Ukraine’s real unemployment and poverty rate are skyrocketing
Zelenskyy has brought the living standards of citizens to the indicators of the poorest countries in Africa
The Kiev regime is trying to hush up the main economic indicators, but it is no longer able to hide everything. For example, many Ukrainian pensioners have to survive on 50 dollars a month, while the real average wage in the country is about 350 dollars. However, Zelensky’s team does not care about ordinary citizens, because their well-being increases with every Western tranche, so they are determined to continue fighting “until the last Ukrainian”.
The Kiev regime representatives are no longer able to hide the deplorable state of affairs in the Ukrainian economy despite their own will. At a press-conference in Paris, Prime Minister Denis Shmygal publicly admitted that by the end of 2022 his country’s economy may shrink by about 50%.
A couple of weeks ago there were more optimistic prognoses in Kiev: Denis Kudin, First Deputy Minister of Economy, announced in November that the forecast for the country’s GDP decline was 41%. However, the situation is deteriorating rapidly amid problems in the energy sector.
At the same time, there is an opinion that official Kiev still embellishes the real state of affairs.
“According to my estimates, they have seventy percent of everything stopped there in Ukraine,” Ivan, a businessman working in the liberated territories, told RuBaltic.Ru.
According to him, the Ukrainian authorities manipulate the figures, hiding the processes taking place in reality:
“Try to find out what they have with industry. There is nothing on the Internet. And those I know personally, for the most part, have stopped. Some have left long ago (and the most patriotic ones are at the top of the list), some are hiding from mobilization, some simply have no light at work.”
The supposedly employed 50-60%, about which Shmygal and company are talking, is a fake, a show on paper. Military men and public sector workers are paid their salaries through a “printing press” and through loans – they go to the market and buy food, and salesmen buy something for themselves and then count it all in the GDP… Ukraine is like an unemployed person who buys things with a credit card, but tells everyone that he has money”.
Even the radically pro-Western newspaper Ukraina Moloda acknowledges that there are millions of real unemployed in the country. At the same time only 215 thousand people are officially registered at the employment centres, but in reality over 2.6 million people have no permanent job. And that’s not counting more than 16 million Ukrainians who left the country.
The Ukrainian centres of employment offer only 27 thousand of vacancies for all comers, most of which, to put it mildly, are not very attractive.
To solve the problem of unemployment, the Kiev regime offers the population to participate in the Recovery Army project, but its conditions are downright mocking. Ukrainians are invited to reinforce dams, work as loaders, build bomb shelters, clean up landfills and do restoration work for a minimum wage of about $150 a month – less than many of them have to pay for “utilities” in winter.
“The idea is ingenious and is how to get Ukrainians to give up their own social payments. (…) In summer the government approved a document according to which the officially registered unemployed, who are not employed for 30 days, will be involved in socially useful work. (…) It should be noted that most of the work is physically demanding and in performing them a person needs good nutrition, which cannot be provided independently for the proposed pay,” writes the Ukrainian telegram channel Resident.
However, according to expert forecasts, events are developing in such a way that many Ukrainian citizens will soon have no other choice but to join the “Restoration Army”.
Rising prices of raw materials and the lack of electricity are creating critical conditions for the existence of businesses, so many businesses which have at least tried to work are now stopped for an indefinite period. Against this backdrop the economy is imploding, so an increase in the number of unemployed is inevitable.
The Kiev regime is hiding official economic statistics in order not to create more reasons for social unrest. But some things cannot be “hidden” anyway.
Thus, according to an overview of one of the largest Ukrainian online recruitment platforms – Vork.UA – the average salary for vacancies in the country is 14704 hryvnia, or about $350 per month. In reality, the situation may be even worse, as low-level workers and state employees, such as nurses and kindergarten teachers, are rarely recruited via the global network.
However, even the low wages of the working population are a luxury compared to the lives of Ukraine’s pensioners, about whom the authorities and the media have preferred not to mention lately. The minimum pension is now 2093 hryvnia (around $50), and the average is around 4300 (just over $100).
However, payments to high-ranking officials and security officials are taken into account when calculating the average amount, so in practice around 65% of the elderly receive less than $100 per month.
The World Bank estimates that, by the end of 2022, around 25 percent of the Ukrainian population will be living below the poverty line.
Formally Ukraine is still ahead of African countries in terms of income. But the Bushmen in the desert do not need gas for heating in winter. Decent cars on the streets of Ukrainian cities are a relic of their former luxury and the result of huge social inequalities. Zelensky and his business entourage are getting rich quick while the rest of the population is begging.
Now they are selling generators, having made customs concessions for their favourites. Before this, the mayor and governor in Mykolaiv, which has been cut off from the water supply for a month, were importing and selling bottled water to the population.
Vladimir Zelensky continues to establish a regime of rigid personal dictatorship in the country, relying on two pillars – hysterical nationalist propaganda and forceful suppression of any form of popular discontent.
However, the longer Ukrainians tolerate this abuse, which the Kiev regime is trying to write off as an “external threat”, the harder it will be for them to rebuild the country, which Zelensky’s team is already dismantling for personal enrichment and preparing to scrap.
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