Despite the ongoing conflict, economists and diplomats are already laying the groundwork for a rebuilt, modernized, and powerful Ukraine. In this episode of International Horizons, interim director Eli Karetny sits down with renowned economist and post-Soviet transition expert Anders Åslund to discuss the ambitious blueprint for Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction.

Moving beyond immediate relief, Åslund details the staggering $100 billion annual requirement for reconstruction and the critical role of foreign aid, private investment, and seized Russian assets. The conversation explores how the tragedy of war has inadvertently created a blank slate for complete technological modernization—allowing Ukraine to shed its outdated Soviet infrastructure in favor of decentralized renewable energy and a rapidly booming, tech-driven military-industrial complex.

From its unmatched agricultural potential to the profound, enduring solidification of its national unity, tune in to discover why experts are overwhelmingly optimistic about Ukraine’s future as an economic and military powerhouse within the European Union.

Transcript

Eli Karetny

Despite the fact that Russia’s war on Ukraine continues to rage, some diplomats and economists are looking ahead to a time when a peace agreement can allow Ukraine to rebuild and to emerge as a crucial power in post-war Europe. An important conference was held this week in New York City, organized by Roman Popadiuk, America’s first ambassador to Ukraine; Simon Johnson, the 2024 Nobel Prize winner in economics; and Anders Åslund, the renowned expert on economic transitions in the post-Soviet space.

The report coming out of the conference, titled Rebuilding Ukraine: The Road to Post-War Reconstruction, examines the challenges Ukraine will face in this effort and makes recommendations for how reconstruction should be structured, financed, and carried out. I attended the conference and was both surprised and delighted at the optimism conveyed by the participants. A shared conviction was on display: not only were the speakers and discussants convinced that post-war Ukraine would recover economically, but that Ukraine would ultimately rise up to take its place as a powerful state in the European Union.

Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is Eli Karetny. I teach political theory and international relations at Baruch College and have for years been a deputy director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. This year, as the institute’s interim director, I have the honor of hosting this podcast.

Here with me today to discuss the recommendations in the report on rebuilding Ukraine is Anders Åslund, currently chairman of the Economics Education and Research Consortium, senior fellow at the Stockholm Free World Forum, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. Dr. Åslund has spent over 30 years focusing on the systemic transition from a planned economy to a market economy in the post-Soviet space. He has been advisor to, among others, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, and has contributed, excuse me, to the economic policy of the Baltic States from 1989 to 1994. He was a professor of international economics at the Stockholm School of Economics. He graduated from the Stockholm School of Economics and earned a PhD from Oxford University. Welcome, Anders. Thank you for joining us on International Horizons.

Anders Åslund

Thank you very much, Eli.

Eli Karetny

This week’s conference, held on April 29 at the Morgan Lewis headquarters in New York City, looked beyond relief and recovery towards reconstruction and the rise of Ukraine. The report states that reconstruction cannot wait until the war is over. It should begin now and be carried out on an ongoing basis, but that certain forms of reconstruction should be given priority. You spoke at the conference about three key aspects of the reconstruction plan: how it would be financed, the centrality of infrastructure, and the importance of electricity and power. Can you elaborate on each of these facets of the rebuilding plan?

Anders Åslund

Yeah, but let me first take a step back. What is really needed is three elements. You talked about it. First, reconstruction takes place all the time. There are 30 to 32 million people in Ukraine today. They have to be able to live. They must have food, infrastructure, electricity, water, and we must make sure that exists. So, reconstruction is not something that starts after the war, but it takes place all the time.

The second point is that there must be enough money. First, the money needs to come from the public sector, and later on, it needs to be attracted from the private sector. Ukraine now needs about $100 billion a year in foreign inflows. That’s a huge amount of money, but that’s necessary. That’s about half a GDP in Ukraine as it now exists. Half of this is needed to finance the budget deficit, and half of it is needed to provide military support, as it is now. It must come from public sources today. 80 to 90% of this money comes from the European Union, since the US has stopped giving any money to Ukraine. The other comes from a few other allies, such as Norway, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and international financial institutions. Only in the longer run should we expect a significant amount of private capital. Say that it’s $4 billion a year now, while the total money needed is $100 billion.

