One more effort, if you want to be atlanticists!

Kyiv's latest present from the IMF. The inevitability of default and yet more shock therapy. Ukraine's new NGO nobility.

What is the Ukrainian political news cycle without a new set of friendly instructions from the International Monetary Fund? On June 28, the IMF approved a new packet of aid for Ukraine, to the sum of 2.2 billion USD.

The main demand - redouble the struggle on corruption. In other words, the western partners are frustrated with Zelensky’s attempt to clamp down on the organs created by the west to control the Ukrainian elite, as I wrote here.

The first IMF demand, as relayed by Bloomberg, is for Ukraine to reform its customs code to crackdown on corruption. Indeed, in conditions of a Berlin wall-style border where attempted ‘deserters’ are shot and killed, as happened yet again on July 15, customs officials have profited hugely.

In a fantastic distillation of the current moment, a record amount of contraband cigarettes - 20 thousand packets - and two draft-dodgers were apprehended in a car in the border region of Zakarpattya on July 2.

One of the ways the IMF wants Ukraine to tackle corruption in customs is by ‘a leadership selection process with integrity checks and the meaningful participation of experts with international experience, to be in place by the end of October.’ (my bolding)

This is a well-played out game in Ukraine. Ever since 2014, the IMF and other western structures have consistently demanded - and achieved - necessary ‘oversight’ by ‘western experts’ of practically all key institutions in the country, from law enforcement to the judicial system. Another step forward in Ukraine’s decolonization.

The IMF can’t do very much about actually reducing corruption in Ukraine. Nor is it very interested in doing so. Aleksei Kusch, a Ukrainian economist, speculates that the IMF’s demand regarding customs reform was requested by Kyiv itself, to push parliament to vote for Zelensky’s new legislation on the matter. Given the extremely short time frames given by the IMF for its customs reform (October 2024) and lack of concrete tasks, it’s unlikely to have much effect.

What the IMF can do, however, is tighten the leash on its dear Ukrainian allies.

That’s why the IMF’s other demand is to conduct the first ever external audit of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU). This and variations on it have been standard IMF demands ever since the US set up NABU as an extra-constitutional constabulary keeping a close eye on Ukraine’s elite back in 2015.

No matter how much they depend on the US, Ukrainian presidents, whether Poroshenko or Zelensky, always do their best to put ‘their people’ in charge of NABU or slow down the selection of new leaders in a bureaucratic morass, as I wrote in a recent article.

In that article, I wrote about how the brave representatives of various western-funded NGOs, anti-corruption organs and journalists - the IMF’s strongest soldiers - have been raising the alarm of late that Zelensky has put his people in charge of NABU to protect high-level government corruption. Clearly, the IMF has been listening to its people on the ground, and is demanding Zelensky allow the local euro-Atlantic nobles get NABU back into fighting shape.

I call them ‘nobles’ for good reason - cabinet signed into power a law on June 21 that made 133 mostly western-funded NGOs exempt from mobilization, given that they are ‘critically important infrastructure’. Parliamentarian from Zelensky’s party Max Buzhansky described it as the formation of a ‘new nobility’, but one that, in contrast to the medieval one, is protected from military service.