A dismal piece of Washington Post propaganda gearing up for a postwar, fully neoliberalized Ukraine leaves readers precisely where Jeff Bezos would want them, writes Patrick Lawrence.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky congratulating soldiers on the Day of Defenders in October near the Mariinsky Palace in Kyiv. (President Of Ukraine, Public domain)
The nice thing about being an oligarch is that you are so wealthy it doesn’t matter that you are looked upon as a predatory pariah.
The nice thing about being an American oligarch, such as Jeff Bezos, is that America does not have oligarchs: It has highly successful business executives and entrepreneurs.
Bezos can build Amazon into something that looks very like a monopoly, he can own The Washington Post and sign contracts with the Central Intelligence Agency, he can have a net worth of $114 billion. But he is still a highly successful businessman, not an oligarch. He is a “job-creator,” a phrase of which I have long been fond.
The new fashion among government officials, economists, think tank inhabitants, bankers, investors, multilateral bureaucrats, and the journalists who faithfully copy down what they say is to forecast what kind of place Ukraine will be once the war is over.
And here’s the thing: Ukraine has oligarchs, and the postwar Ukraine these people have in mind cannot have oligarchs. Highly successful business executives and entrepreneurs with vast holdings, the same holdings from which they now profit, O.K. But they have to be executives and entrepreneurs, not oligarchs.
Nomenclature is all when it comes to postwar Ukraine, you see. Bezos and the reporters whose checks he signs understand this very well.
The working assumption among the people given to big think is that the Kiev regime and its Western backers will prevail against the Russian Federation and have their way in postwar Ukraine. We can leave the wisdom or otherwise of this prognosis for another time.
Of immediate importance is that those beginning to plan for the future anticipate “a new, strong, European Ukraine,” a Ukraine that “will follow a European or U.S. model,” a nation with “more lawyers and less [sic] bribers,” “a free-market Ukraine.”
These phrases can all be found in a long takeout The Washington Post published Dec. 8 under the headline, “War has tamed Ukraine’s oligarchs, creating space for democratic change.” This is The Post’s contribution to the conversation about what Ukraine will look like and how its economy will work once Russian forces have been beaten back across Ukraine’s eastern border.
In 4,200 words, Bezos’ newspaper wants to tell us that all will be well in postwar Ukraine, where oligarchs will be no more and the business executives they have become will make Ukraine democratic, modern, and — a neoliberal code word here — efficient.
Ukraine’s crop of oligarchs, like the Russian Federation’s, date to the years immediately after the demise of the Soviet Union. What the inebriated Boris Yeltsin, tool of neoliberal Clintonians, did to post–Soviet Russia, Leonid Kuchma did to Ukraine.
Kuchma’s presidency, from 1994 to 2005, was a godawful mess of fraud, corruption, and media censorship. Among much else, he set in motion and oversaw the same sort of rapacious, free-for-all privatization schemes Yeltsin got going in Russia. Your typical Ukrainian oligarch active during the Kuchma years will have paid taxi fare for state-owned and–operated assets worth billions.
In Ukraine’s case, a weak central government and underdeveloped institutions meant that corruption per capita, let’s say, was often worse than in the Russian Federation. It ran to the very foundations of society and government.
The people policing corruption were corrupt. Those who assumed high office were corrupt. Petro Poroshenko, who replaced the corrupt but duly elected Viktor Yanukovych after the U.S.–orchestrated coup in 2014, made an oligarch-sized fortune in chocolate candy.
The Post piece offers a useful example of how this worked. In 2004, Kuchma’s penultimate year in office, an oligarch named Rinat Akhmetov and another oligarch named Viktor Pinchuk paid $800 million for Kryvorizhstal, a major state-owned steelmaker. Pinchuk had married Kuchma’s daughter two years prior to this transaction.
Rinat Akhmetov and Leonid Kuchma, the second president of independent Ukraine, around 2005. (CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Everyone savvy in these matters knew the price Akhmetov and Pinchuk paid for Kryvorizhstal was preposterously low, a brazen rip-off of an asset rightfully the property of the Ukrainian people.