And the third point is that Ukraine needs to complete its reforms. Much has been done, and this should be seen as several different elements. One is the EU accession. The EU accession is essentially a big reform program, and that is also integration into the West, and these are the three elementary things.

But responding to your questions, as I put it at the conference, what Ukraine needs is, as I already mentioned, now: money. Without the money, Ukraine can’t go ahead or win the war. And the second thing is transportation. Ukraine has won the war in the Black Sea. Without a navy, Ukraine has defeated the Russian Black Sea Navy, which is an extraordinary achievement. And then the third, what I also mentioned, is electricity. In the last two years, Ukraine’s production has primarily been reduced by one or two percentage points a year because of Russia’s attacks on the electricity system. But the positive thing is that Ukraine has managed to keep the lights on, by and large. Ukraine has managed this, so while Russia is now barely growing at all, Ukraine continues growing by 2% a year, which is not so much, but this is…

Eli Karetny

Thank you, Anders. Maybe we can look a little bit closer at some of the important points that you make. First, looking at the substantial amount of funding that will be required for reconstruction, you mentioned the number $100 billion a year. The report indicates that that amount would be needed over a 10-year period, so we’re talking about a trillion dollars in financing. And you mentioned some of the countries that have already made loan guarantees. And so, despite America no longer contributing to Ukraine, there seems to be confidence from strategic allies that money would be made available in the way that would be required. So, my question is: one, would the funds be provided? Is the hope that the funds would be provided on a bilateral basis or also through multilateral institutions?

Anders Åslund

Both. So, what is happening now? The European Union, a few days ago, completed a decision to give 90 billion euros to Ukraine in an interest-free loan. You can say this is really a grant, but it’s not called a grant for bookkeeping reasons, and that’s $106 billion for two years. So this is a bit more than half of the money, and that is given by the European Union multilaterally. And then all kinds of countries are giving a lot of money bilaterally, and that is essentially all the EU countries apart from Hungary and Slovakia, that is 25 countries. And then you have other countries, which are north parts of the European Union, that are also providing money.

So the biggest donor in terms of the share of GDP is still Estonia, followed by Denmark. So the Nordic and Baltic countries feel most threatened, and they are 100% behind Ukraine. They see that Ukraine is our front against Russia. If Ukraine fails, we will be next. So therefore, Russia must not be allowed to defeat Ukraine. And then, if you take in terms of the money, the biggest country, not surprisingly, is Germany, since it’s the biggest economy in Europe. But then it’s followed by Norway, which is now providing more than $9 billion this year to Ukraine alone. So the Nordic and Baltic countries are very strongly committed. Generally the North, apart from Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, and also Britain, the countries that either have too tight public finances or are not sufficiently committed. Or I would single out three: France, Spain, and Italy, that you would expect to do more. But when it comes to policy on common EU money, very well going together.

And then you have smaller amounts of money, but still a substantial amount of money from the international financial institutions. The IMF, the World Bank has done more than the IMF for Ukraine. The European Investment Bank, which is really the handout operation for the European Commission, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, that has been very active and helpful in Ukraine all along since the early 90s.

Eli Karetny

Looking further at other sources, potential sources of funding. The report recommends also using frozen Russian assets to support post-war recovery. But the reconstruction of Ukraine, as was indicated by several conference participants, will require something more long-term, something more structural, and that’s integrating Ukraine’s economy into global value chains. What role do you see private industry playing in Ukraine’s reconstruction, if not at this immediate stage, over the medium and longer term? And at what stage do you see foreign direct investment beginning to play an important role?

Anders Åslund

Yeah, thank you for bringing up the Russian frozen assets. It’s a huge amount of money, $300 billion, and more than two-thirds of this is in Belgium, for rather bookkeeping reasons, because the Euroclear Bank is a place where central bank holdings are stopping. So they hold a lot of money. This money should be seized and given to Ukraine as reparations, and the European Union is going towards ever stronger formulations in these directions. But so far, we have not seen the actions that, as you understand, I would like to see. But when taxpayers’ money is getting tight, $300 billion, which is completely undeserved—it’s really what the Russians mobilized in order to be able to attack Ukraine—this money should be taken as war reparations. And since it is sitting basically in the European Union, there is no reason not to do so. But what is important now is that the money is frozen; the Russians can’t take it back. And that is a decision by the European Council late last year, which decided that will be the case. My expectation is that this money will sooner or later be used for Ukraine, and it’s vital to get it right. But this is, of course, the public money.

