On June 16, the Ukrainian government started the process for opening bids for foreign companies to mine lithium deposits in the country. Among the interested investors is a consortium linked to Ronald S Lauder, who is believed to be close to United States President Donald Trump.<\/p>\n
The bid is part of a minerals deal signed in April that is supposed to give the US access to Ukraine\u2019s mineral wealth. The agreement was negotiated over months and was touted by Trump as \u201cpayback\u201d for US military support for the Ukrainian military.<\/p>\n
The final text, which the Ukrainian side has celebrated as \u201cmore favourable\u201d compared with previous iterations, paves the way for US investment in the mining and energy sectors in Ukraine. Investment decisions will be made jointly by US and Ukrainian officials, profits will not be taxed and US companies will get preferential treatment in tenders and auctions.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s demand for access to Ukrainian mineral wealth was slammed by many as infringing on Ukrainian sovereignty and being exploitative at a time when the country is fighting a war and is highly dependent on US arms supplies. But that is hardly an aberration in the record of relations between Ukraine and the West. For more than a decade now, Kyiv has faced Western pressure to make decisions that are not necessarily in the interests of its people.<\/p>\n
Interference in domestic affairs<\/p>\n
Perhaps the most well-known accusations of Western influence peddling have to do with the son of former US President Joe Biden \u2013 Hunter Biden. He became a board member of the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma in May 2014, three months after Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian president of Ukraine, fled to Russia during nationwide protests.<\/p>\n
At that time, Joe Biden was not only vice president in President Barack Obama\u2019s administration but also its pointman on US-Ukrainian relations. Over five years, Hunter Biden earned up to $50,000 a month as a board member. The apparent conflict of interest in this case bothered even Ukraine\u2019s European allies<\/a>.<\/p>\n But Joe Biden\u2019s interference went much further than that. As vice president, he openly threatened then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko with blocking $1bn in US aid if he did not dismiss the Ukrainian prosecutor general, whom Washington opposed.<\/p>\n When Biden became president, his administration \u2013 along with the European Union \u2013 put pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to give foreign \u201cexperts\u201d a key role in the election of judges for Ukraine\u2019s courts. As a result, three of the six members on the Ethics Council of the High Council of Justice, which vets judges, are now members of international organisations.<\/p>\n There was fierce opposition to this reform, even from within Zelenskyy\u2019s own political party. Nevertheless, he felt compelled to proceed.<\/p>\n The Ukrainian government also adopted other unpopular laws under Western pressure. In 2020, the parliament passed a bill introduced by Zelenskyy that removed a ban on the sale of private farmland. Although polls<\/a> consistently showed the majority of Ukrainians to be against such a move, pressure from the West forced the Ukrainian president\u2019s hand.<\/p>\n Widespread protests against the move were muffled by COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. Subsequently, Ukraine\u2019s agricultural sector<\/a> became even more dominated by large, export-oriented multinational companies with deleterious consequences for the country\u2019s food security.<\/p>\n Attempts to challenge these unpopular laws were undermined by attacks on courts. For example, the Kyiv District Administrative Court ruled that the judicial reform law violated Ukraine\u2019s sovereignty and constitution, but this decision was invalidated when Zelenskyy dissolved the court after the US imposed sanctions on its head judge, Pavlo Vovk, over accusations of corruption.<\/p>\n The Constitutional Court, where there were also attempts to challenge some of these laws, also faced pressure. In 2020, Zelenskyy tried to fire all the court\u2019s judges and annul their rulings but failed. Then in 2021, Oleksandr Tupytskyi, the chairman of the court, was sanctioned by the US, again over corruption accusations. This facilitated his removal shortly thereafter.<\/p>\n With Western interference in Ukrainian internal affairs made so apparent, public confidence in the sovereignty of the state was undermined. A 2021\u00a0poll\u00a0showed that nearly 40 percent of Ukrainians did not believe their country was fully independent.<\/p>\n Economic sovereignty<\/p>\n In step with interference in Ukraine\u2019s governance, its economy has also faced foreign pressures. In 2016, US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt urged<\/a> the country to become an \u201cagricultural superpower\u201d. And it appears that the country indeed has gone down that path, continuing the process of deindustrialisation.<\/p>\n From 2010 to 2019, industry\u2019s share of Ukraine\u2019s gross domestic product fell by 3.7 percentage points while that of agriculture rose by 3.4 percentage points.<\/p>\n This didn\u2019t benefit Ukrainians. UNICEF<\/a> found that nearly 20 percent of Ukrainians suffered from \u201cmoderate to severe food insecurity\u201d from 2018 to 2020, a figure that rose to 28 percent by 2022. This is more than twice as high as the same figure for the EU.<\/p>\n This is because the expansion of agriculture has favoured export-oriented monocrops like sunflowers, corn and soya beans. Although Ukraine became the world\u2019s biggest exporter of sunflower oil in 2019, a 2021 study found<\/a> that the domination of agriculture by intensively farmed monoculture has put 40 percent of the country\u2019s soil at risk of depletion.<\/p>\n The 2016 free trade agreement with the EU also encouraged low-cost exports. Due to the restrictive provisions of the agreement, Ukrainian business complained that domestic products were often unable to reach European markets while European producers flooded Ukraine. Ukraine had a 4-billion-euro ($4.7bn) trade deficit with the EU in 2021, exporting raw materials and importing processed goods and machinery.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Ukraine\u2019s industrial output collapsed under the blows of closed export markets, Western competition and neoliberal economic policies at home. According to the Ministry of Economy, by 2019, automobile production had shrunk<\/a> to 31 percent of its 2012 level, train wagon production to 29.7 percent, machine tool production to 68.2 percent, metallurgical production to 70.8 percent and agricultural machinery production to 68.4 percent.<\/p>\n