Viktor Yushchenko canceled the deal after he replaced Kuchma as president in 2005. The government then sold Kryvorizhstal to Mittal Steel, an Indian company now part of Netherlands-based ArcelorMittal, for $4.8 billion.“The transaction was clearly corrupt,” The Post quotes Yushchenko as saying, presumably in a recently conducted retrospective interview.
Yushchenko came to power as a reformist in consequence of the late–2004, early–2005 Orange Revolution — this after he was poisoned and badly disfigured with dioxin by nobody knows who. Still popular among Western liberals, he is occasionally quoted in support of the Zelensky regime’s war against Russia.
Ukraine’s Viktor Yushchenko in March 2009. (European People’s Party, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Yushchenko did not have an oligarch problem and wasn’t one himself. But neither did he manage to tame them, to take the Post’s phrase. Volodymyr Zelensky, the current president, has had an oligarch problem the whole of his political career.
As a TV comedian who became president, he was more or less invented by Ihor Kolomoisky, an oligarch (media, banking, diversified businesses organized as the Privat Group) with long tentacles reaching into government and politics.
Kolomoisky is among the richest of Ukraine’s oligarchs and apparently among its most corrupt. Last year the Justice Department banned him from entering the U.S., and, in apparent response, Zelensky began to distance himself from his former (let us assume former) patron. First, he stripped Kolomoisky, who resides in Israel, of his Ukrainian citizenship.
And then something interesting. Zelensky went on to introduce what he called his “de-oligarchization” bill in the Rada, Ukraine’s legislature. It passed easily into law a year ago last month. You haven’t read much about this law — if you have read anything of it, indeed — because it does not seem to have made any difference.
So far as I can make out, Zelensky saw a political opportunity when his sagging support indicated he needed one: Being seen to act against the nation’s parasitic oligarchs is a surefire boost among the ordinary Ukrainians whose assets many of them have stolen.
The most interesting thing about the de-oligarchization law is not its ineffectiveness but its definition of an oligarch. Here we begin to approach the true point of the Post’s piece about these people. In the Post’s words:
“The new law defines an ‘oligarch’ as anyone who meets at least three of four criteria: influence in politics, media holdings, economic monopolies, and minimum assets of $100 million.”
Let us use the Zelensky law as a mirror. In it we find that oligarchs are too visibly and directly influential among Ukrainian politicians and holders of high office, they make political use — again, too visibly—of overly concentrated media empires, and they steamroll competitors in the industries where they dominate. We can leave out the monetary threshold, given how low the law sets the bar.
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Why now, after 31 years as an independent nation and nearly as many with the most oligarch-ridden economy in Europe, do these criteria matter? I do not find this a difficult question to answer.
It is because the Ukraine that is supposed to graduate into the ranks of the European Union and NATO has to look good. And it will not look good so long as oligarchs carry on with their crude intrusions in national politics, their indifference to legal statutes, and their incessant bribery, graft, and other sorts of corruptions.
It is time, in short, for Ukraine to clean up its act. It can be an act, indeed, but the oligarchs have to be sent back to makeup, and then to wardrobe, and altogether recast as modern business executives. They have to be worthy of straight-faced profiles in Forbes or BusinessWeek, to put this point another way. They have to look more like Bezos than the shameless crooks and greedheads they actually are.
Ihor Kolomoyskyi in 2013. (CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
The war, the de-oligarchization law, and public discontent have oligarchs on the run, the Post reports, but I couldn’t find a single oligarch on the run in this story.
Ihor Kolomoisky doesn’t live in Ukraine anymore and comes over as indifferent to the allegations against him in reports I have read. Of the other oligarchs mentioned, Serhiy Taruta co-founded and runs a metals-industry group based on privatized state assets, has held several political offices, has had a seat in the Rada since 2014, and seems to entertain presidential ambitions.
Not exactly a man on the run.
Taruta is good friends with the aforementioned Rinat Akhmetov, he of the foiled steel company swindle, and speaks very highly of him. “He was not a member of a criminal group, but he knew and he was friends with people who were,” Taruta tells the Post. This kind of thing counts in oligarchic Ukraine.
