Most are on the wrong side of this Trump/Zelensky dust-up

 by Scott Creighton

UPDATE: Good on Consortium News. They get it.  Trump, Vance School Zelensky on Reality of His War

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Folks are out there cooking up whatever boot-licking take they can come up with to praise 'Man of the People' Zelensky after yesterday's little scene with Trump and Vance in the White House.

And as they do they sit back and watch the bots click their subscribe buttons like it's going out of style.

Now, Trump came across like a petulant little spoiled brat because that is what he is and yeah, his damn near criminal 'give us the resources' scheme is about as deplorable as his meme coin rug pull was and will be.

All that is true. But go read the transcript. It was Zelensky who came there with an agenda. He says he's making Ukraine 'Open for Business' as they drop the economic brick on the heads of their own people. But then he makes one thing clear... in the friendly presser:

he wants to take back Donbass and Crimea and that is not negotiable to him. No land for peace. 

Crimea held a referendum and they left Ukraine and went back to Russia after ObamaGod regime changed the place with a bloody coup.

Donbass is a separatist area which has also declared themselves done with Ukraine for the same reasons. 

Zelensky is not getting either of them back and he knows it but he will keep the war going as long as he can because all sorts of money and opportunity for the oligarchs keep popping up as long as it goes on.

Ukraine Shouldn’t Become a Neoliberal Laboratory

from Jacobin

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky hesitated quite some time before signing his country’s new labor law on August 17, 2022. Already a month earlier, the national parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, had passed the bill known by the number 5371. In the sober, deceptive language of bureaucracy, it is supposed to simplify relations between employers and employees. In reality, it implies a complete flexibilization of the labor market, to the detriment of workers.

Zelensky’s hesitation may have owed to pressure from Ukrainian trade unions as well as from abroad. Even the International Trade Union Confederation, which unites more than 200 million workers worldwide, protested against the law. “It is grotesque that Ukrainian workers, who defend the country and care for the injured, sick and displaced are now being attacked by their own parliament,” General Secretary Sharan Burrow said in a statement.

Ukraine’s digital minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, for his part, did not hesitate for long, picking up the pen on July 4. At the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Lugano, Switzerland, he signed an agreement with the mobile and cable network companies Kyivstar, Vodafone, and Datagroup-Volia on the digitization of Ukraine. In the war, he said, there is an opportunity to digitally develop Ukraine into the most advanced state in the world. “It’s an experiment, a revolution. An opportunity for you, your companies, and the whole world!” Fedorov explained.

The new labor law and the Recovery Conference are both indicators of the direction Ukraine could take during and after Russia’s war. Ukraine risks becoming a neoliberal laboratory with as few labor regulations as possible — and with the best possible conditions for private companies that want to profit from reconstruction...

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The neoliberal battle for Ukraine’s reconstruction

The New Statesman

At a breakfast discussion at Davos in January 2023, the BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said that Ukraine’s postwar recovery could become “a beacon to the rest of the world about the power of capitalism”. The scene could have been a parody of Russian propaganda: the head of an American asset firm telling a rapt crowd of the Western business and political elite that Ukraine’s reconstruction would not only be a cash cow but would be touted as a capitalist success story – presumably something to congratulate themselves about at future breakfasts in Davos. For Fink, Ukraine’s reconstruction presented not just a business opportunity but an ideological one. If Western political leaders saw the war in Ukraine as an occasion to reinvigorate EU and Nato enlargement, then Fink and his ilk viewed it as an opportunity to revive a waning faith in capitalism.

The idea sounds somehow familiar. Fink’s words reflect the continuation of a more than 30-year project adopted by – and in some ways, imposed on – Ukraine and its neighbours. The “disaster capitalism” of the current war was preceded by the administration of 1990s “shock therapy”, a series of radical neoliberal reforms following the fall of the Soviet Union, from which the country never fully recovered. The current war has introduced an innovation on the old formula: the fusion of neoliberal economic policies with cowboy advances in technology, particularly artificial intelligence (AI) and digitalisation. Wartime Ukraine has already seen a dramatic influx of Western donor funds, consultants, experts, engineers and Silicon Valley venture capital. The result has been radical experiments in the introduction of AI-enhanced platforms for mine clearance and the rapid collation of commercial satellite data (both supplied by Peter Thiel’s Palantir); and economic strategies like the “fast state”, a Ukrainian government proposal that envisions a state so streamlined that it “disappears in one’s own efficiency”.

