JOSEPH BIDEN, America’s folksy vice-president, is not known as an enforcer—except in Ukraine, where he has become the spearhead of American policy. This week Mr Biden made his fourth visit to Kiev since Ukraine’s Maidan revolution and delivered a fiery speech in parliament, imploring the country’s leaders to eradicate “the cancer of corruption”. He invoked the “Heavenly Hundred”, the protesters slain on Kiev’s icy streets in 2014. “Their sacrifice, to put it bluntly, is now your obligation,” Mr Biden roared.

Even as Mr Biden was speaking, Roman Baidovsky faced a panel of expressionless judges in a cramped courtroom halfway across town. Mr Baidovsky’s 23-year-old son, Sergey, was one of the Heavenly Hundred. Sergey’s killers and their superiors have yet to be punished. Incompetence has hampered the investigation, and the old guard in the security services have undermined it. Most crucially, says Taras Hatalyak of OPORA, a human rights group, “there’s no political will” among the country’s leaders to pursue the cases, an assessment echoed by senior Ukrainian lawenforcement officials.

When Sergey left for the protests, he told his father that “I want my kids to live in a normal country.” So far, the promises of the revolution have not been fulfilled: Ukraine remains far from normal. Since the Maidan, it has run through three chief prosecutors, none of whom has closed a single case against high-level officials from former president Viktor Yanukovych’s regime. Only two men have been convicted of crimes connected with the murder of protesters, both low-level foot soldiers. Key suspects have been allowed to escape. So little has been done to prosecute economic crimes that the European Union may have to lift its sanctions on ex-Ukrainian officials.

The latest prosecutor-general, Viktor Shokin, a close ally of President Petro Poroshenko, has ignored high-level corruption among the new authorities. Talk of Mr Shokin’s fate dominated Mr Biden’s meetings in Kiev this week. Ukrainian activists have been calling for Mr Shokin to be fired, but Mr Poroshenko has refused. An independent prosecutor would deprive him of a powerful political instrument and might expose his associates to investigation.

Attempts to create new anti-corruption institutions have encountered enormous resistance. “If they let big fish get caught, those people will start to speak,” says a Western diplomat. Selecting a special anti-corruption prosecutor, needed for the new National Anti-Corruption Bureau to start, dragged on till the last possible day, endangering Ukraine’s hopes of visa-free access to the European Union. Last week a seemingly independent candidate was picked, but only under the dual press of civil society and the West. “Many of us are feeling tired of patronising these guys and watching them all the time,” the diplomat adds.

Yet removing Mr Shokin alone would amount to little. An ongoing project to select new prosecutors will likely result in some 80% of the old guard being rehired, says Vitaly Kasko, a deputy prosecutor-general who has been at odds with Mr Shokin. “Herpes is not on the lips, it’s in the blood,” says Yulia Mostovaya, editor of Zerkalo Nedeli, a weekly. “We have to fight the virus, not just its symptoms.” As justice fails to materialise, many in Kiev have come to blame not just Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, whose authority eroded earlier this year, but Mr Poroshenko as well. “The guys who came to power weren’t the ones who should have,” says Volodymyr Bondarchuk, whose father Sergiy, a high-school physics teacher, was also killed last year. “Their goals are far from the ideals of the Maidan.”