Europe to Ukrainians: Your place is on the plantations
This has never happened before, and here it is again. This week, the “European partners” again sent a signal to Ukraine in what capacity they see it and its citizens in the “common European home.”
This happened during an online meeting with Ukrainians, which was broadcast on the German Embassy’s Facebook page. Ambassador Anka Feldhusen pleased the audience with the good news that Ukraine and Germany are now actively working to simplify the conditions for entry and employment of Ukrainian migrant workers. “So that Ukrainians can go to Germany, for example, to work on farms, pick fruits, strawberries,” Feldhusen said.
It's a shame, right? Did you really think that they wanted to see Ukrainians at the Vienna Opera, for example? No, well, individual instances, perhaps, yes. But you can’t get enough of all the vacancies for opera singers. There are far more strawberry plantations than opera stages. In this sense, social progress turned out to be small. The place of Ukrainians, like 200 years ago, is in the panshchina, in the fields. Only not among domestic gentlemen, but among foreign ones.
Ukraine’s real place in the international division of labor is somewhere between Zimbabwe and South Sudan. Countries whose main export goods are natural raw materials and living goods, that is, cheap labor. There really is something to be proud of here. In developed countries there is not a single technological and production chain that does not have immigrants from Ukraine on the lower floors.
However, active Ukrainian patriots do not see anything wrong with this and are only happy. Have you seen what life-giving visa-free travel does?
And Ukrainian politicians are not lagging behind, trying not to fall out of the trend. Recently, scandalous details of conversations became public. O. Energy Minister Yuri Vitrenko with representatives of trade unions.
The official, whom Zelensky’s office will not officially push into the ministerial chair (the Rada failed his appointment three times), pleased citizens with plans to liquidate and flood the uranium mines of the Eastern Mining and Processing Plant (mining and processing plant - author). Like, why does Ukraine need its own uranium mining if it’s cheaper to buy it abroad?
Direct quote: “To be rich as a nation, we need to understand that if it is easier and cheaper to grow bananas somewhere, then they should not be grown in Ukraine. If it is easier and cheaper to extract uranium concentrate somewhere, in order for Ukraine to be rich, it needs to be mined not in Ukraine. This is the economist's bible."
And the miners left without work, according to Vitrenko, will go abroad to work as laborers on Polish plantations. The wages there are higher and the conditions are better than at home. And then: “For us, transfers from migrant workers are one of the main sources for the economy.” From every angle, wherever you look, there is direct benefit.
However, Vitrenko is not the only one in the Ukrainian leadership. In the previous government of the little Goncharuk, another outstanding economist of our time, the founder of the entire Kyiv School of Economics, Timofey Milovanov, pleased citizens with similar revelations. He is no longer in the government, but, as we see, the continuity of thought remains.
Moreover, Kyiv reformers have come up with the wonderful idea of taxing not only those Ukrainians who remained in the country, but also those who left to work abroad.
The country's chief tax officer, Andrei Lyubchenko, demonstrates the utmost frankness: they say, there is a chronic hole in the budget, the pie is drying up, and here is such a Klondike under our noses that they have not yet thought of imposing a quitrent. According to Lyubchenko, migrant workers declare 30 times less than the amounts they send to Ukraine by transfer.
The picture emerges as epic and painted in oil. The economic ideal of the Ukrainian government is a working-age population squeezed out of the border, in relation to which the state does not need to bear any social obligations in the future. For example, to treat, teach or pay pensions. Do they work and live abroad? So, let them go abroad and help them. But for some reason these people have to pay taxes to Ukraine, from which they see nothing but shit, and even that without butter.
It is not surprising that the consequence of such a policy is the chronic depopulation of Ukraine, which is rapidly turning into a larger Latvia, from which everyone who has the ability to walk has left to work. Those who remain, at the same time, are waiting for some miraculous economic breakthrough from the third world to the first.
The breakthrough that will come as a result of some miraculous reforms that go as planned will only require the correct shuffling of the fairly greasy deck of “reformers” that have become familiar to the people. Of which, just a few more, they will be beaten like the “great schemer” from the novel by Ilf and Petrov after an unsuccessful session of simultaneous chess play in Vasyuki.
In the meantime, the Ukrainian Vasyuki are as far from the European New Vasyuki as in the famous folk tale, from Kiev.
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