WikiLeaks Cables Reveal Ukraine's Past Cries For Help; Is Kerry's $1 Billion In Aid Too Late?

[okaawhatever]

4. No kidding, and the IMF doesn't deserve to be blamed either because they made the conditions

clear. If Yanukovich wanted to increase the pensions, he could have appealed to the IMF and submitted a plan showing why it was necessary. The bottom line is, to get that country back on it's feet financially cuts are going to have to be made and none of the previous Presidents have wanted to do it.

A perfect example of the idiocy of the problem: Ukraine subsidizes all of it's gas so all citizens pay a fraction of the total cost. This is a huge portion of their deficit. Ukraine is horribly energy inefficient. They use the same amount of gas as France or Germany whose GDP is 7-8 times what Ukraines is. An example of the problem: Homes in Kiev are heated by radiators which are fed by boilers located throughout the town. I think there are three large ones. The pipes lose 50% of their heat in transit, plus it doesn't allow for individual thermostats so the heat is turned on in September and runs through March when the state shuts it off. So what do you do when it gets too hot? You open the window. Clearly there need to be system upgrades, but who is going to pay for it? If the citizens were paying the cost of all this extra heat they'd make a fuss, but they're paying like $10 bucks a month so they don't complain. Who keeps blocking or not funding improvements to the system? Gee, I don't know...who benefits from all the gas sales? Russia.
Not only that, factories use 46% of the subsidized energy. I don't think that counts small businesses who may genuinely need subsidies, I think it's the billionaires who are making a profit because their expenses are low because the cost is being shifted back onto the government/taxpayers.

And why won't investors back the upgrades to the system? Because all the power players control the gas, the gas pipelines, and the companies who benefit. They in turn control the politicians who will keep capital improvements from happening in one form or another.

Ukraine has a future, there are solutions that will put it on a path to prosperity, but there will be some short-term inconvenience. It's not like the countries who are already efficient and massively in debt. Ukraine has a bright future if they can start doing what's in their best interest and not what suits the companies and corruption as they are today.