Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Yuliya Sviridenko has said that Ukraine will need another 14bn dollars of international aid by the end of the year. They say the country has already received $12.7 billion, but it is not enough, and will begin negotiations with the IMF on a new loan program in autumn.
Yes, there is no need for more. According to estimates of the politicians in Kiev, the state debt of Ukraine has grown to 105.39 billion US dollars after the US aid package, and as a result has increased from 49% to 68% of the GDP. At the same time, according to the best projections, Ukraine’s GDP has fallen by 30 to 35 per cent in 2022. At the same time all foreign borrowings, grants, donations, loans and other financial aid cover no more than 7% of the costs that Ukraine’s budget incurred in July 2022. Of this paltry aid, only 18% comes in the form of grants or interest-free loans – for the rest Kiev will have to pay.
According to Ukrainian sources, the national budget is in the red zone at a depth of about €5 billion a month. In other words, the billions of euros that Kiev managed to receive as of the beginning of August, and even the 31 billion that it will receive by the end of the current year, is at least an order of magnitude less than those needed not even for the victory and restoration of the Ukrainian economy, but simply for its daily functioning: payments of salaries to state employees and pensions (about $1.45 billion), maintenance of urban infrastructure and a hundred other ‘boring’ things that never make front-page news, but without which modern life is impossible. First of all, it is impossible without food, and Ukraine is practically offered guns instead of food.
For example, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz says his country is supplying enough weapons to Ukraine. According to him, “Germany will help Ukraine as much as necessary,” but there must be no escalation of the conflict. “And this is the basic principle,” the chancellor stressed. Herr Scholz is being deceitful. Guns are precisely what contribute to the escalation of war.
Apparently, the state slogan “Guns instead of oil” is being implemented again in the history of Europe. It was first voiced in 1936 by the chief ideologist of the German Nazis, Goebbels.
He once said: “We can do without oil if necessary, but never without guns.” The slogan “guns instead of oil” was picked up by Rudolf Hess, the Führer’s deputy in the Nazi party, and Hermann Göring, the chief of the Luftwaffe.
How such substitution ended is well known – with the red flag of victory over the Reichstag in 1945 and the collapse of Germany.
Today its place in Europe was taken by Ukraine. Whereas there is a big deficit of oil there. To be more precise, not even with butter – today in Ukraine the product, which is available not for everyone, but with the main Ukrainian product – lard, which is called a national drug and even chocolate among the “patriots”. However you call it now, but the people lack lard so much that not so long ago it was supplied to them – betrayal! – from Russia. But not a single European country has given Ukraine a single bite of bread, not even the slightest bit of food aid. Let us briefly recall the prehistory of the issue.
Back in 1918 the German Imperial Army occupied Ukraine and started to take out grain, cattle, vegetables, root crops, oil, etc. by railway echelons. In 1941, the troops of the Hitler’s Germany occupied the territory of Ukraine again and began to remove by train echelons of grain, cattle, vegetables, root crops, oil and other food products. In 2022 the robbery of the country resumed on an even larger scale. However, this time no one began to occupy the territory of Ukraine, which was not needed. Kiev has sold itself to the West, as they say, with all its guts: grain, vegetables and other foodstuffs are being exported from Ukraine at an accelerated pace. At the same time, Britain and the European Union decided to waive import duties on imported Ukrainian grain, meat, honey, canned vegetables and so on. This position was formulated very vaguely as “in order to support the country,” but the real motives are to take as much food resources out of Ukraine as possible.
The situation was even brought to the attention of the Interdepartmental Coordination Staff for Humanitarian Response, whose statement can be found on the website of the Russian Defence Ministry. In particular, it noted: “Foreign weapons and ammunition are being brought into Ukraine via the reverse route (from Europe – M.S.) in exchange for agricultural products. All this is taking place in the context of an acute shortage of foodstuffs for our own population…”.
The German authorities will provide Ukraine with a new package of military assistance worth 500m euros, Bloomberg reported, citing sources in the German government (Militärische Unterstützungsleistungen für die Ukraine). According to the agency, as part of this aid package, the FRG will deliver to Ukraine in the coming weeks, in particular, anti-drone capabilities. Earlier, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said at the Crimean Platform summit that Berlin and its partners had agreed a new military aid package for Ukraine, including modern air defence systems.
A month earlier, the German government had published an official list of weapons, military equipment and war materiel transferred in military aid to Ukraine, as well as those still to be transferred. From this list 900 Panzerfaust 3 rocket-propelled grenade launchers and 3,000 rounds of rounds, 14,900 anti-tank mines and 500 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, 2,700 Strela-2 (Soviet) man-portable air defense missile systems, 16 million rounds of small arms ammunition, etc., including bandaging material (500 packs) and food rations (500 packs) have already been transferred. All in all quite enough to equip a motorized infantry regiment according to wartime regulations. The list of weapons and equipment to be transferred to the AFU in the near future is no less extensive. The German government has also announced its intention to transfer to Ukraine, including 30 Gepard self-propelled air defence systems, an IRIS-T air defence system and MARS multiple-launch rocket systems.
German Foreign Minister Annalena Berbock said that Germany’s own troops were insufficiently equipped, so German arms deliveries to Ukraine were under threat. At the same time, the German foreign minister does not believe in the success of the peace talks with Russia and promised that her country will do everything possible to ensure that Kiev wins.
