If you want in on the action, get to know this woman:
Natalie Jaresko has joined UkraineInvest as a Strategic Advisor on a pro-bono basis.Natalie Jaresko is former Minister of Finance of🇺🇦.She is an American-born Ukrainian international finance executive with over 30 years experience in the public, private, non-governmental sectors. pic.twitter.com/Ri6VxmLURV
— UkraineInvest (@UAInvestTeam) February 21, 2023
She has an amazing ability to end up where the loot is.
The headline link from Laura Ruggeri's Medium site, February 24:
Immediately after the start of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, key players in the coalition supporting Ukraine, as well as transatlantic financial institutions and think tanks, were already discussing Ukraine’s reconstruction. They invariably framed it as a historic opportunity for the country: like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Ukraine would become a beacon of freedom, democracy and rule-of-law, a testimonial for Build Back Better, a green and digital economy success story; the country would leapfrog several stages of economic and governmental development and its economic growth would replicate Germany’s post-war boom. Unsurprisingly, the more recent and far less inspiring examples of Western-led ‘reconstruction’ in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan didn’t deserve mention.
The speed with which fantastical narratives of recovery and reconstruction were churned out shouldn’t surprise anyone: they had been concocted years earlier as part of several ‘reform plans’ for Ukraine. One could say they are hardwired into the overall strategy of this proxy war against Russia and the storytellers are directly or indirectly linked to governments and lobbies that are involved both in the destruction of Ukraine and the Ukrainization of Europe, a process designed to fully control, militarize and plunder the Old World.
There is little doubt that Ukraine will need rebuilding once the war eventually ends, but ‘destruction’ and ‘reconstruction’ mean different things to different people in different contexts.
For instance, there is strong disagreement as to what constitutes ‘destruction’, when the ‘destruction’ of Ukraine started and who should be blamed for it. The semantic field, like history, is a contested territory.
Those who have been following Ukrainian affairs without ideological prejudice, and with a modicum of intellectual honesty, know that at the time of the dissolution of the USSR, Ukraine was an economic powerhouse, the third industrial power of the Soviet Union after Russia and Belarus, and its breadbasket. The Soviet republic had aerospace, automobile and machine tool industries, well-developed mining, metallurgical and agricultural sectors, nuclear, oil refining and petrochemical plants, tourism and commercial infrastructures and the largest shipbuilding centre in the USSR.
Steps along a continuum of destruction
Since its independence in 1991, Ukraine’s GDP has lagged behind the level it reached in Soviet times, industry declined, and the population decreased by about 14.5 million people in 30 years due to emigration and the lowest birth rate in Europe. Ukraine has also become the third largest IMF debtor and Europe’s poorest country. These negative records cannot be blamed solely on Ukraine’s systemic and staggering corruption: the corrupt networks bleeding Ukraine are truly transnational.
Ukraine was targeted by two colour revolutions that led to regime change and civil war, and was wrestled away from its largest economic partner, Russia. Its history was erased and rewritten, neoliberal prescriptions destroyed its economic and social fabric and led to a neocolonial form of governance.
Ukraine joined Europe’s nefarious Eastern Partnership(1) in 2009 and has been teeming with Western NGOs, economic and political advisers since its independence. The country’s indentured servitude and captivity to Western interests was cemented after the last Ukrainian government to object to the IMF’s harsh conditions was overthrown by a U.S.-sponsored coup in 2014.
On 10 December, 2013, Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich stated that the conditions set by the IMF for loan approval were unacceptable: “I had a conversation with U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, who told me that the issue of the IMF loan has almost been solved, but I told him that if the conditions remained we did not need such loans”. He then broke off negotiations with the IMF and turned to Russia for financial assistance. It was the sensible thing to do, but cost him dearly. You can’t break the shackles of IMF debt with impunity: not only does this lender of last resort impose its usual shock therapy of austerity, deregulation, and privatization so that the vultures can swoop in, it also furthers and protects U.S. interests.
If those who destroyed a country are allowed to be involved in its reconstruction, then reconstruction will inevitably be just a point on the continuum of conquest, occupation and looting, but with better optics. Destruction produces that blank slate on which the occupier can write his own rules: “To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname empire: they make a desolation and they call it peace”. Tacitus knew both the reality and the spin of Roman imperialism. One can only wonder if those who talk about ‘reconstruction’, ‘recovery’, ‘reform’, ‘rules-based order’, ‘reset’ or whatever buzzword is fashionable at the moment are aware of the brutal reality or truly believe their own propaganda. In any case, they promise a future utopia worth killing and dying for....
....MUCH MORE
Possibly also of interest:
"Patronage" for investorsZelensky said Ukraine would have a “special, historically significant model of rebuilding,” in which companies and countries could choose a specific region or mine to rebuild....
And though not mentioned by name, Madame Jaresko was a primary character in the story of Templeton's Ukrainian bond doings that we highlighted in last year's "Sovereign Debt: 'Ukraine in default according to Fitch and S&P'".
She was mentioned by name in 2014's ""The Corporate Takeover of Ukrainian Agriculture"".
