As a state, Ukraine is vitally – or fatally – dependent on the West: As the Ukrainian anti-corruption activist Martina Bohuslavets notes in the staunchly patriotic Ukrainska Pravda, Kiev’s “international partners finance not only the reconstruction of critical infrastructure, but also all…pensions, public employee salaries, and, in general the country’s ability to keep going.”
This is no exaggeration. Consider some figures from The Economist: The Ukrainian state budget for this year amounts to $87 billion; expected tax revenues – $46 billion. “The rest,” the British champion of uncompromising struggle against Russia concludes, “must be filled by foreign aid or borrowing.”
To a large extent, this Western financial support has been forthcoming. According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, which tracks these funds systematically, between January 2022 and April of this year, the West as a whole had funded Ukraine to the tune of €176 billion in already allocated aid. In addition, there is €100 billion in commitments that has not yet been allocated. It is true that some aid figures are politically inflated. The recent US package of $61 billion, for instance, really only amounts to $31.5 billion that is actually going to Ukraine; the rest is, in essence, a gift to America’s own Department of Defense. Yet there can be no doubt that, without Western funding, Kiev would have to stop the war and many ordinary peace-time state operations as well.
Against this backdrop, it would seem that Ukraine’s Western donors should have an extraordinary degree of leverage over the Zelensky regime. But things are more complicated, as a recent ouster has shown. On June 10, Mustafa Nayyem resigned from his position as head of Ukraine’s State Agency for Reconstruction and Infrastructure Development. The Reconstruction Agency, which has grown out of the country’s bureaucracy for maintaining roads, highways, and bridges, has a broad remit. With a budget worth $2.5 billion of foreign aid, its tasks now also include, for instance, the maintenance and repair of water supply systems, the building of military fortifications and protections to shield energy structures from Russian aerial attacks.
Clearly, this is an important office. As it happens, Nayyem resigned........