Akhmetov is the son of a coal miner, founded a coke-processing plant soon after Ukraine gained independence, and made it big in metals during the Kuchma years, the Kryvorizhstal bust notwithstanding. At its height prior to the current war, his fortune was worth $7.6 billion; he has taken a hit since the outbreak of hostilities: He is now worth a mere $4.3 billion, poor fellow.
Akhmetov gets an inordinate proportion of the Post’s linage in its report on the state of the Ukrainian oligarchy. The piece reads in part like a personal profile, indeed. Why is this?
Akhmetov is precisely the kind of oligarch the Post wants to show us, in my read. Dominant in the metals sector, politically powerful, elected to the Rada in 2006, friends among crime bosses, he represents all that was wrong about the oligarchs. And now he has seen the light.
He has bailed out of politics, at least directly. He has seen the future of the Ukrainian economy, and it shines brightly with none other than highly successful business executives and entrepreneurs.
“I am not an oligarch,” He tells the Post. “I am the biggest private investor, employer, and taxpayer in Ukraine.” And later: “Competition in the economy means market economy. Competition in politics means democracy.”
There is this from Rostyslav Shurma, one of Zelensky’s top advisers and — I love this part — previously a senior executive at Metinvest, a steel producer Akhmetov owns: “It is absolutely essential we have strong businessmen, we have national champions, global champions. But they should not interfere in politics.”
Yes! the Post report urges us to conclude.
Rinat Akhmetov, left, giving Aleksander Ceferin the UEFA Football leadership award, December 2021. (CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
I read all this against the background of the not-much-reported deliberations of those on the international scene planning the future shape of the Ukrainian political economy. High among the groups involved is the Ukraine Recovery Conference, which has met annually for the past five years.
Last summer’s gathering, in Lugano, Switzerland, included five heads of state, 40 government ministers, 60 international organizations and a large Ukrainian delegation.
Patricia Cohen, a New York Times economics correspondent, wrote a creditable piece last week — creditable for its forthright honesty — describing this discourse under the headline, “Away From the Spotlight, a Debate Rages Over a Postwar Ukraine Economy.”
As Cohen makes clear, two things are going on at present. Abroad, all the talk is of how to reshape Ukraine into another specimen of neoliberal savagery with all the inequality, social dislocation, and disparities, and the unbridled corporatization this model brings with it.
In Ukraine, the Zelensky regime is hard at work laying the groundwork for this objectionable transformation — stripping workers of rights and protections, cutting regulation, opening the gates to foreign resource exploitation, shutting down the press, forcing the political parties to conform or close.
Please consider the above list of things to come in Ukraine should the West win this war: inequality, corporatization, the absence of regulation to curb excess, abuses of labor. Does this remind you of anything? The America that made Bezos a highly successful business executive, maybe?
Ukraine’s task is simply to get this done by way of the fiction that, in a neoliberalized political economy, there is some imagined distance between government and the corporate sector. There is none in America and there shall be none in Ukraine.
The kicker at the end of this dismal piece of Washington Post propaganda leaves us precisely where Jeff Bezos would want us. It quotes a financial journalist in Kyiv named Yurii Nikolov. “I hope the businessman Akhmetov will remain with us,” he tells the Post, “and oligarch Akhmetov will not be reborn.”
It is all a question of nomenclature, nothing more.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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One further thing is we all think in boxes and do not know how to get out of them. For example, trying to reduce my energy footprint, I bought a two burner induction stove that fits on my electric stovetop. Was encourage to. buy cookware that worked with induction heat. I was thinking of buying at least a stew pot, high and small in circumference. Kicked myself in the head and said, since all that iron cookware I have is induction ready, some going back to mother and grandmothers and one being a flat iron, I put the flat iron on induction stove and put a steel, larger pot on the iron. Duh, right? But we get stuck sometimes and simple things do not occur to us, instead we believe or are led to believe we need more pot, rather than the answer passed generations down and at least getting out of a box our culture put us in, but first we must know we are in a box.
“Please consider the above list of things to come in Ukraine should the West win this war: inequality, corporatization, the absence of regulation to curb excess, abuses of labor. Does this remind you of anything? The America that made Bezos a highly successful business executive, maybe? ”
As always, you make clear what I intuit. I think we have a big fight coming not just in USA, but across the world as we decide to make war or peace.
