Ukraine's denied development, Blackwater and NATO plans
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Dan Steinbock
By Dan Steinbock
March 7, 2022
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Undermining the Ukraine's devt with China
"…the new Iraq"
Even as tensions progressively escalated in the past half decade, trade ties between the Ukraine and China steadily increased since President Viktor Yanukovych's state visit to Beijing in 2013. Four years later, the Ukraine, now under President Petro Poroshenko, joined China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). And in 2019, China bypassed Russia as the Ukraine's biggest single trading partner.
Together, China — the Ukraine's new economic partner — and Russia — its historical trade partner — the two absorb a fourth of the Ukraine's exports. That's over six times more than the US (see Figure 1).
In June 2020, Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao and Ukrainian Minister of Infrastructure Oleksandr Kubrakov signed a deal to strengthen cooperation in multiple areas, particularly in infrastructure financing and construction. And last year, overall trade boomed to $19 billion, having soared 80 percent since 2013.
To the Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, BRI meant an alternative future that would be more peaceful and stable, or as he said in his phone conversation with President Xi Jinping, the Ukraine might become a "bridge to Europe" for Chinese investments.
In just a year, major Chinese companies started operations in construction, food and telecoms (Huawei). Intriguingly, Huawei — which the US has struggled to bury for a decade — began to develop mobile networks in the Ukraine, won the bid to install a 4G network in Kyiv's subway, and was selected in 2020 to improve the Ukraine's cyberdefense and security.
Indeed, new contracts signed by Chinese companies in the Ukrainian engineering market exceeded $2 billion for two consecutive years.
But this was not the future that was planned for the Ukraine in the West. Hence, the US penchant to ignore Russian pleas for security assurances and diplomacy, Zelenskyy's reconciliation efforts with Russia derailed by the far right in 2019, the purposeful neglect of Austrian-style options for neutrality in the region and the fatal sanctions against Russia that will dent global economic recovery.
The White House has opted for very different scenarios and they were preceded by Blackwater's dream for a new Iraq in the Ukraine.
Blackwater, Prince, $10-B mercenary plan
From 1991 to 2014, the US flooded the Ukraine with $4 billion in military assistance. Over $2.7 billion has been added since then plus over a billion provided by the NATO Trust Fund, and all that is only a part of the NATO total. To Erik Prince, it was a great money-making opportunity, Iraq déjà vu.
As the founder of the private US military contractor, Blackwater (renamed Academy), Prince had long supplied mercenaries to the Central Intelligence Agency, Pentagon and State Department for covert operations, including torture and assassinations. In early 2020, Prince outlined a "road map" for the creation of a "vertically integrated aviation defense consortium" that could bring $10 billion in revenues and investment (see Figure 2).
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https://www.manilatimes.net/2022/03/07/opinion/columns/ukraines-denied-development-blackwater-and-nato-plans/1835377