Over to the private money. I’m going to one of these conferences after the other where people discuss what should be done in terms of private investment. And the first answer is the people who are already there. If you take one of the biggest US investors, it has been Cargill. The four big grain traders are important. John Deere, all of the agricultural people have been there for a long time, and they have investment, and they will invest more. There is a change in it; they’re moving their investment further to the west in Ukraine. So this is a very important part of it.

And then you have the big new industry in Ukraine: arms production. And there are now several big new arms-producing companies that are very clever. They are very fast. I go and talk to these people from time to time when I am in Ukraine, and they say that, “We are producing new prototypes in four to six weeks,” while if you take any of the Western countries, they have a stale procurement system that takes years for any new prototype to come through. So the Ukrainian companies are very fast, and they are producing arms very swiftly. You probably heard these numbers now discussing the Gulf War, the war on Iran, that the US Patriot missiles cost $4 to $5 million for one missile. The Ukrainian drone interceptors cost $2,500. And what are they fighting? They are fighting Iranian Shahed drones that cost between $25,000 to $50,000. So, do you want to take down a Shahed with a $2,500 or a $5 million missile?

So President Zelenskyy has very cleverly traveled around to five countries in the Gulf and offered his wares, saying, “We can take down the cheap Iranian missiles with our cheap drone interceptors, or do you want to waste $5 million missiles on them instead?” Needless to say, everybody has agreed, and I have no idea about how much money it is in, but it’s a beautiful example. This will mean a lot for Ukraine in the future. Ukraine will be a big arms producer.

And if you talk the money, I tend to talk to Oleksandr Kamyshin, who is the former minister for strategic industries and now personal adviser to President Zelenskyy. He said that a year ago we could produce arms for $10 billion. Now we produce for $35 billion. Our problem today is not how much we can produce; we are easily scaling up. The problem is that we need money. So this is why Ukraine needs money: in order to finance its own arms production. And now Ukraine is starting exporting these arms in various directions. Ukraine was a big arms exporter in the old days, and now it’s coming back with new arms.

And I should say here also, where do these capable people come from? They are sort of a combination of two worlds. The dominant world is young software people, so they come not from hardware, but from the software side. And beyond is the very big Ukrainian military-industrial complex that existed in the Soviet Union. Ukraine was a machine-building nation, and it remains an engineering nation. I wouldn’t say machine-building now, since so much is software. And what is happening now is that the European arms companies are rushing in, in order to make joint ventures with these Ukrainians. Partly they are starting production abroad, in particular the Danes and the Germans, but also the Swedes have been quite active. And partly they are doing it very quietly in Ukraine.

The new drone factories in Ukraine, they are quietly underground. If you ask where they are, nobody will answer you. And if you ask, “Can you take me there?”, they will take you there in a very quiet fashion, so that you don’t know where you have been going, because naturally they don’t want to be bombed. But the point is they are spread out, they are not easily bombed, while the Russian arms factories are big, heavy-style old factories. So the Ukrainians can easily bomb one factory after the other. So these are big things.

And then, of course, you have agriculture. Ukrainian agriculture is doing amazingly well in the midst of the war. Agriculture used to account for 40% of Ukraine’s export value before the war. Now it has increased to 60%, not because the volume has increased, but because other things, like metallurgy, have declined.

Eli Karetny

That’s great, Anders. Thank you for that. Since we’re already discussing the significance of Ukraine as an arms exporting country and as a military power in its own right, I’d like to ask you about the extent to which there’s a vision of what Ukraine’s military role might be in a post-war Europe. Some at the conference and elsewhere talk about Ukraine, instead of joining NATO, becoming a kind of NATO unto itself, a military force that could protect Europe and serve as a bulwark against future Russian aggression, with a million-man army, well-trained, well-funded, battle-hardened. Does the reconstruction plan hinge on Ukraine remaining a strong military power, even when the war comes to an end?

