Reminder: The West Refused to Buy Entire Ukraine for the Discount Price of €20 Billion

December 16th, 2013:

Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, will go to Moscow on Tuesday in an attempt to secure loans and energy benefits after failing to extract promises of billions in aid from the European Union.

As street protests continued in Kiev at Yanukovych’s failure to sign up to a political association and trade pact with Brussels, reports in Moscow indicated that Russia was prepared to slash gas prices and lend generously.

EU sources said that in negotiations in Brussels last week, Serhiy Arbuzov, the deputy prime minister, demanded €20bn (£17bn) to sign up to the European pact to cover trade losses with Russia and the impact on Ukrainian industry. The request was dismissed.

In 2013 the ostensibly “pro-Russian” Yanukovich (actually pro-EU but not a die-hard) negotiated an EU association agreement and was going to sign it, but he had one small ask first: If the West could pretty please get him a €20bn loan bailout the country urgently needed. (Including because the reform EU was demanding was going to be painful and the EU deal was going to put up barriers to trade with Russia.)

The EU refused and the US (IMF) wasn’t interested either. So Yanukovich asked Moscow, which reluctantly came up with the money ($15bn in loans and a gas discount) and Yanukovich put the association agreement with the unhelpful EU on hold.

Two months later he fled Kiev after a black flag sniper massacre and was toppled. Russia took over Crimea and Donbass rose up in revolt.

Imagine how different everything might have gone if the West simply gave Yanukovich the €20bn he needed to deliver Ukraine to them gift-wrapped.

But the country of 45 million Russian-like people wasn’t worth a measly €20bn to them. Western officials (McCain, Nuland, Westerwelle…) would literally fly into Kiev to participate in pro-EU deal protests but wouldn’t press their governments for a little bit of spare change that would have made the protests a moot point.

Of course the West never particularly wanted Ukraine. Its attitude was rather that of ‘I want you to want *me*’. 

It felt good for the West, particularly its elites suffering a profound legitimacy crisis at home, to have some eastern savages making a ruckus over wanting to integrate with Western Europe. It’s the sort of flattery that the West, always on the lookout for a reason to congratulate itself, is addicted to.

However, that doesn’t mean that the West was particularly invested in whether these savages eventually integrate with it, and it certainly wasn’t going to shoulder the costs.

The West “needs” Ukraine only in three ways. To deny it to Russia. To use it against Russia. And as a pool of Western worshippers to reassure its superiority complex.

Incidentally what 95% Ukrainians respect and admire about the West starts and ends with its high material standard of living. Western integrationism commands a strong popular appeal over vast swathes of the globe and it is 100% based on the fact West is (comparatively speaking) really good at making money. It is hoped that by adopting the Western system somehow someday they too might enjoy a high standard of living.

Of course, Western elites don’t put it that way. They purposefully conflate the cause of Western appeal, particularly to themselves. They delude themselves that it has to do with the quality of the Western political system. That is to say, they make it all about themselves. They look at Euromaidan and see eastern savages who are erupting in violent protest just so they could one day be managed by the kind of elites that exist in the West. So wonderful, moral, and benevolent are they!

In reality, easterners understand the Western political order is in many ways just as flawed (sometimes more so) and just as undemocratic. But gaslighting and exploitation are nonetheless preferably served with a German car and Italian clothing rather than an apartment in a freezing Khrushchyovka and a $150 pension.

Reuters, 2013:

On September 4, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich called a meeting of his political party for the first time in three years, summoning members to an old Soviet-era cinema called Zoryany in Kiev.

For three hours Yanukovich cajoled and bullied anyone who pushed for Ukraine to have closer ties to Russia. A handful of deputies from his Party of Regions complained that their businesses in Ukraine’s Russian-speaking east would suffer if Yanukovich didn’t agree to closer ties with Russia. That set him off.

“Forget about it … forever!” he shouted at them, according to people who attended the meeting. Instead the president argued for an agreement to deepen trade and other cooperation with the European Union.

Some deputies implored him to change his mind, people who attended the meeting told Reuters. Businessmen warned that a deal with the EU would provoke Russia – Ukraine’s former master in Soviet times – into toughening an economic blockade on Ukrainian goods. Yanukovich stood firm.

“We will pursue integration with Europe,” he barked back, according to three people who attended the meeting. He seemed dead set on looking west.

Less than three months later Yanukovich spurned the EU, embraced Russian President Vladimir Putin and struck a deal on December 17 for a bailout of his country. Russia will invest $15 billion in Ukraine’s government debt and reduce by about a third the price that Naftogaz, Ukraine’s national energy company, pays for Russian gas.

BTW, since the West didn’t think Ukraine was worth €20bn why did anyone ever think it would be interested in defending an Anti-Russian Ukraine from Russia? Just because the West was encouraging Kiev to become Anti-Russia doesn’t mean it was going to be there if the bill for that came due. Not a masterstroke by Kiev.