Ukraine’s key industries are plummeting in terms of market prices, ditto the average living standard. Companies whose products are meant for the middle class re-gister a decline in terms of payroll dynamics. Kyiv’s top-level bureaucratic offices are picketed on an almost daily basis, protesting cuts on preferences, demanding that the cabinet’s promises be honored, supporting Ukraine’s European choice. The World Bank has lowered Ukraine’s business performance rating by three points.
Under the circumstances, Ukraine’s political landscape can change beyond recognition, so that the current outwardly stable regime will prove shaky, says TBi Channel’s Chief Edi-tor Vitalii Portnikov. He told www.rosbalt.ru that the street may well become the political battlefield, in the presence of a serious social crisis, with the man in the street sinking below the poverty line, lack of government guarantees in terms of pension and wages and salaries — in other words following in the footsteps of some Arab countries.
For the time being, this political scenario is far from being played out in Ukraine, precisely because this country still has well-being reserves, but these are being quickly exhausted. Experts say that IMF money — something Ukraine’s top-level bureaucrats hate to discuss in public — is a guarantee of this country’s financial security in the nearest future.
Viktor PINZENYK, ex-Finance Minister of Ukraine, currently deputy chairman of UkrSibbank’s supervisory board, says Ukraine’s problems have nothing to do with loans; that they are to be found in the rampant populist practices of its politicians, their refusal to communicate on a personal basis with Ukrainian society. More on this, Ukraine’s 2012 budget, IMF commission’s findings in Ukraine, hryvnia’s exchange rate until the end of the year, Yulia Tymoshenko’s prison term, prospects for Ukraine’s trade integration read in the interview with Viktor PINZENYK in the next issue of The Day.