Anders Åslund

I wouldn’t say hinge, but of course it’s a natural part of it, rather. And the size of the army, I would put it at 800,000, which is still enormous. If you say the biggest EU army is in Germany, which is 200,000 poorly trained soldiers who have not been in battle. So Europe is helpless without Ukraine. This is the fundamental insight that the sensible military know. If you talk to US Generals Ben Hodges and Phil Breedlove, they understand this perfectly well, but most people don’t. And it’s similar within the European Union that many people don’t understand how important Ukraine is.

And you can say generally Northern Europe is more pro-Ukrainian than Southern Europe. It’s also that Northern Europe is much more threatened by Russia, and therefore they are most focused on it. So it might sound funny to you, but the leading country in terms of intelligence now in Europe is Estonia. They were right about Russia invading Ukraine, while Germany and France had got it completely wrong. Britain, Canada, the US had it right, but the big European countries were on the wrong side. So therefore the Baltic countries, however small they are, have gained a lot of respect and are taken very seriously.

And what we are seeing now is that there are more and more military exercises and cooperation with Ukraine, because the Ukrainians are today, without any hesitation, the best in Europe, and as you mentioned already, the most plentiful. So there are no significant differences. The Ukrainians want to be with the West, and the West realizes increasingly that they are nobody without Ukraine. So it’s the Ukrainians who can hold up the Russians. Nobody else can.

Eli Karetny

Thank you. Two other areas of great potential, which you’ve already mentioned, but we can explore a little bit more: agriculture and energy. What will be required to realize Ukraine’s potential as the breadbasket of Europe? This is one question. And in terms of the energy sector, what role do you see natural gas playing in turning Ukraine into a key player in the energy sector, and also solar, wind, batteries, I heard discussed at the conference.

Anders Åslund

Yeah, if I start with agriculture, Ukrainian agriculture is outstanding. Ukraine has the best agriculture in Europe. And if you travel around the big fields, the black fields off of Kyiv, you see fields that are as impressive as whatever you see in Illinois or Iowa. It looks the same. The farms are a bit bigger in Ukraine than in Iowa. Say that in Illinois, a normal family farm is about 2,000 to 5,000 acres. The Ukrainian family farms are at least 10,000 hectares, several times larger, and they have all the equipment. The standard equipment is John Deere equipment, exactly what you see in Illinois. And we’re producing the same corn, the soil, and the wheat, the same grains as you see in the Midwest. So this is extraordinary.

Ukraine’s problem in this regard is: who are the competitors? France, which has reasonably good agriculture, but not at the same level, and Poland, that has awful agriculture. So you can say that this will be the commercial economic problem: how to handle Poland’s useless agriculture. Because they have tiny, tiny farms of just a few hectares of land, while the Ukrainian farms are 10,000 to 20,000 hectares. The Polish family farms have no equipment, etc. So, if you travel in Eastern Poland, you see really pathetic agriculture, because they were fighting so hard against communists that they didn’t want the communists to take over their farms, and therefore they unfortunately stayed backwards.

And Ukraine’s agriculture, the only thing is, will they be allowed to export? My advice is simple: export it over the Black Sea to the Third World, Egypt, the Middle East, the countries that really want to export. Avoid the two big competitors, France and Poland, so that we don’t have that issue. But this needs to be resolved in one way or the other.

And thank you for the question about energy that didn’t come to an approach as yet, and you’re right, emphasizing two parts. One is gas and the other is renewable energy. And in terms of gas, Ukraine has enormous resources. Ukraine has the second biggest gas reserves in Europe, after Norway. So, Norway produces 124 billion cubic meters a year, while Ukraine produces 20 billion cubic meters a year. Ukraine should produce 70 billion cubic meters a year if we take it in relation to the Norwegian results, which is a relevant measure. And why isnt it there? As you would not be surprised to hear, because of Soviet policy. In the 1970s, the Soviet Union detected the enormous gas fields in Western Siberia and decided, “Now we are going to produce all gas here,” and they closed down their production in Ukraine. And they cut it very fast, from 70 billion cubic meters a year to 20 billion cubic meters a year.

