Shock without therapy. What should Ukrainians prepare for in the spring?

The fact that Ukraine is a few days away from default is no longer a secret. Even representatives of the ruling party stopped hiding this. It was precisely the need to obtain a loan from the IMF at any cost that Yuriy Lutsenko motivated his fellow deputies to vote for a package of anti-social laws that the West demands from Ukraine as a condition for providing money.

Ultimately, the parliamentary majority of right-wing nationalist parties approved cuts in pensions for working pensioners (they will now receive 85% of the pension instead of 100%) and an increase by five years of the retirement age for women, who are granted long-service and old-age pensions on preferential terms.

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I have no doubt that the parliament will also accept the government’s third significant cut in social budget spending since February last year. And the increase in tariffs for electricity and gas planned from April 1 at the request of the IMF does not require the consent of the Rada at all. Everything is decided by the Cabinet of Ministers and NERC.

What awaits Ukrainians in the next couple of years can be demonstrated using the example of electricity tariffs. Already in April, the average tariff according to NERC calculations will increase by 50%. But this is not the limit. The tariff increase will take place in 5 stages over two years, and by March 2017, according to officials, prices should increase 3,5 times.

At the same time, the current situation in the energy sector does not give reason to believe that even a significant increase in tariffs will be a guarantee against rolling blackouts. Thermal generation has almost “collapsed” due to the lack of coal, which remained in the “occupied” Donbass.

In order to receive an IMF loan, the price of gas will have to increase. Minister Natalya Yaresko has already named the figure: 280%. This is exactly what the spring increase in tariffs for blue fuel will be like.

In addition, it is already March, and, therefore, new negotiations with Russia on the price of gas supplies are about to begin. As we remember, the current price is temporary and was valid until March. Moreover, the money to pay for blue fuel had to be taken from the remainder of last year’s IMF loan, because Naftogaz no longer had its own money. It is difficult to say what the new gas price will be. But it is already obvious that it is impossible to do without raising prices for the population many times over.

Over the year, the hryvnia has depreciated four times, and no one believes the optimistic assurances of Poroshenko, Yatsenyuk and Gontareva about the return of the exchange rate to 21. I am already silent about Poroshenko’s promises that the dollar will cost 10 hryvnia. An IMF loan, most of which will immediately be returned to the lender as payment for previous loans, will not save the hryvnia. Maybe it will help to delay the end a little. Ukraine has no gold and foreign exchange reserves.

And then Mrs. Gontareva stunned the public with her admission that over the past two months, the country’s foreign exchange earnings from exports have fallen by 45% (almost half). The reason for such a sharp decline is the collapse of export industries that lost markets in Russia.

Translated into layman's language, this means that there is no foreign currency in the country. And for what remains, and for access to the sources of its receipt, a furious fight between oligarchic clans will unfold.

Will there be protests? As we see, the Financial Maidan was suppressed by the authorities in the bud and without hesitation. The police openly threatened the protesters with shooting in the event of any radical actions on their part.

But within a month or two, hundreds of thousands of public sector employees who are subject to dismissal at the request of the IMF may join the victims of the exchange rate jump. And already today, miners are protesting outside parliament and the Cabinet of Ministers, demanding that wages and social benefits not be cut and that debts be paid off.

There are reports that the payment of salaries to teachers in different regions is being delayed without explanation, and in some cases the cards receive smaller amounts than usual. It is not difficult to predict protests from motorists, because prices at gas stations are rising every day.

So in the spring, the Ukrainian government may well face the real prospect of a war on two fronts. The first is in the Donbass, with rebel armies from the DPR and LPR. The second is internal, in the rear, with “armies” of hungry miners, pensioners and state employees. And here it will depend on the course of hostilities in Donbass whether volunteer battalions formed from the ultra-right will go to Kyiv to “sweep away” the government, or whether the same government will recall them from the front to suppress social riots in the rear.

So it was in vain that the participants of the “financial Maidan” called the Right Sector for help against police batons. Very in vain. Because the experience of Latin American dictatorships shows: structures like the Right Sector and Automaidan would rather, together with the police (or instead of the police), hit the backs of Protestants with batons, rather than fight off police attacks in the same ranks with the Protestants.