et’s assume peace in Ukraine—granted, a very big-ticket axiom. In our premise, we may include the speculation that Ukraine has ceded, de facto if not formally, at least some of the territory conquered by Russia in the course of the last three years; those who insist that something like total Ukrainian victory is achievable sound suspiciously similar to those who thought the Afghanistan occupation was indefinitely sustainable, and may be safely disregarded for the sake of the exercise.
A report sponsored jointly by the World Bank, the European Commission, the United Nations, and the Ukrainian government found that the cost of postwar reconstruction will run to a cool $524 billion. (For those who enjoy irrelevant historical comparisons, the Marshall Plan was in the ballpark of a mere $175 billion in current dollars.) That’s a lot of dosh, and the West is going to put up most of the capital. February’s MacGuffin, the Ukraine minerals deal, gives a taste of what’s to come: Western powers and organs are going to put up the money in exchange for whatever goodies are to be had, and this will be framed as the West winning the peace. Those are just the facts of life. You see these deals even in notional First-World countries that are poor in capital; most of the big-ticket infrastructure in Greece is French- or German-owned.
The problem is that this kind of thing tends to cultivate local resentments among the populations notionally benefitting. As part of a funding deal, the International Monetary Fund demanded a reform of Ukrainian land markets that was enormously unpopular and passed ultimately only because Covid strictures kiboshed the obstructive mass protests that greeted earlier efforts to carry out the reform. It’s not clear that, after the war, “Ukraine for the Ukrainians” sentiments will have less appeal. (Western European resentment of the Americans in the postwar period is instructive.)
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