The editors of the Washington Post have realized that rebuilding Ukraine will be very, very difficult:
A trial has begun in London involving efforts by Ukraine’s biggest bank to claw back nearly $2 billion, plus an even larger amount in interest, that it says was siphoned off fraudulently by its former co-owners. It’s an awkward fact that one of those former owners, who denies the charges, was for years a chief benefactor of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Mr. Zelensky has since broken with the former co-owner, Igor Kolomoisky, a media mogul who has been a focus of U.S. investigators probing money-laundering and fraud, and has sanctions imposed on him by the U.S. government for alleged corruption. Mr. Zelensky, elected on a platform of cleaning out the corruption that has long tainted the country, also strongly backed legislation, enacted in 2021, that targets oligarchs such as his onetime patron.
Still, the trial underway in the British High Court is a timely reminder that Kyiv’s work is unfinished, despite measures it has taken to build transparent, accountable, graft-free institutions. That work cannot wait, even as Ukraine fights for its survival against Russia’s calamitous invasion.
What country will want to pour money down the rathole that is present Ukrainian corruption?
I would add that just as Russia is corrupt because of Russia, Ukraine is corrupt because of Ukraine. The Russians didn’t make Ukraine corrupt. They didn’t help but they didn’t force the Ukrainians to be corrupt.
There are other complications as well. Will the Ukrainians that have settled in EU countries return to a non-corrupt Ukraine? How do you rebuild a country that consists mostly of the people who were unable flee?
The latest plan is to confiscate Russian assets (like their central bank reserves in US, Europe) and turn it over to Ukraine.
Of course, that’s only the monetary part (just a series of numbers in a computer). Since the damage is physical and recovery requires real resources — it requires the productive surplus of other countries. That leaves out the US, UK — and most likely Europe. Realistically, the country with productive capacity to rebuild on the scale needed is China.
So the answer is China (real resources) paid by the US / Europe using confiscated Russian assets.
Do you not understand how profoundly corrupt the US is, in all its institutions? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!
The basic assumption that there will be a Ukraine after the war is itself absurd. Russia will determine if a Ukraine exists and how and whether it will be rebuilt.
By the way, isn’t Zelensky Kolomoisky’s creature? Or is he beholding to some other oligarch?
Even this discussion begins to lay the groundwork for an eventual NATO withdrawal.
Why should Putin be discouraged?
It’s true that Ukraine is rift with government theft and cronyism, what country isn’t?
But war requires control of the narrative, just the frank and open doubt is enough to encourage the Russian efforts.
Suspect it will come from the same place that funds levee construction in Louisiana, Boston’s Big Dig, the California Super Train, Congressionally blessed NGOs and will fund the Green New Deal and also rebuild Ukraine while delivering a horde of environmental and social issue NGOs. The Chinese who offer loans, skilled workers and no western style NGOs will be mighty appealing