And strangely, for almost 25 years, Ukraine has had almost constant gas production of 20 billion cubic meters a year. This doesn’t happen like this. This is simply complete mismanagement, previously because of the Soviet forces, then because of inertia, then because of corruption, and then because nothing was done. So this is what needs to be done: Ukraine should increase its production of gas three to four times. And who needs gas these times? Europe. So, Ukraine should become a major exporter of gas to Europe.

And on top of that, Ukraine has important industries that are designed for cheap gas, notably the half a dozen big fertilizer factories. And these fertilizer factories are standing more or less still now. They should be used, they should be fed with Ukrainian gas, and this is a pretty elementarily big industry. And the only thing that is needed is good management and good governance, so that it becomes possible. And then you get the capital coming. Chevron, Shell, Vitol were all involved in serious gas production in Ukraine, but for various reasons they left. They would understand, and others would understand to come back. Ukraine needs big foreign investors in gas, and I’m convinced that it will be possible to get them.

Then over to renewable energy. What we have learned now during the war, during the last four years, is that the Soviet system is not good when you are being attacked. It’s very easy to bomb a thermal power station. Ukraine has about 60 thermal power stations; all of them have been bombed because they are sufficiently big so that they are worth spending million-dollar ballistic missiles on them, and the Russians do. Would you bomb a wind turbine? No, because a wind turbine costs too little, so it would be a waste of a Russian ballistic missile to bomb it. Even more so when it comes to solar energy. So you want solar energy and wind turbines, so that you are less vulnerable. And they also allow for a more decentralized grid. You don’t want a centralized grid with big transformer stations. The Russians love bombing the big transformer stations, and I visited one of these bombed power stations, Burshtyn in western Ukraine. And it’s amazing to see how the Russians can bomb with ballistic missiles some transformer station, which is just like a small shed, and they can hit it precisely, knowing where it is, and destroy it. And these transformer stations are quite expensive and difficult to replace. It’s better then to have a more decentralized grid. I mean, you can have solar cells on the roofs or on the balconies, and then it’s not worth it for the Russians to bomb them. So renewable energy is very much a matter of making yourself stronger against the attacks.

And then you raise the question about what happens when the sun is not up, and when there’s no wind. Well, then you need batteries. So you need, on the one hand, sun, because that’s the cheapest energy you can find today, and on the other hand, wind, which is also cheap, but they are at different times. But in between you need batteries, and you also need thermal power stations for the time being, and new nuclear power to balance the system. But solar and wind are now the cheapest sources of energy, and they can be established very fast. Nothing can be built as fast as solar energy. I mean, you see how people put up these solar cells on roofs wherever they feel like putting them up, and then it’s only a question of getting the system together.

Eli Karetny

Thank you, Anders. Shifting focus to historical models and lessons from the past that can be applied to the reconstruction plan in Ukraine. To what extent are the recommendations in the report based on lessons learned from the liberalization of the post-Soviet Russian economy, and to what extent are the recommendations modeled on post-World War Two reconstruction in Germany and Japan?

Anders Åslund

Much more related than the former, because you can say that we have a market economy in Ukraine. Now it’s no longer a matter of building a market economy. What is important that we don’t discuss much in the report is privatization. We discuss it, but that’s a bigger topic. The reason not to discuss it too much is that it’s always the most controversial. My view is quite simple: get it done in a way that is politically reasonably acceptable. People always react against privatization because they think they should, whoever they are, should have got more of it. From a general economic perspective, you want it to take place so that the economy can work better.

But what has happened now in Ukraine is very much about the old industry has been blown out. If you take things like, Ukraine used to have six big oil refineries. I think that only one, Kremenchuk, is in reasonable shape now, so that it can be revived, and another, so-so. But the big factories are bombed out. And if you take fertilizers, where there used to be six big fertilizer factories, two are bombed out completely. I guess the Portside plant is in reasonable shape, but barely used for strange reasons. And there is one in Sumy. But basically, it is a few of the old ones that are remaining, and for the rest, the new things will come up.

