This is an interview with the author (Prabhat Patnaik) of the article of the same name, excerpted and linked to below. The IMF’s role in the events of 2014 in Ukraine isn’t talked about as much as the EU Association agreement. – Natylie
The IMF Connection with the Ukraine Crisis by Prabhat Patnaik, 3/7/22, Network Ideas Blog
The security concerns of Russia arising from Ukraine’s intentions of joining NATO have been widely discussed in the media. But the IMF’s link with Ukraine which is a parallel issue has scarcely received much attention. The IMF, as is well-known, “opens up” economies around the world for the penetration of metropolitan capital by making them “investor-friendly” through the adoption of a host of anti-working class and anti-people (“austerity”) measures; and such “opening up” typically involves the taking over of natural resources of the countries and also their land areas by metropolitan capital. The mechanism that the IMF typically uses towards this end is the imposition of “conditionalities” for giving loans to countries that are in need of balance of payments support.
In addition, however, to this general role that the IMF plays, there are occasions when it plays a specific role, namely, that of supporting the US government’s cold war objectives. And in the case of Ukraine, it has played this specific role almost from the very beginning, apart from its general role of opening up the Ukrainian economy to metropolitan capital.
Prior to 2014 when Viktor Yanukovych was the president of Ukraine, that country had been in negotiations with the IMF as part of its trade integration with the European Union. The IMF had asked Ukraine to undertake a number of “reforms”: to cut wages; to “reform” and “reduce” the health and education sectors, which in Ukraine were major employment-generating areas; and to cut the subsidy on natural gas that was provided by the State to all Ukrainian citizens which made energy affordable for them (Bryce Green, FAIR, February 24). President Yanukovych was reluctant to implement these “reforms” which would have imposed a heavy burden on the people; he stopped negotiating with the IMF and started negotiating with Russia instead…
Read full article here.