It is hard to see how Prime Minister Valery Pustovoitenko's spectacular 'imprisonment' of 1,500 of Ukraine's top industry officials will actually do much to fill the government's coffers.
The state-owned enterprises are mostly outdated, uncompetitive, working at a fraction of former output or completely idle. Their management is to a large extent frozen in Soviet-era thinking. Many of the top bosses are tainted by corruption or are downright crooks. It is going to be hard to get more than a tiny part of the money the government is owed however muscular Pustovoitenko's actions become.
But as an act of political showmanship, forcing the debtors into a humiliating stay at a civil defense camp is masterful.
It allows the government to point the finger, with a degree of justification, at the culprits who have left state employees without pay for months and who have left the treasury without funds to pay millions of pensioners.
It may also be done with a view to impressing the International Monetary Fund which is due to make a final decision by the end of this month about giving Ukraine a vital $2.2 billion loan.
But there must be something pleasing for the people who have suffered at their hands for years, to see a bunch of smug, lazy, often bullying and frequently dishonest Little Caesars themselves for once squirming in discomfort. It will not pay the wages or pensions but it is partial recompense of a kind.
And there is also something refreshing about action of any kind finally being taken by a government frequently accused of doing nothing. However inane Pustovoitenko's shenanigans are, they have shown that the government is willing to offend the powerful layer of communist-era functionaries who have until recently felt themselves largely immune to change.
These are the people who, together with the Communists and their allies in Parliament, have helped to halt or wreck market reform for years. Locking them up against their will for a while is not a bad precedent for future dealings with them. Locking them out of the enterprises they control and replacing them altogether could be an even better one.
