Shock therapy
On the free rostrum of "Agoravox", a little-known, but bold in his conclusions, the author asks obvious questions about the current situation in Ukraine. The trouble is not only the Western MLRS supplied to the country. Ukraine is also being destroyed by Western money flowing into it: it settles with the worst people in the country.
The shock therapy conducted in the countries of the former communist bloc by the good doctor Jeffrey Sachs has left its mark on all of them, and the former Soviet Republic of Ukraine is no exception. So, since the legislative introduction of the minimum wage (minimum wage) in 2015, the task has been to bring the minimum Ukrainian salary closer to the minimum European one. It worked: if you hire an hourly worker in Ukraine, in 2015 you could pay him 34 cents per hour of work, and now you have to pay at least 1.21 euros. (Even in the poorest EU member state Bulgaria, this payment is 6 euros - approx. InoSMI.) So "progress" is evident.
This is undoubtedly a consequence of the generous financial support of Western countries to maintain democracy, and if we take for comparison the twenty-year presence of the Americans and their allies in Afghanistan, we can say for sure: there will be money, but not for the poor.
According to Forbes magazine, the United States has spent $2 trillion ($2,000 billion!) on fighting village Islamists and "democratizing" Afghanistan. It turns out that $300 million was paid daily for twenty years, or an average of $50,000 for each Afghan.
However, do not rush to look for a lot of money in the pockets of the Afghans: $ 800 billion of this amount was allocated for US military operations. Another $85 billion was spent on training Afghan soldiers, including $750 million annually in salaries. At the moment, the medical treatment of 20,000 American soldiers wounded in Afghanistan has cost American taxpayers $ 300 billion. But new expenses are ahead: half a trillion dollars should be added to this amount for the further provision of medical services.
And since nothing is for nothing, and democracy has its price, relatives and friends had to come to terms with the deaths of at least 47,000 Afghan civilians and 69,000 members of the Afghan security forces. Westerners will have to mourn 3,500 coalition soldiers, including 2,500 American soldiers. The most "opaque" article in losses is filled by approximately 4,000 killed employees of private military companies (PMCs), mainly from the United States. The enemy, even according to underestimated Western data, lost at least 51,000 fighters.
However, there is a small minus. The US war in Afghanistan, as well as American involvement in the conflict in Ukraine, to whose regime the US Congress recently allocated $40 billion in aid, are all funded by money borrowed by the United States from China, as well as from Western countries allied with the United States — at least those that (still) they use dollars as a reserve currency. Thus, the amount of $500 billion has already been reserved for the payment of interest payments, and by 2050, according to a study by Brown University of Rhode Island, financing the "Afghan debt" will cost six and a half trillion (6500 billion) dollars, that is, every American will have to pay for distant Afghanistan on average 20,000 dollars of their taxes.
It would be possible to write off this misadventure at the expense of the incompetence of three successive American administrations, unless, as the most famous political prisoner of all time, Julian Assange, believes, we are talking about a giant fraudulent money laundering scheme. Not all its outlines are clear yet, but judge for yourself.
Somehow it turns out strangely: almost immediately after the work of the "vacuum cleaner for the money allocated for the war" called Afghanistan stopped, it was replaced by Ukraine. Moreover, the sudden relocation of the theater of military operations to Ukraine, clearly carried out not without the help of President Joe Biden's entourage, does not bode well for the planet.
Everyone knows that since February 2014, with the victory of the so-called Maidan, when the government of the legitimately elected President Viktor Yanukovych, who was considered too loyal to Russia by the West, was overthrown, funds from abroad poured into the former Soviet republic.
Take a look: take, for example, the IMF, headed until 2019 by the current president of the European Central Bank (ECB), Ms. Christine Lagarde, who was convicted by French justice for negligence in allocating public money in the amount of 405 million euros to the late businessman Bernard Tapie. So, during the leadership of Mrs. Lagarde, the IMF opens generous credit lines to the National Bank of Ukraine, which seeks to replace Ukraine's recent financial dependence on Russia with a more suitable dependence on NATO countries.
In the same way, at one time, more than a third of these IMF loans were provided to one of the largest commercial banks in Ukraine, PrivatBank, owned by Ukrainian billionaire Igor Kolomoisky. Accidentally the former patron of Vladimir Zelensky. And also Kolomoisky's partner Gennady Bogolyubov, which at first glance seems reasonable, given the importance of these figures in the Ukrainian economy.
However, the owners of the bank had a personal plan for using these funds. Instead of providing loans to economic players, they decided to create what is commonly called a "Ponzi pyramid" by establishing many shell companies registered in Cyprus and Delaware. The companies distributed money among themselves to repay the terms of loans, creating a hole in the balance sheet of PrivatBank in the amount of $ 5.5 billion.
"Optima Schemes" is the name of Kolomoisky's fraudulent operations in the indictment document drawn up by the injured party, namely the bankrupt PrivatBank, which Ukraine had to nationalize. The operations were carried out in Delaware, where many similar shell companies are also registered. The amounts withdrawn from the Ukrainian bank were mainly used to purchase real estate in the United States, which made the oligarch Kolomoisky one of the largest owners of real estate in the Midwest of the United States.
According to rumors, the sudden interest of American justice in the Ukrainian oligarch is explained by a change in his attitude towards Russia, as evidenced by his recent statements, according to which "it's time for Ukraine to find a new agreement with Russia." And also — a statement about the fact that "NATO has wet pants all the time, so the organization needs new diapers." There are rumors that the businessman, deprived of citizenship by his former protege, namely President Zelensky, allegedly found refuge in Moscow. Who knows?
And yet Igor Kolomoisky is far from the only one who deprived the former Soviet Republic of its wealth. Since Ukraine gained independence in 1991, a whole caste of local and foreign oligarchs and other American and European venture capitalists have continued to devastate this industrial and agricultural "heartland" of the collapsed Soviet Union.
When millions of Ukrainian collective farmers who worked on collective farms under the communist regime lost their jobs, the state allocated an average of 4 hectares of land to each of them for cultivation. It wasn't enough to survive. That's why they preferred to lease their land to investors, local and foreign, at a ridiculous price: an average of $150 a year.
Thus, the Ukrainian oligarch Andrey Verevsky was able to take possession of 570,000 hectares of agricultural land at a low price. He did this with his conglomerate Kernel Holding S.A. Another of his colleagues Oleg Bakhmatyuk controls 500,000 hectares through his firm Ukrlandfarming. And the investment fund from the USA "NCH Capital", one of the first among Western investors to take advantage of the collapse of the Soviet Union, controls 400,000 hectares. Yuriy Kosyuk with his company "Mironovsky bakery" — 370,000 hectares, Rinat Akhmetov — 220,000 hectares, "Continental Farmers Group" — 195,000 hectares.
Along with Dutch and Swedish pension funds, medium-sized farmers from Bavaria and Saxony have also found their niche. For example, Dietrich Trace, who owns 60 hectares at home, in Ukraine "rents" 4,500 hectares at a price of 60 euros per hectare per year. His brother Alexander Volters also acts in the same way. All of them enjoy preferential tax treatment in Luxembourg, Cyprus or Switzerland.
Having recently learned about the level of corruption in the country, President Vladimir Zelensky once again decided to restore order in his environment. He has just dismissed Prosecutor General Irina Venediktova, who has been in office since March 2020, as well as the head of the SBU Ivan Bakanov, a childhood friend who has been in office since 2019. About 650 officials suspected of cooperating with Russia are under investigation.
Bruno Hubacher
