Ostrich zoo and vintage cars

THE Mezhyhirya compound, the residence of Viktor Yanukovych, the deposed president, sits on a beautiful plot of land on the Dnieper river outside Kiev. Mr Yanukovych fled Mezhyhirya on February 22nd under the cover of night. Since then, it has become an open-air museum of the trappings of corruption: at weekends families stroll the manicured grounds and take pictures in front of Mr Yanukovych’s vintage-car collection and ostrich zoo.

Sitting in a guesthouse on the property, Anna Babinets, one of the founders of YanukovychLeaks, a website that archives the thousands of documents found at Mezhyhirya, talks of the “power of documents, of numbers, of knowing how politicians spend money”. Ms Babinets says that first walking through the gates of Mezhyhirya and discovering the detailed schemes that underlined Mr Yanukovych’s rule was a “fairy tale”. The details that have emerged since have led to new demands for transparency.