5 April, 21:58
In June 2025, China will complete one of the world’s most breathtaking engineering projects — a bridge across the Huai River Grand Canyon. This steel giant stretches 2,890 meters long and hangs 625 meters above the gorge. The total cost? Just $280 million.
Now back to Kyiv, Ukraine. The recently renovated Shuliavskyi Overpass spans a modest 300 meters, hovers maybe 10 meters above the road, and isn’t even new — it’s a reconstruction of an old Soviet bridge. Total cost? Nearly 2.5 billion UAH, or approximately $89 million.
📊 Let’s Do Some (Painful) Math
To compare the two projects, we created a simple metric — a complexity index that accounts for both length and height:
Complexity = Length × (1 + Height / 100)
💥 Bottom line: The Shuliavka bridge cost 20 times more per unit of complexity than China’s engineering marvel.
🧮 So, How Much Was “Lost”?
Now let’s (cautiously) estimate how much may have been “absorbed” by corruption, assuming Shuliavka had the same unit cost as the Chinese bridge:
- China: $280M / 20,952 units ≈ $0.013 per unit
- Shuliavka should’ve cost: 330 × $0.013 ≈ $4.3 million
- Actual cost: $89 million
📌 Difference: $84.7 million, or over 3 billion UAH at the exchange rate.
That’s enough to build 19 more Shuliavka bridges, or a small spaceport.
🤡 Build Fast, Audit Never
What actually happened?
- 📈 Costs ballooned from 599 million to 2.5 billion UAH
- 🏭 Delays due to “suddenly discovered” land issues with the Bolshevik factory
- 🏗️ Interchanges still not fully completed
- 📉 Contractor found at fault, asked to return part of the funds
All this — for a bridge over an urban road, at the price of one dangling over a canyon in earthquake-prone, foggy southwestern China.
🪞 A Mirror of Efficiency
The Chinese built a bridge across a chasm.
We built one across a road.
They got infrastructure.
We got “Prozorro-progress”.
But the real abyss isn’t in the landscape — it’s in our budgets.
Links: source