This week the Prime Minister of England, who is valued at a comparably modest £4 million, pledged £1 billion from UK taxpayers to the President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko – worth the considerably higher figure of $1.3 billion. Cameron is considered an aristocrat in Britain but his Ukrainian counterpart is known as an oligarch. Poroshenko has amassed this fortune in a country with an average monthly salary which is 1/15th that of the UK.
However, the Ukrainian president is a mere pauper by comparison with the countries’ richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, who has somehow got his hands on $17.8 billion (according to Korrespondent.net, a leading Ukrainian news portal) in the last two decades, or roughly 10 percent of the war-torn state’s entire GDP. Akhmetov, who didn’t make his cash running corner shops, is well known to the UK elite as the owner of the penthouse at 1, Hyde Park, in central London, paying a record £136 million for the privilege and another £60 million to decorate it.
The two Ukrainian oligarchs are not unique in their country, there are plenty of other billionaires knocking around Kiev and, in 2008, it was estimated that the top 50 controlled 85 percent of the nation’s GDP. Indeed, Forbes names nine Ukrainians on its tally of the world’s richest people. In Europe, we often talk about the ‘one percent’ but in Kiev, it’s more about the 0.000001 percent.
Ironically, should Poroshenko emerge victorious in his current military campaign against rebels in the Lugansk and Donetsk regions, the biggest economic winner would be Akhmetov, as most of his business interests are situated in that area. Surely, this fantastically wealthy man could contribute the money the regime needs instead of Joe and Josephine Soap in the UK? After all, he has invested well over £1 billion in his Shakhtar Donetsk soccer project, but maybe he subscribes to Liverpool manager Bill Shankly's view: "Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it's much more serious than that."
Given the corruption that pervades in Ukraine, it’s highly likely that a lot of the money will find its way back to London's fancy restaurants and luxury good's stores rather than the war’s front-lines but that is beside the point.
Plainly, the UK state, which due to lack of money now has an infant mortality rate above the EU average, cannot afford this largesse and Ukraine’s top 10 oligarchs – which include its president – can. Throwing, say, $100 million each into a fund to assist the war effort in the east might mean buying a smaller yacht or moving to the less fashionable side of Hyde Park, but it would be a key step in showing that they are willing to change their ways in the “new” Ukraine. It would also be considerably more honorable than depriving British people of much-needed cash for crumbling public services.
However, what if they have no intention of altering their behavior and they have instead hijacked the spirit of “Maidan” to simply replace one oligarchic clique with another? This seems increasingly to be the case with each passing day, as a glance at current political maneuverings shows.
The Maidan protests began as a show of people power, a large section of the populace tired of the gut-wrenching corruption and the grind of life in Ukraine, which has the lowest worker's incomes in Europe. Later, egged on by US and EU hawks, it was commandeered by paid protesters and far-right activists before the billionaires took control of its momentum. The latest Kiev soap opera concerns President Poroshenko’s weakening grip on power as his Sergeant Bilko act in the east proves less effective than he’d initially hoped.
Step forward Ihor Kolomoisky, who fancies himself as the new Poroshenko (who was the new Tymoshenko, who was the new… repeat ad infinitum). Proud patriot Kolomoisky, a citizen of no less than three countries – Cyprus, Israel and Ukraine – has adroitly used his emergency appointment as governor of Dnepropetrovsk to position himself as a staunch advocate of Ukrainian nationalism.
He is also significantly richer than the incumbent, with $6.5 billion on hand, according to Korrespondent. Unlike most of his peers, Kolomoisky has also, Bond-villain style, dipped into his humungous pockets to assist the military campaign with his own private militia – numbering between 2,000 and 20,000 men, depending on who you believe.
Aside from bankrolling the Dnieper Battalion, he’s also offered a $10,000 reward for each rebel captured by them and is hoping to found a political movement using his private soldiers as “activists.” Meanwhile, Akhmetov is reportedly scrambling around in an attempt to launch a rebranded version of ousted President Viktor Yanukovich’s Party of Regions – which has its power base in the currently disconnected east.
An oligarch who has been quiet recently is Viktor Pinchuk. In 2010, Pinchuk spent more than $6 million on his 50th birthday in Courchevel, France. Pinchuk, the son-in-law of former President Leonid Kuchma, is the founder of the Yalta European Strategy, which last autumn hosted former CIA director David Petraeus, Israeli President Shimon Peres, ex-US President Bill Clinton and probable presidential candidate Hilary Clinton, plus the aforementioned Mr Blair. Originally a supporter of Yanukovich, it appears that Pinchuk ($3.1 billion) is the oligarch with the most significant international connections, and has skillfully reoriented himself as a respectable face of Kiev “business,” despite spending the annual net wage of over 2,000 average Ukrainian workers on a birthday bash.
The question is, with all this cash swirling around Kiev, why do the Ukrainian oligarchs need £1 billion from embattled British taxpayers to fund their military adventures? With the NHS in turmoil, the armed forces being decimated and a sizeable minority in the UK unable to afford basic necessities like food, surely Cameron could find better uses for such a large dollop of dough? Or maybe he thinks that by presenting it to Ukraine, he is doing “God's work”?
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