institutions often lack the capacity to absorb and benefit from the assistance offer (due to a lack of staff, resources, competences and so forth). Second, often technical assistance projects are rarely based on an analysis of what reform measures could actually be most effective within a local context (‘best fit’). There is an emphasis in many of these technical assistance and twinning projects on training and learning from ‘best practice’ without first identifying and addressing preconditions that would enable Ukrainian institutions and civil servants to effectively perform their duties in the first place (adequate salaries, equipment, language competence etc.). Third, the EU is not effective at ‘defending’ its investments, because the sustainability is poor. For example, despite the fact that there have been many technical assistance and twinning projects in Ukraine already since the early 2000s, the documents produced by them in most cases have been lost (and are not available in the archives of Ukrainian institutions, or at least are not readily available), so many new projects start from scratch instead of capitalising on previous projects. For the domestic actors, this indicates the weak resolve of the EU to make a tangible and sustainable impact. Fourth, the EU has not yet seriously addressed the developmental needs of Ukraine, and is not supporting investment in public infrastructure. This is a crucial difference between the associated and accession countries: the latter received a massive support for infrastructural projects during the accessio...
