Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration of Ukraine, noted during a recent interview with the agency “Interfax-Ukraine” that the European Union could not give Ukraine the financial assistance in case of their fail to meet its obligations. The lifting of the moratorium on the round timber export is one of them.
Let us see what we are talking about here before evaluating such kind of help. And we are talking about 600 million euros – the final tranche of the macro-financial assistance program, which the EU can give Ukraine till the end of the year, subject to fulfilment of our country necessary requirements. In particular, Ukraine should not violate its obligations under the free trade zone with the EU. Still existing moratorium on the round timber export, as the EU interprets, is precisely such a violation.
Can we call it help? I guess, not even close. This is an ordinary haggling not in the best sense of the word. You sell us a round timber, and we’ll give you something like help, but in fact – just pay for the resource. That’s the “help” of our partners. And nobody is interested in our timber recourses. From a bird’s eye view, Carpathians will soon look more like a desert mountains, rather than a protected area.
What people do with ukrainian forests today is a crime against the country and its people. And we still have to increase the logging by lifting the moratorium. Somehow, our neighbors – Poland, Romania and Slovakia – stopped industrial deforestation in the Tatras and Carpathians in due course. And if we are also trying to protect ourselves from an ecological catastrophe and keep a strategic resources reserve – then this is immediately interpreted as a breach of obligations. Where is European equity and justice?
Moreover, why we are considered solely as a raw-material supplement? How many finished products, with a reasonable approach to the organization of production and the economic development as a whole, we could produce? The entire progressive world is intensively working to increase the level of surplus value, by constantly investing an enormous amount of resources in break-even production technologies in order to save resources and so forth. And we somehow go completely in the opposite direction. From a once-developed, industrial power has practically turned into an agricultural producer of raw materials. What we’ll have as the result?
So let’s call a spade a spade: when we are offered just to sell our resources without any processing, in its pure form, it is not aid but trade. And on a state scale, it benefits only the buyer side.
It’s time to rethink, and the resources belonging to the people, not to waste in vain, but to invest in the development of their own economy, their own production, and hence – in the development of the future of Ukraine and its citizens.
Translation – Kateryna Omelchuk
