Ukrainian News Service Says Standard of Living Is
Plummeting
By Eric Zuesse
July 24, 2015 "Information
Clearing House"
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The plunging economy of Ukraine has evidently become
so bad that Ukrainians now can even feel safe to call publicly for
stopping the war against the separatist Donbass region of the
country, and for reallocationg those military expenditures so that
Ukrainians in the non-rebelling part of the country won’t starve to
death.
On July 23rd, Dmitriy Gordon, a leading Ukrainian
journalist, is thus, for the first time, publicly urging that the
separatist region, Donbass (consisting of the Donetsk and Luhansk
districts), be officially acknowledged to be no longer part of
Ukraine. He
says that “It is better to dissociate Ukraine from the occupied
territories of Donbass, to spend that money on housing and financial
aid for immigrants [refugees from Donbass] than to keep the people
[the vast majority of residents in Donbass] who hate Ukraine [though
they actually didn’t hate Ukraine until Ukraine’s government was violently
overthrown in February 2014 and the new government bombed
them for not accepting that new government]. … I will tell an
unfashionable view. Many people think it, but not everyone will
dare to say it out loud. Ukraine does not need Donbass. It shackles
the country. … It is like a lizard that lays aside its tail. …
We need to get away from Donbass, and move into Europe without this
tail.”
The choice between guns and butter becomes easier
when there is no butter. And the butter in Ukraine is now gone. So,
butter is what Ukrainians increasingly want. Thus, for example, RIA
Novosti Ukraine news agency headlined on July 19th, “Ukraine
Today: Poverty, Absolute Poverty, and Retirees Dream of Death,”
and reported that, “Two years ago, the average salary of Ukrainians
in dollar terms amounted to 275 American money. Now it’s less than
100 dollars.”
This RIAN report says that, “Neither the President
of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko, nor Prime Minister Yatsenyuk,
nor Speaker of Rada [Parliament] Volodymyr Groisman — none of them —
expresses public concern about the lowered living standards; no one
has called to review them, much less to improve these economic
conditions.”
It goes on to say, “Expert of the Public Safety
Fund Yuri Havrylchenko believes that the current level of income of
the majority of the Ukrainian population is poverty, and retirees
are in a state of slow death from starvation. … [He says,] ‘In
Ukraine, all workers live in poverty. The level of their income
and consumption is less than 17 dollars a day. With a few
exceptions, almost all pensioners live below the absolute poverty
line, consumption is less than $5 a day. This means that they are
dying of hunger, only slowly. If they do not even have enough to
eat, then what can we say about the cost of everything else?’”
Mr. Gordon, for his part, might be attacked for
urging separation, if he were blaming Ukraine for the civil war; so,
he instead blames the residents of Donbass (the
direct victims of the coup-installed government), as the cause
of Ukrainians’ misery. He says: “For the most part residents of the
region adhere to pro-Russian views. They hate Ukrainians, don’t want
to speak Ukrainian, and they reject Ukrainian and European values.”
He adds, “Criminal psychology is inherent in so
many people there … It is no accident Yanukovych was elected so much
at the mercy of bandits in the Donetsk region.” Yanukovych had won more
than 90% of the votes that were cast in Donbass.
Yanukovych had turned down the offer from the
European Union because the economists at the Ukraininian Academy of
Sciences had calculated that the EU’s offer would
cost Ukraine $160 billion.
Investigative historian Eric
Zuesse is the author, most
recently, of They’re
Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records,
1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S
VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.