And one day…when the US is done picking Ukraine clean – this country won’t even be a shadow of what it once was.
“It is all a question of nomenclature, nothing more.”
If we examine the consequences of the double-speak, we see increasing alienation in the population, more crime and desperation, more war, more insanity–and, not the least in concern, the increasing need to use even more double-speak to mask the psychopathic self-righteousness of “the leaders.”
This masking, led by the sort of language Patrick emphasizes, which turns robber barons and egomaniacs into models of “the American dream” style, also requires increased control and authoritarianism. Hence anything critical of empire building and perception management is “conspiracy theory.” (We also saw this recently with the covid manipulations.)
To me, the only thing heartening here is that this form of self-indulgence will only continue to produce the CN’s and Patrick Lawrence’s of our world who will not rest with abdication of principle, such as truth serves humanity versus lies, and will continue to fight for it. Meanwhile, the psychopaths who it seems take Hitler as their model for decent leadership will in time turn on each other as their machinations collapse.
Very good article – and most accurate, as I can attest, having worked in this part of the world.
The corruption of Ukraine has been – and undoubtedly remains – mind-boggling. I remember meeting with a well-connected lawyer in Kyiv in the early years of this millenium who reported that there was an informal “price list” for getting laws one wanted passed by the Verkhovna Rada (parliament), ranging from $1 ro 2 million for simple laws to $5 million or so for major legislation. And various wanted criminals got seats in the parliament simply to obtain parliamentary immunity from prosecution.
The various post-Soviet states presented what amounted to controlled experiments how different political/economic approaches functioned. In Ukraine, the “oligarchs” soon took control of all major industry and went on to capture the state authorities. In Belarus, Lukaschenko maintained tight state-control of all large industry and no oligarch class was able to emerge. In the 1990s, Russia went the course of Ukraine, but after 2000, the new president, Putin took measures to re-exert state authority, so that Russia now has a system intermediate between Ukraine and Belarus.
In Russia the oligarchs are for the most part not appendages of the state, nor is the state an appendage of the oligarchs. For this reason, the expropriation of Russian oligarch properties in the West in wake of this year’s Russia-Ukraine war by reason of their owners being “close to Putin” had no effect whatsoever in influencing the actions of the Russian state – in fact Putin probably welcomed the weakening of the oligarch class in Russia. The situation over there isn’t the same as in the West, where the politicians carry out the wishes of their donors. So, in addition to grossly violating the rule of law – a value the West claims to uphold – these expropriations didn’t have the intended effect which the Western politicians assumed they would have, when looking at themselves in the mirror.
Patrick’s article is essential for understanding why the whole story of “free, democratic, independent…Ukraine” the Western free media have been describing for years can no longer be accepted. David Otness’s comment is a start, but surely IF Angela Merkel’s statements recently, and for the last 8 years or earlier, are even published in the media, it can be seen at once that Russia has followed international law in this matter, did its best to solve the known Donbass disagreements peacefully and with a UN resolution ALL needed to follow, so that the “unprovoked, unjustified invasion on February 24” was nothing of the kind.
Most excellent and accurate comment, rosemerry.
Very much appreciated.
DW
Ditto
We ‘meet’ again, Patrick.
In an interview with a German mag, this week, Prof Michael Hudson was asked;
” What is your view on the current financial situation in this war. The G7 and EU governments talk already about rebuilding and reconstruction of Ukraine after the war. What does this mean for Western businesses and finance capitalism?
Hudson replied (my emphasis);
“Ukraine hardly can be rebuilt. First of all, much of its population has left, and is unlikely to return, given the destruction of housing and infrastructure – and husbands.
Second, Ukraine is owned mainly by a narrow group of kleptocrats – who are trying to sell out to Western AGRICULTURAL INVESTORS and other vultures. (I think you know who they are.)….”
Of all the plausible ‘real’ reasons behind the Ukraine conflict, “The Future of Food” has very few credible peers, if any.
Written by a New Yorker, ~6 months ago;
hxxps://ifz.org.br/2022/06/03/war-within-the-war-the-fight-over-land-and-genetically-engineered-agriculture/
“Ten months before Russian troops poured into Ukraine, that country’s President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a bill into law authorizing the private sale of farmland, reversing a moratorium that had been in place since 2001.