And if we look upon the electricity sector that I looked a lot on, you have about 60 thermal power stations. All these come from the 1960s or 70s. They should not exist in the future. So these should just be used for as long as is possible. When you visit one of these power stations, you have two questions: has this been bombed, or has this not been bombed? But they are looking so old and worn out in any case. So this is really a question of changing completely, and therefore Ukraine now needs really to move to a different stage. If you take agriculture, this has already happened. When it comes to the military-industrial complex, this has also, by and large, happened. So, what we are seeing now, it’s not that the Soviet system is going, it has already gone. What we are seeing now is that it is the Soviet-style factories that are going.

Eli Karetny

That’s really useful. That helps make sense of some things that I overheard people discussing, as with Germany and Japan, where reconstruction entailed complete technological modernization. I heard participants talking about Ukraine as the first fully modern rebuilding project. So maybe you could say a little bit more about how this terrible tragedy actually creates a space for a real opportunity to build an entirely new industrial base, a modern industrial base for Ukraine.

Anders Åslund

Yeah, I mean, the best example is the military-industrial complex Ukraine had when the war started: Ukroboronprom, the old Soviet military-industrial complex with dozens of old Soviet factories of very different levels. A few were good, many were bad, and 80,000 employees. And this was not something that should be done. What has happened now is that Ukraine has at least 500 military startups. They are set up by young men—sorry to say men, but they are men, by and large software engineers that have started these. And Ukraine is now producing at least 100 different kinds of drones in cutthroat competition with one another.

And it’s also funny how it’s being sold. They are sold often to various Western countries, not companies, but countries that are then delivering arms. Say, in one case, I talked to a co-owner of a drone company, and he said that they were supplying three different brigades. So the military procurement in Ukraine is amazingly decentralized, often paid for by Western governments, and here it’s bilateral. It’s not through the European Union. And then each country selects specific regions. You can see Denmark, for example, has decided to develop Mykolaiv in the south and say, “This is our territory, we take care of it,” and they will take care of all aspects, social as well as military developments. So this is a very peculiar development, and these people are making a lot of money, so they will swiftly move to become independent businessmen—they already are—and turn to exports. And Ukraine does a lot of this kind of exports. So, I think that the military-industrial complex, where we have this tremendous dynamism for obvious reasons, is the most interesting area.

Something that I don’t know so much about is the reconstruction industry, but here we are seeing bigger Ukrainian companies, and also joint ventures with Western companies that are doing a lot of big construction, but they tend to be big events. We are seeing it in the military area.

Eli Karetny

Thank you, Anders. I want to end our discussion by exploring two related ideas: the kind of legal and cultural questions that are overhanging reform and reconstruction in Ukraine. Beginning with the legal questions, corruption has long been an issue in the post-Soviet space. So, one question is: what measures will be required to deal with this issue, and to bring Ukraine up to European legal standards?

Anders Åslund

Yeah, but first of all, I would like to emphasize how much has been done in Ukraine already. I’ve been following this for many years, and a decade ago Ukraine used to rank about 142nd out of 180 countries in the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index. Now it is up on 105th rank one decade later, and lots of things have been done. The most elementary and important thing is digitize: get all the small services from the state on the computer, so that the small people can’t ask for the money.

The much more difficult things come last. It is big government procurement. In any country, you tend to find big government procurement having problems with corruption when it comes to military purchases, and when it comes to major infrastructure projects. And this is, of course, what Ukraine now needs on a big scale. And we saw a big corruption case in Energoatom of at least $100 million, and it was a typical case of procurement in a state-owned nuclear power company, and it’s very difficult to clean that out. Those who did it were these anti-corruption bodies that have done an important job, and this has been pushed since the Revolution of Dignity in 2014 by many forces, both Ukrainian civil society and the good forces in the parliament and government, and of course, the foreign donors who are pushing this hard.

