A recent World Bank study estimated the reconstruction of Ukraine will cost an eye-popping $411 billion. While the paper contained data to demonstrate that it is a serious analysis, this document cannot be taken seriously.
First, the war is not only not over, but the conflict seems to be steadily deepening, so there is still considerable uncertainty as to the “final cost” of damage incurred. This could, of course, lead to such a document, but then it should have been made clear that it was more a case that, if by some miracle the war were to end right now and uninterrupted reconstruction could begin immediately, then $411 billion could be spent. But since all the evidence suggests that the devastation is only now really deepening, this World Bank study shows only how much the world could have “gotten away with” if the war had ended in the spring of 2023.
So, the final bill is still completely unknown today, but there are some even more serious and sensitive issues. What is being rebuilt? For, if this “something” is Ukraine, then the question of “which” Ukraine we are talking about should be asked. The one that existed before 2014, i.e., of which Crimea and the territories occupied by Russia in the war were still a part? Or the Ukraine that will exist after the war? Assuming, of course, that there will be any entity called Ukraine after the war.
Today, Ukrainian society and its economy are non-existent, replaced by an amorphous bloody mass, kept from falling into total chaos only by the hard structures of violence. This mass consists of three complexes. There is a state war economy based on military dictatorship and its social base, maintained and operated by the European Union on behalf of the United States. There is the military itself, which is a state within a state, directly controlled by the U.S. imperial deep state. And finally, there are the natives, whose sole function is to serve as “ammunition” for the global masters of the two war economies above with their own physical bodies. The situation is roughly equivalent to that of the inhabitants of black African countries descending into permanent civil war.
If the World Bank were serious about its strategy for the reconstruction of Ukraine, it would base its estimate on the answers to these questions, but these questions have been ignored.
