Even as the latest Ukraine Defense Contact Group for weapons supplies to Ukraine met at NATO’s Ramstein AFB Jan. 21-22, officials of the Zelenskyy regime were publicly discussing the need for a “financial Ramstein” to carry the bag of Ukraine’s war budget indefinitely.
In this context, Bloomberg News reported Jan. 26 that the IMF is readying a $16 billion package of loans for NATO’s favorite marcher-lord country, “to provide a catalyst for more international funding"; it will also, according to Bloomberg, require “Ukraine’s donors and creditors ensuring the sustainability of the country’s debt.” Its debt is clearly unsustainable by its shrunken economy under the war conditions, so this means, essentially, still more U.S. and German aid to Ukraine, but in the form of guarantees for the IMF loans. The United States Treasury has always been able to dominate the IMF, and still does.
The “anti-corruption purge” just carried out in Ukraine may have been related to approval of this package, but corruption has hardly mattered to the IMF since the 2014 Maidan coup, whether under Christine Lagarde or Kristalina Georgieva as Managing Director; what has mattered is austerity against Ukraine’s working population and economy.
The IMF provided a $17 billion loan package to Ukraine in 2014. Loans from NATO countries nearly doubled that. With Vice President Joe Biden acting as proconsul for Ukraine, the U.S. Treasury sent its own American agent of austerity to be Ukraine’s Finance Minister: a Chicago banker with State Department experience, Natalie Jaresko. Ukraine’s private creditors led by Franklin Templeton funds were essentially told to wait indefinitely for payments on another $15 billion. Jaresko proved skillful at self-dealing both money and control of a data company from that position, as detailed by Max Blumenthal in the Grayzone on Dec. 23, 2022. She got the Ukrainian GDP to shrink 10%, the currency floated, and Ukrainian workers’ monthly salaries down to an average $194/month equivalent, while their energy costs of living rose by half, according to an analysis in Foreign Policy in late September 2014, seven months after the Maidan coup.
Thus NATO fights to destroy Russia’s economy, to the last Ukrainian worker, and the last U.S. taxpayer.
Jaresko in 2017 moved on to head the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico, clamping a vise on any possible recovery, or economic development of the island. She wrapped up that economic disaster in 2022, and on Dec. 23, 2022 led a “Ukrainian diaspora” team to cheer Zelenskyy from the U.S. House of Representatives gallery.