An earlier administration in Ukraine had instituted the moratorium in order to halt further privatization of The Commons and small farms, which were being bought up by oligarchs and concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. As documented in a series of critical reports over ten years by the Oakland Institute based in California, the moratorium on land sales in Ukraine aimed to prevent the acquisition and consolidation of farmland in the hands of the domestic oligarch class and foreign corporations.
The marketization of farmland is part of a series of policy “reforms” that the International Monetary Fund stipulated as a precondition enabling Ukraine to receive $8 billion in loans from the IMF….
Even amid the pandemic there has been “wide-ranging opposition from the Ukrainian public to reversing that ban, with over 64 percent of the people opposed to the creation of a land market, according to an April 2021 poll.”…”
As well as the usual suspects e.g. Monsanto, Bayer, Clinton, Gates, IMF, World Bank, pay particular attention to the PR outfit, Hill & Knowlton.
If you’re unfamiliar with H & K, as well as their campaigns mentioned by the author, they were hired by the tobacco industry in the ’50’s, and the fracking industry in the Naughties, to create the ‘alternative science’, and thereby create ‘debates’ that provided those industries room to operate until the science was ‘settled’.
Very comprehensive, and very well constructed, the above investigative report.
Where is the link? Just finished reading The Destiny of Civilization. Not an economist by any means, but he made it understandable most places in book. Would love the link.
Paula, this discussion can be found at Naked Capitalism, from several days ago.
As well, Hudson’s own site well worth having on your list of sources.
DW
https://thesaker.is/michael-hudson-gives-an-interview-to-a-german-magazine/
Plus, given you mentioned civilisations’ destinies (note plurals), a useful contribution from Robinson, recently;
https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2022/12/prof-paul-robinson-what-can-nikolai-danilevsky-teach-us-about-todays-struggle-between-east-and-west/
‘Fukuyama’s The End of History vs Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations,’
‘Putin was rather late in coming round to this point of view..however..Valdai, October..he used the words “civilization,” “civilizations,” and “civilizational” some 20 times, and commented that “real democracy in a multipolar world is primarily about the ability of any nation—I emphasize—any society or civilization to follow its own path.”
To rub in the point, Putin mentioned Danilevsky and cited his statement that progress lies in “walking the field that represents humanity’s historical activity, walking in all directions,” adding that “no civilization can take pride in being the height of development.” Putin followed this by calling for a “free development of countries and peoples,” in which “primitive simplification and prohibition can be replaced with the flourishing complexity of culture and tradition.”..
Some commentators argue that the “New Cold War” between Russia and the West differs from the original in that lacks an ideological component similar to the conflict between communism and capitalism. Others maintain that there is such a component and that it consists of the struggle between democracy and autocracy. Putin’s speech shows that both points of view are wrong.
For the speech reveals a very coherent philosophy well founded in a specific Russian intellectual tradition with origins in Danilevsky. However, this philosophy has nothing to do with autocracy and democracy. In fact, the very essence of civilizational theory is that no system is inherently the best. Putin is not making any claims about how states should organize their internal affairs, let alone promoting autocracy versus democracy. He is, however…’
You can find it at the site ‘nakedcapitalism’ under the title
“Michael Hudson Discusses the Future of Europe and Global Restructuring”
Respect for Lawrence’s article and Otness’s knowledgeable response. Here is a slightly different take on reaching the same conclusion about Russian destiny: Milions of people over the last 100 years have been praying for Russia, according to instructions given by Our Lady of Fatima. In response to this devotion the light of our world’s future has passed from the Anglosphere to EurAsia. Russia has been blessed. We need to respect and be grateful that a nation with vision and commitment to justness has picked up the torch we have dropped because of the archaic world view of our leaders.
The President of the Republic of Moldova is the head of state of Moldova.
The current president is Maia Sandu, who assumed office on 24 December 2020.
Maia’s education:
Academy of Economic Studies of Moldova (BBM)
Academy of Public Administration of Moldova (MIR)
*** Harvard Kennedy School (MPP) ***
The poll by the Chisinau-based data company shows that a majority – 59% –
believe Moldova is under the control of US or EU forces.
