What Is Ukraine Worth?

Ukraine, almost four years into Putin’s war, is facing a cash crunch. The International Monetary Fund warns that Kyiv will need some $65 billion in outside financing in the next two years. That’s not even counting the cost of the war effort, pegged at $120 billion a year. One cannot put a price tag on freedom, to be sure, but the vast sums being mooted to keep the war going make it hard to avoid a question: What is Ukraine worth? And who is going to pay?It’s not our intention here to be cynical amid a war that has already cost more than a million battlefield deaths or injuries on the Russian side, and killed some 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers. Yet for a country that has an annual gross domestic product of some $190 billion, and a national debt that is nearly as large, the material dimension of the conflict is getting increasingly difficult to ignore. That’s partly because it’s far from clear who will, to fight the war, come up with the spondulix.Not America, it would seem, at least under President Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress. The aid spigot to Ukraine has largely dried up, after some $135 billion was sent to Kyiv, according to estimates by Germany’s Kiel Institute. With America’s national debt soaring past $37 trillion, one can understand the hesitation to spend more taxpayer dollars on a war that Mr. Trump vows to bring to an end via a negotiated peace.Even so, if the truce terms end up rewarding Russia for its aggression — by, say, awarding Moscow territory it failed to win on the battlefield or turning Ukraine into a kind of puppet state — the intangible costs to America’s role as global leader, and to the security of the West, could prove intolerable. That, one imagines, is why Europe’s democracies have sought to bridge the gap left by Mr. Trump’s de facto termination of aid to Ukraine.So there’s been a deal of high-minded talk in the chancelleries of Western Europe. President Emmanuel Macron speaks of a “coalition of the willing” offering “unwavering” support for Kyiv. Germany has put in motion a rearmament drive to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. Other members of the North Atlantic Treaty, too, are planning to bolster their defense apparatus. Yet rebuilding Europe’s anemic armies will take time.In the near term, Politico reports, Kyiv is slated to run low on money by April. To stave off a shortfall, the Europeans had been planning on a loan of some $160 billion to Kyiv. Yet the funding formula bears some resemblance to a Rube Goldberg contraption. The idea was to in effect borrow against, without seizing them, the nearly $300 billion in frozen Russian central bank assets held in Belgium.The “baroque design” of the loan, the Carnegie Endowment reports, was “meant to leave Russia’s property rights untouched” and dodge potential “legal jeopardy that could come with outright confiscation of the assets.” Yet Belgium and some other nations seem to be getting cold feet over the prospect that Moscow could, per the Times, “file a lawsuit or demand its money back.” So much for Europe’s newly martial posture toward the Kremlin. Nor are new allegations of a “corruption plot in Ukraine to skim €100 million from the country’s energy sector,” as Politico reports, encouraging the Europeans to lavish funds on Kyiv. Yet President Volodymyr Zelensky seems oblivious, Owen Matthews writes in London’s Telegraph, racking up billions of dollars in orders for new jets. In the end, someone is going to have to foot the bill for this war, even if Ukraine’s independence is, not to put too fine a point on it, priceless.Correction: One million is the number of Russian soldiers killed or injured in the war. An earlier version misstated the statistic.

What Is Ukraine Worth?

What Is Ukraine Worth?

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