By July 2005, Ukraine's national newspaper The Day had described Ukraine as a “country of nominal owners.” The director of Ukraine's Koretsky Institute of State and Law observed, “Farmers are merely nominal owners of their plots. Neither domestic nor foreign investors will want to do business with such bogus landowners.” Only a few months earlier, across the border in Russia, a pensioner by the name of N. Volkova wrote to the newspaper Krest'ianskaia Rossiia asking, “Explain to me, please, how I can get rid of my land share.” The Russian tax inspectorate had demanded a 1,500 ruble payment on her land share. Like so many other landowners in Russia and Ukraine, Volkova had never learned the location of her share and received no profit from the land. She continued:

Volkova was far from alone. The paper records of results in Ukraine and Russia emphasized the distribution of land share certificates and the opportunity to allot land, thus confirming the existence of private ownership, but observation of changes on the ground told a far different story.