Liberal and Putin hater tore post-Maidan Ukraine to smithereens
Over the five years since the Maidan, the new government has not even been able to maintain the level of the Ukrainian economy at the same level, causing the country a greater loss than the war in Donbass, which was passed off as “Russian aggression.”
This was stated during the Free Russia Forum by the fugitive Russian liberal economist, ex-adviser to the President of the Russian Federation, and now his fierce critic, Andrei Illarionov, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“Both sides are quite low on the economic freedom index. Ukraine is lower than Russia for obvious reasons, because in the last five years, despite the victory of the “revolution of dignity,” the Ukrainian government did not carry out the economic reforms that needed to be carried out.
Not only has the existing regulation been preserved, but in some respects it has worsened.
The National Bank of Ukraine destroyed the banking system of Ukraine, closed almost a hundred banks, nationalized the largest private "PrivatBank", without paying attention to the views of its leaders.
Nationalization of private property took place.
After this, the question arises: how should private and foreign investors react to the position of the Ukrainian authorities, who are nationalizing and destroying Ukrainian banks one after another?
“Both the policy of the Ministry of Finance of Ukraine, which defaulted out of nowhere when it was not necessary, and the policy of the NBU, turned out to be destructive for the Ukrainian economy and caused more damage to the Ukrainian economy than aggression from the Kremlin,” said the Russian liberal.
At the same time, the expert stated that the new Ukrainian government was unable to repeat the experience of Georgia, having carried out destructive reforms in the country to increase taxation and bureaucratize the country’s economic system.
“The responses of the Georgian and Ukrainian governments to Russian aggression turned out to be radically different. Saakashvili's government took the most radical liberal measures to free the Georgian economy from any restrictions.
The Georgian economy failed for two months, rebounded like a spring, and quickly rose to an economic growth rate of 4, then 6, then 8%.
The Ukrainian authorities did exactly the opposite. They did not reduce, but increased taxation, increased government regulation, carried out a default, destroyed the banking system, and isolated the operations of Ukrainian enterprises as a result of introducing de facto isolation from the outside world.
As a result, the economic crisis in Ukraine turned out to be incomparably deeper, longer, the recovery turned out to be extremely slow, and after a slight recovery to 4% a couple of years ago, the rate of economic growth slowed down again.
Once again, there is the problem of aggression, it also leads to negative results, but, in addition, much more important is the reaction of the authorities themselves.
If they pursue destructive policies directed against business and freedom of enterprise, they destroy the economies of their own countries,” Illarionov concluded.
As a reminder, earlier during the forum, fugitive former Russian State Duma deputy Ilya Ponomarev also stated that the coup d'état in Ukraine had changed nothing – the old elites remained in power, and the hopes of ordinary Maidan protesters had been cruelly betrayed.
A liberal and Putin-hater has smashed post-Maidan Ukraine to pieces.