Ukraine’s reconstruction will be an unimaginably daunting task. The World Bank recently assessed that it would cost close to $500bn. Beyond the staggering cost in human life, war has devastated the economy: in the first year of the conflict, the country lost between 30-35 per cent of its GDP. Poverty more than quadrupled and one in three families are now food insecure. Over 15 per cent of Ukraine’s territory – comprising some of the most fertile farmland on Earth – is now contaminated with landmines and unexploded ordnance...

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Zelensky: Ukraine to help launch equivalent of Diia in other countries

from KI

President Volodymyr Zelensky shared during his nightly address on June 2 that Ukraine was helping other countries in Europe, Latin America, and Africa to develop the equivalent of Diia, the state mobile application for government services.

Dubbed "the state in a smartphone," Diia was launched by the Digital Transformation Ministry in 2020.

Ukrainians can access digitized versions of various official documents, including their passport, driver's license, vehicle registration, or tax ID. It is also possible to do things like register a business or the birth of one's child on the app.

Digital transformation was also one of the main topics of discussion during Estonian President Alar Karis' visit to Kyiv on June 2, according to the President's Office.

"Previously, Ukrainians looked to Estonia as an example in the development of digital solutions," Zelensky said...

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notes on Zelensky Trump Dust Up

 

Below the fold is the transcript of the first part of the meeting between President Donald Trump and Zelensky in 2019. 

Here is the skirmish from yesterday.

 

Ukraine bans largest opposition party

from WSWS

A Ukrainian court has officially banned the activities of the country’s largest opposition party, the Opposition Platform—For Life party.

The decision was handed down by the Administrative Court of Appeals No. 8 on June 20 in Lviv and effectively upheld President Volodymyr Zelensky’s banning of 11 political parties that Kiev regarded as “anti-Ukrainian” and “collaborationists” earlier in March. The measure was then approved by the Ukrainian parliament in May.

Ten other pro-Russian and left-wing parties were included in Zelensky’s ban, among them the Socialist Party of Ukraine and the Party of Shariy led by the popular Youtube blogger Anatoly Shariy.

In addition to legally banning the party’s activities, the court also stated that the party’s property and assets will be confiscated by the State Treasury. ..

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Zelenskyy has consolidated Ukraine's TV outlets and dissolved rival political parties

from NPR

President Zelenskyy has consolidated all TV platforms in Ukraine into one state broadcast and restricted political rivals. Political opposition fears such civil liberty constraints could continue.

Ukraine has had to take extraordinary measures to fight Russia's invasion. Among them, the government has consolidated the country's television outlets and dissolved rival political parties. It says it needs to do this to maintain a united front in fighting Russia. NPR's Emily Feng reports from Kyiv...

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Pandora Papers Reveal Offshore Holdings of Ukrainian President and his Inner Circle

from OCCRP

Actor Volodymyr Zelensky stormed to the Ukrainian presidency in 2019 on a wave of public anger against the country’s political class, including previous leaders who used secret companies to stash their wealth overseas.

Now, leaked documents prove that Zelensky and his inner circle have had their own network of offshore companies. Two belonging to the president’s partners were used to buy expensive property in London.

The revelations come from documents in the Pandora Papers, millions of files from 14 offshore service providers leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and shared with partners around the world including OCCRP.

The documents show that Zelensky and his partners in a television production company, Kvartal 95, set up a network of offshore firms dating back to at least 2012, the year the company began making regular content for TV stations owned by Ihor Kolomoisky, an oligarch dogged by allegations of multi-billion-dollar fraud. The offshores were also used by Zelensky associates to purchase and own three prime properties in the center of London...

Zelensky capitalized on widespread public anger at corruption, but his 2019 campaign was dogged by doubts over his anti-graft bona fides, given that his campaign was boosted by media belonging to Kolomoisky — who is accused of stealing US$5.5 billion from his own bank and funneling it offshore in concert with his partner, Hennadiy Boholiubov.

In the heat of the campaign, a political ally of incumbent President Petro Poroshenko published a chart on Facebook purporting to show that Zelensky and his television production partners were beneficiaries of a web of offshore firms that allegedly received $41 million in funds from Kolomoisky’s Privatbank.

That ally, Volodymyr Ariev, didn’t provide evidence, and his accusations have never been proven. But the Pandora Papers show that at least some of the details in this alleged scheme correspond to reality. The leaked documents show information on 10 companies in the network that match structures detailed in Ariev’s chart...

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