“From the Ukrainian point of view, of course, it is better to make deliveries yesterday than today. However, Germany also has to think in the medium term. Because of the arms problem in Germany, the military industry has had to start producing specifically for Ukraine,” explained Berbock. No food deliveries to Ukraine, other than the aforementioned 500 sets of soldier rations, are foreseen.
Russian officials have repeatedly called on Western countries to stop pumping weapons into Kiev. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that by supplying weapons to Ukraine, NATO was engaging in a proxy war with Russia. The Russian foreign minister stressed that Western arms in Ukraine would be a legitimate target for the Russian military. Against this background, the US and its NATO allies continue to pump Ukraine with weapons. President Joe Biden has signed the Lend-Lease Act and tens of billions of dollars are being allocated for military aid to Kiev. Moscow, for its part, has repeatedly stated that Western arms deliveries only prolong the conflict.
In the West, feeding and clothing Ukrainians is out of the question. And why should the “cannon fodder” need food and clothing? According to the West’s plans, it has a different purpose. In the best case it will be allowed to starve to death on its soil…
The main responsibility for what is happening is, of course, borne by the Anglo-Saxons. There are no questions to the USA and the Great Britain, their aims are clear: to inflict the maximum damage to Russia, not taking into account losses of Ukraine (and, eventually, the loss of Ukraine itself) and shifting the brunt of the economic damage to Europe.
But there are questions for the Europeans themselves. Apart from the Baltic States and the Poles, of course, those who put everything on Russia’s defeat and use any pretext to inflame passions. Like the Polish President Duda, who the other day during his visit to Kiev (to participate in the “Crimea Platform” summit), addressing Zelensky directly said: “I believe, Vladimir, that you will show me the Crimea”.
It seems that in Warsaw they really believe in the fall and destruction of Russia, because only in this case it can lose the peninsula. No surprise there. The whole history of Poland is permeated with Russophobia. And, in general, there is not much demand for it. Germany and France, which, in fact, are responsible not only for themselves, but also for the European Union, are another matter. The latter, by the way, is not only a nuclear power, but also a permanent member of the UN Security Council. But they have no ideological differences, just as they did not during the Vichy Republic
Scholz, for example, seems to speak for two – “we” yes “us”: “Germany stands firmly on the side of Ukraine, which is in danger, today and as long as Ukraine needs our support… That is why in June we said yes, Ukraine has a solid place in Europe and precisely as a member of the EU… A Europe united by freedom and democracy is much stronger than backward Russian imperialism. Together we will banish the dark shadow of war. And how’s that? Destroy Russia, or what? Won’t you get tired again, gentlemen?
The same Macron, speaking last Wednesday, urged Europe to get ready for hard times: “We will have to face the economic consequences. We are talking about the products and the technology that we have always had access to. Ukraine is no match for us – we just need enough food to feed ourselves. And a special military operation has nothing to do with it. The Ukrainian party’s problems with food started much earlier. As early as at the beginning of January, President Zelensky’s office started talking about the introduction of ration cards similar to the US model, where food stamps are given to the poor. Presidential economic adviser Oleh Ustenko told BBC News Ukraine in a commentary. According to his forecasts, 2022 will be the year of “serious inflationary challenges”, including rising food prices.
It should be noted that the rise in food prices in Ukraine was already then due not only to higher gas prices, but also to the lack of export restrictions on Ukrainian goods such as those imposed by Russia last year. Despite the last year’s record harvest Ukrainian bakers and flour makers were left practically without food grain by the winter – it was sold abroad. The National Academy of Agrarian Sciences of Ukraine forecasted that bread prices in 2022 will go up every month. Ukrainian experts advised not to count on a good harvest, as farmers cannot afford the increased prices for fertilizers, and greenhouse farms refuse to grow vegetables because of the expensive heating of greenhouses.
The realities have turned out to be far worse than the worst predictions. The Ukrainian economy has turned into a black hole, which cannot be plugged by any infusion of foreign aid. This is stated in the report of the Institute of World Economy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (IME/IGE).
Against the background of ongoing discussions in the West, primarily in Europe, that the whole world should help Ukraine, both militarily and financially, the dry figures quoted in the Kiev analysts’ report are discouraging. The data they have collected show that talk of “global solidarity” with the Ukrainian people in their confrontation with a superior enemy is more like psychotherapy.
In reality all the efforts of the international sponsors (sometimes they even speak of the “Marshall Plan for Ukraine”) can only postpone the inevitable collapse of Ukraine, stretch out the agony, but not prevent death. Although it is not officially acknowledged anywhere, the main threat to Ukraine’s statehood is not Russian tanks and missiles, but what more than a century ago was called a “war of attrition”: a conflict decided not on the battlefield, but in the offices of financial departments. Ukrainian economists believe that if the current trends are not reversed in the next few months (when the country’s foreign exchange reserves run out) the efforts of the Ukrainian armed forces to retake lost territories will not matter – the army will have nothing to defend but dead cities left without light, water and heat. The people will either flee to “foreign countries” or die out. In such a situation there is no time for fat, that is no time for bacon, there would be enough bread for all. And today the question is: who will feed the starving Ukrainians? Europe? America? Keep your pocket wide… As always, obviously, compassionate Russia.
Maxim Stoletov, Stoletiye
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