By Timothy Ash
I think there is disbelief with this cabinet reshuffle. The general line I have heard is what is President Volodymyr Zelensky doing? Just to reiterate what I said upon Zelensky taking office last year: This guy has the best opportunity to enact transformational reform of any Ukrainian leader over the past 30 years. He had:
* Political capital, having won a landslide election in the presidential poll and then also winning a landslide majority for his Servant of the People Party in the parliamentary election;
* The population wanted reform/change;
* Ukraine was still backed by the West, and the International Monetary Fund had a new loan program teed up to be signed off by the IMF board;
* The macroeconomic setting in Ukraine was the best I have seen in 30 years covering the country – low single-digit inflation, a stable currency, rising foreign-exchange reserves at the National Bank of Ukraine, falling interest rates, suggestive that investment was about to take off, a public debt ratio falling from over 90% to 50% and fiscal and current account deficits reduced to 2% of gross domestic product each;
* And markets had rewarded his team and Ukraine with a collapse in borrowing costs, on hard currency debt from 10% to less than 6%, and in hryvnia from 20% to 10%. Conditions were well set for recovery.
In the midst of all that he has decided to almost completely change the team, ousting the reformers, and going back in time to a team that would not look out of place in a Viktor Yanukovych cabinet, circa 2011.
He seems to have decided that the conditionality attached by the IMF to the new loan program – of going after oligarchs to recover losses from the 2015-17 banking crisis was just too difficult. Assuming no IMF support he seems to have been sold some snake oil by the old guard oligarchic industrial lobby that there is some other “quick fix” scenario where the budget and a weaker currency are used to pump prime growth, and that Ukraine does not need the IMF.
Now going back to Yanukovych circa 2011, that worked for a few years, and back then global monetary conditions were also favorable as they are now – so Ukraine grew rapidly in those years, but at a price of rising twin deficits and rising indebtedness and that all eventually ran out of steam in 2014.
But Zelensky had the winning lottery ticket on this one and seems set to set to see it fly away in the wind being blown towards him by oligarchic vested interests.
It’s interesting that the fate of the former Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk was sealed when his conversation with his economy team, and the National Bank of Ukraine, was recorded, and then published in the Ukrainian media (presumably by one of these same oligarchic vested interests) whereupon he was heard describing the fact that Zelensky had no grasp of economics. I think events this week have just proven that to be the case.
(c) KyivPost
I am so mad. He had a perfect chance to make Ukraine into a power house. And instead he chose crap.
He was always just going to be a puppet of Kolomoisky’s. Without Kolomoisky’s media swamping Ukraine in favour of Ze, he would never have got within a million miles of getting elected.
I do really wonder: why?
He has plenty of money already.
Why on earth does he need to suck Kolomoisky’s thingy?
Well, if he didn’t, he might end up like Viktor Yushchenko, or worse.
Let’s recall what Zelensky’s boss, Kolomoisky, said back in May of last year, just after Ze was elected.
“Ukraine’s new president Volodymyr Zelensky should follow Greece by rejecting the International Monetary Fund’s austerity programme and defaulting on its external debt, according to his contentious oligarch supporter.”
Zelensky is a fucking asshole. He promised change and the people believed him. He betrayed the whole nation. He is the puppet of the oligarchs, stealing money from the people which will end up in russian, turkish and israeli bank accounts.
It’s the Ukrainian public that are fucking assholes. If it hadn’t have been for Poroshenko, there would be no Ukraine now.
The TV clown has already lost most of the support that he enjoyed shortly after the election. He dropped faster than an elephant turd. This is very sad for Ukraine. The country deserves much better. Now, many are missing Poro, despite him not having been a great president. Things moved along rather slowly under Petro, but at least they moved.
I hate to say this but it goes back to the saying :”Some societies choose to fail.”
Went they come to a fork in the road where they can choose the path of happiness and prosperity or pain and misery, they chose pain and misery.
I don’t know why the Ukrainians are choosing this path?
Why, on the cusp of real prosperity, they are choosing the to return to the failed and discredited ways of the past.
Is it that they fear happiness? Have they struggled in poverty so long that suffering is like the warm blanket of familiarity and to be without it is frightening?
I wish to understand.
To understand a people blessed with so many resources, both natural and man made, want to see their country spiral down into the abyss.
I just don’t understand not striving to make your life and nation the best it can be.