
Former Ukraine President Yanukovych committed the ‘crime’ of breaking talks with IMF and turning to Putin, who’s more concerned with US geostrategic interests and couldn’t care less about IMF pushing neo-liberalism.
The security concerns of Russia arising from Ukraine’s intentions of joining NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) have been widely discussed in the media. But the IMF’s link with Ukraine, which is a parallel issue, has scarcely received much attention.
The International Monetary Fund of IMF, as is well-known, “opens up” economies around the world for the penetration of metropolitan capital by making them “investor-friendly” through the adoption of a host of anti-working class and anti-people (“austerity”) measures; and such “opening up” typically involves the taking over of natural resources of the countries and also their land areas by metropolitan capital. The mechanism that IMF typically uses toward this end is the imposition of “conditionalities” for giving loans to countries that are in need of balance of payments support.
In addition, however, to this general role that IMF plays, there are occasions when it plays a specific role, namely, that of supporting the US government’s Cold War objectives. And in the case of Ukraine, it has played this specific role almost from the very beginning, apart from its general role of opening up the Ukrainian economy to metropolitan capital.
Source- newsclick. in, 06 Mar 2022