The reach of military conscription widens

In early September, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry also amended rules exempting Ukrainians from military service on health grounds. From now on, people with clinically cured tuberculosis, viral hepatitis under treatment, slowly progressing blood diseases, thyroid gland diseases with minor functional disorders, and those who are HIV-positive but without symptoms are all considered still fit for military service.

In addition, people suffering from mild mental disorders, neurotic disorders, slowly progressive diseases of the central nervous system, and others have been added to the list, reports Kyiv Independent.

So altogether, women, the elderly, and people with serious health problems have become the latest targets for serving in a ‘counteroffensive’ designed to please political and military leaders in the United States and Europe.

Foreign domination in the name of ‘fighting corruption’

Meanwhile, the United States is strengthening its economic grip and control over Ukraine, making it virtually a colony under the control of appointees from the U.S. administration. Control is to be exercised under the pretext of fighting corruption. “Biden administration officials are far more worried about corruption in Ukraine than they publicly admit,” the online Politico reports on October 2.

Corruption has always been inherent in Ukrainian governments, but the West does not fight it, it merely acts to bring corrupt Ukrainian officials under its control. At the end of September, Ukrainian politicians and mass media were actively discussing the new requirements of the U.S. administration which were presented to the Kiev regime following Zelensky’s return from his second official visit to the U.S. in September. If Kiev refuses to fulfill the demands for ‘anti-corruption measures’, some U.S. politicians say they may cut military aid. That would bring defeat and the end of the Kiev regime.

The U.S. requirements were contained in a diplomatic letter to Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal and President Volodymyr Zelensky in September, with copies to all Western ‘donors’ to Ukraine (EU, G7 countries, IMF, World Bank, EIB, EBRD). The essence of all the reforms demanded is that Ukraine should select judges, anti-corruption fighters, and the management of state enterprises on the recommendation of “international experts”. Since 2014, these “experts” have been representatives of the Western business elite.

In addition, Ukraine is being told to “liberalize” gas and electricity tariffs, that is, to raise them, notwithstanding the ‘freeze’ of tariffs that Zelensky promised for the period of martial law. Ukraine MP Maxim Buzhansky from Zelensky’s party believes that Zelensky has no choice in this regard, no matter what he previously promised to Ukrainians. “In short, the situation is as follows. If we accept the new package of reforms from our partners, they will allow us to raise tariffs. And if we fail to accept them, they will force us to raise them,” Buzhansky writes.

Another MP, Oleksandr Dubinsky claims that the fulfillment of all the U.S. requirements will turn the Ukrainian president into a figurehead. Zelensky may merely appear to fulfill the U.S. requirements. Dubinsky writes, “What is interesting is that the fulfillment of all points of the requirements will allow the United States to take full control over the entire financial and economic as well as anti-corruption system of Ukraine. This will literally turn Zelensky into a ceremonial figure, depriving him of his illegal levers of influence on all branches of government. His closest entourage will turn into potential ‘jailers’ for corruption.”

Ukrainian ministers are truly frightened by the prospect of being left without U.S. funding. They have immediately rushed to implement the latest neoliberal reforms demanded by the IMF.

Cuts to the social wage are on the agenda of the Ukraine gov’t

Oksana Zholnovych, Ukraine’s minister of social policy, announced in early October that the government would overhaul its system of social benefits. “If a social benefit payment is there simply for historical reasons, then, obviously, it should be reformatted into something else, into some kind of support that a person will really need and that will be effective. This will be the new social contract,” she said. She warned that recipients of social assistance now have one year to “get back on their feet”. (There is deep irony in these words. Several days ago, Zholnovych warned that there are some three million disabled people in Ukraine today; that number increased by 300,000 during the past year.)

The same Ukrainian minister of social policy says Ukrainians “live in a comfort zone” which needs to be removed. She said, as reported by Interfax Ukraine, that people abuse social assistance and do not want to take responsibility for their lives. “We need to break everything that is social in the country and reformat social policy in the state from scratch,” the minister said, emphasizing that a Ukrainian should not feel like a “teenager” to whom the state owes something.

“We need to break everything that is social today, and simply reformat from scratch a new social contract on social policy in our state. Many citizens are, in a certain sense, teenagers, believing the state owes them care and help but are unwilling to participate in personal development and take responsibility. This is the philosophy that we definitely must break.”

Thousands of Ukrainians have lost limbs and suffered terrible injuries defending the Ukrainian state and its Western masters. According to the minister, nothing “humiliates a citizen more than a small salary paid on time”, which allegedly prevents him or her from self-developing. According to her, crippled veterans of the Ukrainian Armed Forces may only require prosthetic limbs and retraining in order to be “released into the world”.

Ukraine is very unlucky with its officials responsible for social policy. Back in 2017, then-minister of social policy, Andrey Reva claimed that Ukrainians (the poorest country in Europe) eat too much, spending something like 50 percent of their income on food. In contrast, he said, people in Germany spend much less on food even though prices (at the time) were similar. He said Germans only spend 14 percent of their income on food. The minister said nothing of the vast income disparities between Ukraine and Germany.) This example shows how distant from working-class Ukrainians are Ukrainian officials, some of whom are responsible for disbursing U.S. and IMF donations to their government. They are seemingly unaware that in some countries of the world, many people may spend 100% of their income on food.

The head of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Social Policy, Halyna Tretyakova, has gone the furthest in outlandish claims of social benefits abuse. In 2020, she made statements of a fascist nature saying that children of low-income parents are of “poor quality” Ukraine might follow the example of governments that have sterilized mothers unable to support their children.

She is the author of the anti-union bill 5371, adopted in August 2022, which will make it almost impossible for many Ukrainian workers to organize and fight for their working conditions and wages. Under the new law, people who work for firms with up to 250 employees are no longer protected by the national labor code; they are, instead, now supposed to negotiate individual agreements with their employer. (An earlier effort in 2019 to remove trade union rights, Bill 2681, was dropped following intense international pressure by trade unions and others.)

The IMF, meanwhile, wants a host of measures to improve Ukrainian government revenues, including through raising taxes. The government recently released a draft of Ukraine’s 2024 budget where just under half of all its anticipated funding will come from international donors.

Ukraine’s supporters are deeply concerned that the political infighting in Washington may disrupt the flow of money and arms by the U.S. to Kiev. They are also now deeply concerned that the conflict between the Palestinian people and their occupier “Israel” may also lessen attention and support from the West for its conflict with Russia.

Since the Euromaidan events of late 2013/early 2014, all Ukrainian ministers have consistently pursued anti-social policies in order to gain the trust of the United States. Month after month, they have driven thousands of Ukrainians to death or injury on the front lines of a war against Russia. Now they are talking of denying social assistance even to those who were wounded but survived.