leggy leftist
3rd March 2009, 16:26
From the Independent:
When the United States sneezed, Old Europe's banks caught a heavy cold, and New Europe's mini-tiger economies have succumbed, one by one, to a nasty bout of flu. But in the so-called neighbourhood states immediately to the east, chief among them Ukraine, pneumonia threatens – and the experts' prognosis is not good.
International financiers will say, without wanting to be quoted, that Ukraine is already, for all practical purposes, bankrupt. They do not like the D-word, default, though that is clearly on their mind. Ukrainian officials like the word still less, smacking as it does of national humiliation. But the taboo was broken in recent days, when a senior IMF official, Marek Belka, director of the fund's European department, was quoted in the Ukrainian press as rejecting that idea. Which, in many Ukrainian minds, only made the prospect more real.
D-day – in almost every sense – could come as early as next Saturday when Ukraine has to pay its next instalment for Russian gas deliveries under the agreement painfully negotiated in January. It is grimly forecast that Kiev will not be able to pay, so triggering a new cut-off. Even if this particular Armageddon is averted, there is still April – when the warmer days of spring will still be only on the horizon.
Ukraine's precarious financial position is compounded by its uncertain relations with the IMF. Kiev is still waiting for the second tranche of an agreed IMF credit, postponed for guarantees about how it will be used, after a significant proportion of the first tranche vanished – so it is said – in record time from the accounts where it had been deposited.
Corruption at almost every level is identified as Ukraine's number one problem. It is an affliction that has grown in the four years since the pro-democracy street protests that escalated into the Orange Revolution and propelled the pro-Western and pro-market pairing of Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Timoshenko to power.
When the United States sneezed, Old Europe's banks caught a heavy cold, and New Europe's mini-tiger economies have succumbed, one by one, to a nasty bout of flu. But in the so-called neighbourhood states immediately to the east, chief among them Ukraine, pneumonia threatens – and the experts' prognosis is not good.
International financiers will say, without wanting to be quoted, that Ukraine is already, for all practical purposes, bankrupt. They do not like the D-word, default, though that is clearly on their mind. Ukrainian officials like the word still less, smacking as it does of national humiliation. But the taboo was broken in recent days, when a senior IMF official, Marek Belka, director of the fund's European department, was quoted in the Ukrainian press as rejecting that idea. Which, in many Ukrainian minds, only made the prospect more real.
D-day – in almost every sense – could come as early as next Saturday when Ukraine has to pay its next instalment for Russian gas deliveries under the agreement painfully negotiated in January. It is grimly forecast that Kiev will not be able to pay, so triggering a new cut-off. Even if this particular Armageddon is averted, there is still April – when the warmer days of spring will still be only on the horizon.
Ukraine's precarious financial position is compounded by its uncertain relations with the IMF. Kiev is still waiting for the second tranche of an agreed IMF credit, postponed for guarantees about how it will be used, after a significant proportion of the first tranche vanished – so it is said – in record time from the accounts where it had been deposited.
Corruption at almost every level is identified as Ukraine's number one problem. It is an affliction that has grown in the four years since the pro-democracy street protests that escalated into the Orange Revolution and propelled the pro-Western and pro-market pairing of Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Timoshenko to power.