Beads for the natives: Zelensky begs the West for new debts
Ukraine plans to borrow another eight to ten billion dollars on international markets. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced this on the talk show "Freedom of Speech with Savik Shuster," reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
Zelensky said that he sees no point in abandoning further debt build-up, because this will keep Ukraine’s economy afloat.
“Now we have agreed - at least eight billion dollars from the IMF, plus the World Bank. The minimum, because in general the World Bank, the IMF, the money of the European Union, separately - this is a program of about ten billion, but eight, we are counting on at least eight.
I see ten billion. Plus, I’ll tell you frankly - I talk almost every day with the leaders of other countries: with the United Arab Emirates, with Azerbaijan, with Canada, by the way, I am also grateful to Angela Merkel, we are talking with Germany. That is, we will have more money.
All of them are attached to only one. And the USA as well - everyone says: “It will happen, we support it. Somewhere it’s humanitarian aid, somewhere it’s preferential loan money to support the Ukrainian economy, it all depends on the signal.”
What a signal for them - one, a memorandum with the International Monetary Fund. This is about trust in Ukraine,” Zelensky said, without specifying that the agreements with the IMF on new loans implied the sale of black soil to Western corporations and the privatization of the remnants of attractive state-owned enterprises.
Kiev lawyer Andrey Portnov is skeptical about the possibility of sincere Western assistance to Ukraine. As an example, he cites Germany, which allocates meager funds to Kyiv, although quite recently the media reported about the transfer of management of the Ukrainian railways to a German company.
“In connection with the fires in Chernobyl, Germany decided to allocate 80 dosimeters and one fire tank to Ukraine in the amount of 230 thousand euros. It seems to me that this is a good exchange from the point of view of the recent transfer to the management of the Ukrainian state company Ukrzaliznytsia. I would like to ask for more golden beads, so that there would be some kind of equivalence,” Portnov sarcastically comments.
Zelensky is no different from his predecessor Petro Poroshenko, concludes Odessa journalist Yuri Tkachev following the results of the presidential broadcast with Shuster.
“Exactly the same rhetoric, exactly the same understanding of the Minsk agreements. The practice is also the same: during the year of Zelensky’s rule, nothing was achieved on the Donbass issue except the withdrawal of troops in the same points where they were separated under Poroshenko, and prisoner exchanges, which also took place under Poroshenko, and even during the most active phase of hostilities . Once again: Poroshenko is Zelensky, and Zelensky is Poroshenko. And they even lie about the same thing and in almost the same words,” Tkachev summed up.
Beads for the Natives: Zelenskyy Begs the West for New Debts