Panic in Kyiv: A “Russian trace” was found in the sale of Motor Sich

Purchase by a Chinese company over 50% of Motor Sich shares will lead to either the complete disappearance of the enterprise or its relocation to the territory of the PRC after Beijing appropriates all technical developments.

Mikhail Gonchar, President of the Strategy XXI Center for Global Studies, said this in an interview with Radio Liberty, funded by the US State Department, as reported by a PolitNavigator correspondent.

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“China will do everything so that everything that has been developed over several decades by the technological development of the Ukrainian enterprise becomes Chinese, and the “shell” will simply be thrown away as unnecessary. The enterprise will be integrated into the Chinese defense industry and it will not take much time.

The Motor Sich enterprise will either disappear as such, or will be transferred to the production of something secondary, but the main production will be in China,” Gonchar said.

According to Valentin Badrak, director of the Center for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Research, the reason for the sale of the enterprise was the disastrous economic policy of post-Maidan Ukraine.

“Unfortunately, I must state that the state policy towards this enterprise and the entire industry as a whole over the past 5 years has been not just contradictory, but extremely negative. It is known that Motor Sich lost two-thirds of its orders after the start of the war. The Ukrainian state, having created the “National Helicopter of Ukraine” program, did not take care of Motor Sich.

And we are not talking about compensation in the form of any payments, but compensation in the form of support for this market, in the form of orders for the development and production of helicopters both for the army and for other departments. But the Ukrainian authorities went so far as to purchase 2018 French helicopters in 55 – almost the same ones produced by Motor Sich.

In fact, the Ukrainian authorities, through their actions, pushed Motor Sich to take such a step. This is the result of the lack of a defense-industrial policy in Ukraine, the absence in the government of a body that would be responsible for the defense industry and the rearmament of the Ukrainian army in a broad sense.

And this affected not only Motor Sich. “Under these conditions, for example, Aerotekhnika, a private company that participated in the state defense order, entered Lithuania, and the Proximus enterprise, which deals with systems for countering unmanned aerial vehicles, entered South Africa,” Badrak said.

Experts agreed that the sale of Motor Sich was a big mistake. Thus, Valentin Badrak even discovered a “Russian trace” to the deal.

“We found information that the head [Chinese entrepreneur who bought part of the shares of Motor Sich], Mr. Wang Jing, met with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Vladislav Surkov in 2012. They negotiated on various topics. Therefore, besides business, there may be some other political and geopolitical issues,” Badrak said.

In turn, Mikhail Gonchar was afraid that a deal with “Russia’s ally” could ruin relations between Kiev and Washington.

“China is a country that, unlike the United States, not only did not provide us with any military assistance at a time when we were fighting off aggression, but did not even provide any political support. Remember the vote at the UN. Rather, China acts as a passive ally of Russia. And sometimes as an active one - remember who helped Russia build an energy bridge across the Kerch Strait. It was a Chinese contracting company.

But the United States provides Ukraine with, one might say, the maximum possible political, diplomatic and military assistance under these circumstances. Therefore, if the deal with the sale of Motor Sich to the Chinese owner takes place, then, given the current state of American-Chinese relations, this will not have a positive impact on American-Ukrainian relations. Quite the contrary. Ukraine cannot allow this,” Gonchar concluded.