Another is corporate governance. I was myself a member of the board of the Ukrainian railroads for two and a half years, and my impression there was that out of about 30 directors we dealt with, probably all were corrupt. So, what we did was that we demanded the firing of one after the other. So then you wonder what happened to us. Well, the people we had fired claimed that we on the board had ordered them to do all these illegal things, and they told the SBU security services and the prosecutors that that was going on, which was of course untrue. So this became simply dangerous. For such legal reasons, I resigned. It was not sufficient for my personal security to sit on the board. And you have seen this time and again, but it continues. People are cleaning up the boards one after the other, so whenever you see that there is a fight, each fight has a value in itself, because it takes it further. So this is a long, steady fight: clean up the state companies and clean up public procurement.

But the ultimate must be to privatize massively. So, my view, as I said before, is it doesn’t matter how you privatize, it’s important that you privatize, so that you get the companies out of the hands of the government. And this is tough going. But the European Union is adamant on these matters. In particular after the problems they have had in Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, they are not going to let Ukraine into the EU easily without cleaning this up. And there’s a very strong civil society supporting Ukraine for all these things. And what’s wonderful in Ukraine is that you can know everything what is going on. You just check Ukraine’s Prozorro, and there you find out what is really going on. Most of the time, it’s not reported in the West, as a matter of fact. This is simply too detailed to be of relevance for a foreign audience, but for Ukrainians it’s available. So therefore, that’s one of the reasons that I harbor very great hopes for Ukraine.

Eli Karetny

Another area of long-term change that’s been unfolding and maybe accelerating as a result of the war, which I’d like to finish our discussion with, is this issue: the question of cultural and geographic differences within Ukraine and internal divisions. My parents are from Ukraine. I heard stories growing up about cultural differences between Western and Eastern Ukraine. While serving in the Peace Corps in Ukraine, just before the Orange Revolution in 2004, I witnessed some of this firsthand: deep differences between language, culture in the East and in the West. But things have changed. From what I understand, even from family that’s still living there, things have dramatically changed as a result of the war. So, my question is, the national unity, which now prevails in Ukraine, how enduring is that?

Anders Åslund

I think it’s enduring. There is an old saying that nations are born out of the war, and this is the war that is really giving the final birth to Ukraine, that is really cementing the nation. Well, I’ve followed Ukraine for more than 40 years, and traditionally you could say that Ukraine was divided East and West, and that the presidential election always went to the other side that it had gone to the last time. Now this has disappeared. Ukrainians identify themselves as one nation.

And with regard to language, it used to be like this, that it was Russian or Ukrainian, and that there was identification with Ukraine or Russia. For example, a Jewish friend of mine in Kyiv used to say that one quarter of Ukrainians think that Stepan Bandera was a hero, half of Ukrainians think that he was a crook, and one quarter couldn’t care less. And I think that was quite typical 20 years ago. Well, now Stepan Bandera is accepted as one of the people who was behind Ukraine. Good or bad, it’s not this enemy or hero in the same way as it was.

And I also noticed this last time I was in Kyiv last in September, that virtually everybody starts talking Ukrainian to me. I understand Ukrainian, but I am fluent in Russian, and previously it would not be like that. Previously it would be much more mixed. And now I tend to speak English rather than Russian, and there are so many Ukrainians now who speak English. So while language was not important at the beginning of the war, it is increasingly important that people are speaking more Ukrainian, that Ukrainian is becoming more a sign of “we are standing up for Ukraine.” For me, it’s slightly more difficult, but it’s really a change that you see. But the fundamental thing is the Ukrainian nation is now united.

Eli Karetny

That’s really, that’s a beautiful place to end. And I just have to say, this touches me very close to home. Growing up as a Russian-speaking Ukrainian-American of Jewish descent, my family, we would talk about ourselves as being Russian, because in the house we spoke Russian, and that is certainly no longer the case. We no longer call ourselves Russian, and our family that is still living in Ukraine, in eastern Ukraine, they certainly, in public, no longer speak Russian, and clearly refer to themselves as proud Ukrainians. So that shift has ripple effects that go beyond Ukraine, and I think you presented that beautifully. It’s a really great example. Thank you so much, Anders Åslund, for your time, your insight. Thank you.

Anders Åslund

Thank you very much, Eli.