Moscow may not want to feed a defeated Ukraine

Russia “may offer” to Ukraine a Korean solution to end the war, said, this week, Alexei Danilov, head of the Ukrainian Council for Security and Defense. That means ending the hostilities along the present frontline like it happened at the end of the Korean War (1950-53). It also means signing no peace treaty with a final and irrevocable borderline, but only an armistice, which, in the case of Korea, is technically in force even now. Danilov must be joking, was the overwhelming response from Russia. First, nobody here was offering Kyiv any solutions. Second, the Ukrainian regime has broken so many promises, including the Minsk agreements for the end of their civil war, that it cannot be trusted. Third, if we do sign anything, then the current frontline is definitely not where the war should end. My good (and radical) friend professor Sergei Markov has, surprisingly, offered the mildest of the private ideas of an acceptable solution. He says: there is a chain of relatively big cities along the Dnepr River, with their traditionally pro-Russian population. We take one of them, and we’ll be getting all kinds of offers for negotiations. We take two, and negotiations will start. We dislike the course of negotiations and take three cities, and European leaders will form a beeline to Moscow. Other speakers are not so soft and say that only the physical military control over most parts of Ukraine may bring the West to the negotiating table. And it was exactly at that moment that the economic experts rushed in, with the general idea that Moscow is not going to like the prospect of feeding the defeated Ukraine, which is a real ruin by now. So we don’t need these territories at all. The experts are mostly Ukrainian, the ones that have worked there in different governments or think tanks, and then had to move to Russia, fearing repressions. They might be the only ones able to decipher disjointed data coming from Ukraine. The first big problem is about the exact number of people still living in that country. Officially there are about 34-35 million. But Ukrainian experts in Russia are saying that’s impossible, considering the population drain of half a million people annually since 2015, soon after the start of the civil war. Population, in fact, was going down ever since 1994. But the year 2022 gave the new figures. Moscow’s official statistic says that “over 5 million” Ukrainians fled to Russia. That’s mostly the ones who used to live in the east of the country. At the same time, the UN data says that 6.3 million people from Ukraine went West, to Europe. So Larisa Shesler, the human rights activist, estimates the real population of Ukraine as 18-20 million, not 40 million, as it used to be in 1990s. And even these people don’t have many jobs and cannot pay too much of taxes. The pride of Ukrainian industries and the general hi-tech potential were mostly in the East, and many of these areas are incorporated into Russia now. Their rebellion cut the East from the West as early as 2014. It’s hard to imagine the state of the national budget, but the officials from Kyiv are saying that the country needs foreign aid of about $4-5 billion every month just to keep the budget alive. For a Ukrainian, going to the army is probably the best option. A soldier in the frontline is paid a monthly sum equal to $2,700, but that money does not necessarily originate from the budget. Here the economists need to look at the huge figures of Western military aid (50 billion are being marked for 2023 only from the American coffers). All in all, uncounted billions will have to be moved to that country to keep it afloat. So there may not be too many people in Russia willing to own that treasure, all we need is to defuse the constant military threat from Ukraine, which was growing fast in the previous years. It seems that Moscow’s main weapon in the ongoing struggle is targeted bombings of Ukrainian infrastructure, which is only mirroring what the Ukrainians did (and still do) all these years in the East of their own former territories. To sum it up, if Europe and America are willing to upkeep Ukraine as a perpetual threat against Russia, then they’ll have to pay a lot. And here we may want to remember that Ukraine had a chance of being a prospering economy by now. The year was 2013, early December when the president of Ukraine Victor Yanukovitch visited China. Several big contracts have been signed, including one for building a huge seaport for oceanic vessels in Crimea, at that time firmly in Ukrainian possession. That place could have become an integral part of the Chinese Belt & Road initiative, which presumes to create a logistic chain of roads and terminals for all kinds of East-West trade. Chinese investments were also to go into Ukrainian agriculture, and hi-tech, including space exploration, etc. So, in December of 2013, it suddenly became clear that Ukraine had just solved all its economic problems and got its development direction for years to come, and so, needed not a similar, but much less promising package of agreements with Europe. And, of course, when that happened, a violent coup d’etat wrecked Kyiv in early 2014, and President Yanukovitch had to flee to Russia, fearing for his life. A fierce resistance started in the east of the country, the paramilitary battalions marched there to instil fear in the local Russian-speaking and Russia-oriented population, and that’s how the Ukrainian civil war began, lasting for eight years. Just to think that the total sum of the Chinese money allocated for launching Ukraine on the way to an economic miracle did not exceed $10 billion. Dmitry Kosyrev is a columnist for the Russian State agency website ria.ru, as well as for other publications. Views expressed are personal. Read all the Latest News, Trending News, Cricket News, Bollywood News, India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.