Only 32% thought it was actually led by President Maia Sandu,
… a further 3% suggested the nation is ruled by Russia.
The unelected american govt is way out in front of us…
You may think that you are voting for your representative..
But, you are not. … You are voting for the whole world.
Since the US is the “most powerful nation”, and the “richest”, and has “the world’s most powerful military”, and every other country must conduct business in the US dollar, and the US decides which form of government is acceptable in other nations, and does indeed foment wars, coups, civil wars, assassinations, genocide, and all manner of death, destruction, and mayhem on countries deemed “a threat to our national interests”, and the US has such influence over everybody and everything, then all of the people in the world should vote in US elections. Really though, the rest of the world should “regime-change” the US just like the Allies had to with the Nazis. Because that is how good the US is to the world now.
I heard, again, someone on BBC compare the Russia-US-NATO war in Ukraine to WWII, and Putin to Hitler. Always Hitler. The US cannot move for all the Hitlers. But, if Putin is Hitler, then the US is worse than Hitler.
Why we need a third party but no matter how many petitions we sign, often can’t get them on the ballet. How did this two party system get so much power as to deny a third party that might actually represent the will of the people like Sanders tried to do.
My fervent and heartfelt wish is for Russia to have either Mr Putin or Mr Lavrov to address the UN General Assembly before Western Christmas (Orthodox Christmas is in early January) and lay it all out. They do NOT WANT to see or partake in further killing and destruction; they Never Wanted this situation in Ukraine developing. The goblins in the Biden White House and the black hearts in Western “Intelligence” are the perpetrators of this tragic travesty for both personal and nationalistic centuries-old grievances and now vendettas against the Russians.
This racial hatred combined with the ambitions of the old British Empire married to the U.S. Empire—both now in steep decline—only guarantees further wanton destruction of innocent human beings and especially now in the spirit of Christ’s seasonal celebrations is a stain on not only human progress over the centuries, but a stain on humanity ourselves. And quite possibly leading to making large parts of the world uninhabitable for centuries—by most mammalian species. I believe in the possibility of Russian leadership taking this action, an “October Surprise,” in order to not only show the world they are the noble party in this tragedy, but because of the peaceful state they seek righteously as a people. Unlike us, they know war. 27,000,000 Russian souls in WW II alone attest to this.
That’s why there is no need to rub the collective West’s nose in this, a final mass slaughter, they already see the West for what it is: a bringer of war and destruction.
So to offer an olive branch of peace talks one more time before the Big and Final Battle; this is what I believe the Russians are so very capable of, and would be sincere about in calling for a genuine end to this craven folly.
This is my Christmas wish.
As much as I’d like to agree with you on the notion of offering ‘an olive branch of peace talks one more time’ I don’t believe that there is even the tiniest of chances that anyone in the west would take it seriously for more than three seconds.
Putin and Lavrov, in effect, make the offer all the time when they remind people that they are open to negotiations.
But we have to remember that the western powers don’t want peace, they wants war – war that will destroy or subjugate Russia, nothing less. The proof of this is their unwillingness even to consider negotiations.
Peace is what everyone else wants, those of us saner people that see the true evils of western aggression and the dangers of a nuclear WWIII increasing every day.
My Christmas wish is that this is not my last Christmas!
Agree. West had plenty if chances to negotiate but refused. US wants Russian dead so they can split up their resources. Big and great country and full of soul like their poet, Akmatova who was jailed at one time. No one talks about the Americans having no real roots in the country they propose to love. They don’t love it like indigenous do, they don’t love these soils, nor its history like Palestanians do. Americans don’t have the connections, and until they fully embrace and adopt those who truly love this land, Americans will be homeless and always trying to take what isn’t theirs.
American foreign policy is controlled by Neocons. They require that the US 1) Destroy Israel’s enemies and 2) Rule the World. Until that changes talking about negotiations is nonsense. Unless Russia decides to surrender and become a vassal, the war has to go on, until Russia dictates the final terms.
Superb comment, David.
Very much appreciated.
DW
Heart.